El análisis conceptual abordado desde la perspectiva de campos

Students/co-researchers noticed that transportation was managed very differently in the suburban school districts as compared to the urban school district. In suburban school districts, school buses delivered children to their schools. In the urban district, children were forced to ride the public bus, oftentimes alone. Many students/co-researchers and community members

expressed concern and discomfort regarding their witnessing of young children riding public school buses without parents or guardians. Families in urban districts also have to find funding for public transportation or time to collect free tickets that urban schools or the urban district provided in a confusing manner. Shani explained:

The very first time when (a high school in the urban area) was split, the parents were down at the Board of Education, and they were telling them on a fixed income for a parent or a parent who has low income, they cannot afford to send their kid to the other school on a bus. So they were trying to get them to have tickets but they said there was a problem with that because I guess New Jersey transit wanted them to pay a certain amount so they never gave them tickets. And that is a real big problem. (Spring 2012, Shani)

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The whole public transportation ticketing ordeal was a nightmare from the start. One of the students/co-researchers in the Spring 2012 course, a parent, said school transportation in the urban district was still a problem and complained about the difficulty they had as a non-English- speaking family navigating the school transportation options. The urban schools provided tickets for public transportation but only on certain days during certain lunches. As a native English speaker, I thought I could call the state and elucidate the process for him. I called the state office (the New Jersey State Board of Education) and was told loudly and hurriedly to “just send my child to pick up public bus tickets during lunch.” However, there were only certain times during the week and month that bus tickets were distributed during lunch, so I asked for specifics. I was told that there were enough announcements made at school and that my child should be able to figure it out and was probably “acting dumb.” The process was confusing. Unfortunately, my persistence and desire to achieve a concrete, straightforward answer was met with growing anger and frustration on the other end of the call. I gave up on finding an answer to the transportation quandary.

Figuring out how to get student passes for public transportation was certainly confusing. Even worse, once students had access to public transportation, safety was still a serious concern. Children walking, biking, and riding public transport in the city area endured dangerous

circumstances. The report “Safe Routes to New Jersey’s Disadvantaged Urban Schools” details the high rates of poverty, crime, violence, sex offender presence, and pedestrian and bike crashes in three of the poorest urban areas in New Jersey. Most of the pedestrian and bike crashes that kill or injure children occur when children are traveling to and from school, between the hours of 7am and 9am and 2pm and 7pm (Von Hagen, 2008).

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Students/co-researchers expressed concerns about the inconvenience and confusion about public school transportation systems in the urban school district, and children’s safety when journeying to and from school in dangerous urban areas. They concluded that public school transportation should not be a messy, perplexing service. Additionally, if students must use public transportation, the service must be free, safe, and easy to utilize. After all, children in the suburban areas did not seem to face these challenges. This disparity seemed reminiscent of the kinds of obstacles transportation posed during the days of legally enforced segregated schooling:

Of course you all know I’m old, so I had to interview old people. One of my

interviewees, she was from North Carolina. I asked her what school did she attend, where was it located, did she consider it suburban or urban, what was her attitude towards her learning environment, was her teacher helpful in her learning experiences, and what type of issues did she encounter during high school, and if at the time she was in high school, if she could make any changes, what kind of changes would she make. The name of her high school was Dunbury, and it was out in the boondocks, as she said. And she basically had to catch two buses to get to school, and they had to walk at least two miles to the first bus stop because they didn’t offer buses in the area where she was, to the black children. So she basically went to school during the time that segregation was around, and it was an all-black school that she went to for the first three years of high school, and finally in the last year of her high school, there became an end to segregation, and they were mixed together. But during that time she was in high school, she explained that when you go over to the white school, they had pools, they had a gym, with actual gym items to do gym. And their high school, they just had the outside, the ‘okay, you guys just go outside,’ so they never learned to swim in school. They never learned basic physical

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education things such as soccer. There was no basketball. None of those things were available to her when she was in school. (Fall 2011, Rashida)

This North Carolinian’s schooling challenges were exacerbated by unreasonably arduous transportation. Just traveling to and from school was grueling. We had hoped these horrible inequities detailed in her narrative were in the past. Unfortunately, as detailed throughout this paper, severe segregation exists today in the Central New Jersey community college area, and urban and suburban schools experience some of the disparities described in this narrative, set during legally-enforced segregation.

Students in the urban district do not have access to easy, convenient, safe transportation. Some parents and students are confused about the public bus system and the allocation of free tickets, and some students have to walk or bike through dangerous areas of the city in order to get to school. As Tegan argued, “A community that cares offers school buses for children living far from their schools. The community can also help by providing more law enforcement so that the streets remain clean of crime” (Spring 2012, Tegan). Students/co-researchers determined that, until their urban communities are provided with the same quality of school transportation and safe streets that suburban children journey, New Jersey state officials will continue to communicate that they do not care about the safety and well-being of urban children.