Neighborhoods and Schools

Guests: Felton Earls, Research Professor of Human Behavior and Development in the Harvard School of Public Health  Gary Seastrand, Former Public School Teacher and Administrator, directs the BYU Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education & Schooling  Bill Hulterstrom, CEO of the United Way of Utah County  A neighborhood used to be a place where kids played together outside and people sat on their porches plugged into what was happening on their block instead of online on their Facebook feeds. In many neighborhoods, all of the kids would go to the same school just a few blocks away.  The nature of neighborhoods in America has fundamentally changed, thanks to housing policies and open enrollment school systems and the internet’s power to make us feel more connected to someone on the other side of the world to the person living next door.  “Trust was important. More important than trust was what we call agency or a sense that you care enough about what was going wrong in the neighborhood to intervene. If a child was disrespecting an adult, neighbors would intervene and correct the child,” says Earls.