Interviews 2 and 3: Conducted Wednesday 3/1 at around noon
*** The following two interviews were conducted with food service employees at LaFortune Student Center. They requested that I not use their full names, and one refused to be pictured.
*** As they were conducted with workers – I did not have time for a full ethnographic interview because they were working and moving, and it was not the standard casual interview discussion.
Interview 2:
Name: Kim H.
Gender: Female
Age: 38
Occupation: Food services at Notre Dame – Starbucks
Appearance: (photo in phone)
How many children do you have?
– Three children; ages 9,6 and 2
Where do your kids go to school?
– They go to school where their babysitter goes. Transportation is a huge struggle for her family. She would love to send them to a better school.
– They should go to Niles, and she is thinking about transferring them to Brandywine – because it is a smaller school
– She doesn’t like the “rougher, tougher school” that her kids are currently at
– She doesn’t like the exposure to the older students
What is the biggest challenge she faces?
– Transportation is her biggest challenge
– Her and her husband both work and her children’s school has to be convenient
– She can’t send them to a Magnet, because the magnet requires a “wait in line”?
– She can’t send them to another school because it requires that the parents volunteer at it, and her and her husband do not have time to volunteer
What is most important?
– Convenience/Ability to get her children to and from the school
– Safety of her kids
– Then academics
My observations:
She really, really wishes she could do better for her kids, but her lower income status inhibits this. She is also very well informed about the different options already, and her kids are relatively young.
Interview 3:
Name: Joyce L.
Gender: Female
Age: Would not say her age. She does have a daughter who is 30, and a son who is 37. Each of her children has an eleven-year-old daughter.
Occupation: Food services at Notre Dame – Assorted locations. Interviewed in Taco Bell.
Appearance: Refused to have photo taken. Joyce is African American, slightly older, slim of build, wearing all black as it is her work uniform, wearing a black baseball cap.
Where do your kids go to school?
– Her kids both went to Clay High School (quite a while ago).
– She remembers it being a good school. Then someone shut down LaSalle (which is confusing because it is still open?), and that started problems. The North v. East side students got into fights.
– There was drug dealing at Clay when her kids went there.
– Her grandkids go to Edison.
o One day a boy in the 6th grade brought a knife to school and the middle school was forced to send all the kids home.
What is the biggest challenge she faces?
– Transportation of her grandkids to and from school.
– I got the feeling that she was very involved in their lives.
What is most important?
– She said she doesn’t have a lot of time for fighting
– She “ain’t got time for her kids to be bullied”
– She wants to be sure teachers are teaching them well.
– She said SAFETY and then wanting them to actually learn