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While the knowledge of disrepair in inner-city schools is fairly common, the impact that school facilities are having on students and faculty is not as widely known. More recently, the closing of inner city schools has greatly increased across the United States; Reduction in public school enrollment from 2006-2013: Detroit -63%, Cleveland -32%, Indianapolis -27%, D.C. -23%, L.A. -23%,etc. (Journey For Justice Alliance,2014). Due to budget cuts, threat of school closings from poor facility conditions, large class size, and pressure to raise test scores, inner city schools struggle to keep teachers (Journey For Justice Alliance,2014). Poor teacher retention along with a lack in care for educational facilities has created a toxic environment for inner-city students. Although there are many reasons that inner-city schools suffer, negativity within school culture seems to be a common denominator within many of these problems. With larger population percentages of minority, economically disadvantaged and disabled students, difficulties arise in communicating student-to-student and teacher-to-student (Bellwether Education Partner, 2016). The question becomes, how does one design a space to provide comfort, safety and communication in order to foster healthy relationships? This research will inform the design of a middle school that focuses on community and communication. The goal will be to design a school where flexibility and team work is made easier through furniture and layout solutions in order to foster growth and respect for students and teachers.

Despite the widespread recommendation that schools "collaborate" with parents, little is found in the literature to elaborate on what this term or the common synonym "partnership" means, and further, how schools can invite diverse parental contributions to the table of educational discourse. The current study looks to contribute to the literature by analyzing the parent participation discourse in one community elementary school, utilizing critical discourse analysis and ethnographic observations. The findings reveal both school and parents' conceptions of the parents' partnership role as ancillary to that of the school's and the subsequent lack of true collaboration so advocated by the literature. Implications arise from this analysis which calls into question the examples of "collaboration" found in the literature, given the lack of theorizing regarding what collaboration inside of parent participation means. Contributions may shed light on the unintentional inequality of diverse parents in an effort toward true collaboration utilizing both the European American, middle class contributions of the educational institution alongside those of non-mainstream parents in creating an authentic educational atmosphere for diverse students.