I went to public high school--and jr. high, and even part of elementary school for that matter--in West Palm Beach, Florida, in the 70s and early 80s, in the middle of the ghettos downtown. I'm not exaggerating when I say it was in a ghetto. Within about 10 years of when I graduated, the vast majority of the neighborhood around the high school was razed because there were so many problems there--crack houses, buildings that should have been condemned, shootings, etc. (The high school buildings were historical and saved, though: they were turned into an arts school).
When I went to school there, we could walk off campus any time of day (you were actually able to do this at that time--no fences, no tight security, etc.) and buy any drug imaginable (at that time) within a couple blocks of the school. There were prostitutes all over that neighborhood too, homeless folks, winos, etc. were always hanging out at the McDonald's down the street, etc.
Well, guess what? A whole crapload of kids from Palm Beach went to school with me. It was a weird combo--our school had (1) a bunch of middle-class suburban kids who were bused in from the western suburbs about 12-15 miles away, (2) a bunch of rednecks who were bused in from the area west of those suburbs--way out in the boonies, near what was then the northern parts of the Everglades and the eastern stretch of the agricultural areas--mostly sugar cane fields, (3) a bunch of poor kids who lived in the ghettos surrounding the school, and (4) a bunch of rich kids from Palm Beach. I was halfway between the middle-class suburban kids and the rednecks--we lived right on the edge of the two communities, and had social influences from and ties to both. I also made a lot of friends at school from both the surrounding ghettos and from Palm Beach. People who are still my friends to this day.
The first three groups had little choice but to go to that school. The Palm Beach kids could have attended school wherever their parents would have liked--any private school, in any part of the world. Why did they send them to a public high school right across the Intracoastal, in the middle of a ghetto? I don't know. As kids, we didn't think about it much, and I don't remember anyone asking about this, but there were a LOT of Palm Beach kids at that school.
Of course, you have to remember that I went to public school in the "golden age of integration", right in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, when it was a bit of a social experiment to bus kids in from all over to get a wide variety of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds to mesh in the schools. I guess those Palm Beach kids' parents believed in the ideals of that. And in the case of my high school, it worked like a charm. For the most part, everyone got along well, we all had positive influences on each other, there was almost no racism, classism, etc. among the kids, and we had a lot of great teachers and students who really wanted to learn. A lot of my classmates have gone on to success in various fields--friends of mine from that school are now news anchors, newspaper editors, film directors, professional actors, professional musicians, doctors, lawyers, successful entrepeneurs, etc.
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