This case explores the complicated relationship between schools and their geographic neighbors by focusing on a playground renovation project at an urban school serving low-income students. This school’s location in an increasingly gentrified and affluent neighborhood serves to challenge existing assumptions about the coupling of school and community interests. The events surrounding this playground renovation project illustrate the miscommunication, distrust, conflict and lack of consensus that results when the neighborhood schools model no longer holds. In this case, school administrators struggle, belatedly, to adapt to this changing environment while community members are forced to face the challenge of living across the street from a busy, under-resourced urban school.