Sorry to report that it didn’t work. That is to say, that it worked when I had checkins only activated, but when I activated the community places component, it broke again.
If I put the files in the child theme, they show on their own page, without any buddypress or the rest of the site.
if I put the files in buddypress or community folder, then it’s again broken; however, there is an improvement in that instead of breaking all of the buddypress pages, it only acts funny (pushes to the sides) on the checkin component pages.