Parents sharing the process of searching for a school in Greater Philadelphia. What kind of school are you looking for? Charter, public, private, city, suburban?
It’s almost time to make a choice. By January or so I have to decide where to send my kid to kindergarten. Because my family has been considering a move, I literally could choose any school in the city for my kids (admissions process and financial realities notwithstanding). So this problem is probably more pertinent to me than others–As I sift through which open houses I want to attend, it is becoming increasingly obvious that I can’t visit half the schools that I would like to. I have to eliminate some. And it also seems that the more schools that I consider, the less certain I become about school choice. Despite a year of research, I have eliminated very few of the schools that I have examined. I haven’t even settled on private or public. It is a paradox that the more choices that you have, the harder the decision becomes. Literally yesterday I learned about a school that is very exciting to me. Though I visited a lot of schools last year, there are about 10 schools that I would like to visit this year for the first time, and several that I visited last year that I want to visit again. I wish that I had done more last year, but I can’t do anything about that now. Ultimately, the process of narrowing down a list is going to come down to prioritizing our values and coming up with a wild ass guess of a list of schools to visit in order of adherence to those values. And given that time is limited, the process of elimination simply has to start with time, not with eliminating schools because they are inadequate, because very few appear to be. Depressing. Sorry for venting.
Len Lipkin
PSS Community