Tag Archives: emotions

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The Single Most Important Thing To Know About a School Search

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One of the goals of this blog is to help people lower their anxiety level related to school selections.  Unfortunately, due to the paradox of choice, sometimes I feel like the impact that I make is quite the opposite.  Last week I spoke to a group of moms about the school choice process, as I have done several times in the past.  More and more when I lead these discussions, I am finding that at times people are actually getting whipped up into more of an anxious frenzy.  On the one hand, parents are hearing about the complex process of identifying schools for the first time, which is anxiety inducing by itself.  Pepper that with a few folks in the crowd floating horror stories (often rumors at best and downright false at worst), and I feel the tension in the room rising each passing minute.

Well this post is a reaction to that.  If you read this blog, you have nothing to worry about.  I’ll say that again.  YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.  Seriously.

How can I say this?

First and foremost, it is widely documented that the best predictor of a child’s educational success is their family, not their school.  I feel confident in saying that since you are reading this blog, you are dedicating energy to your child’s education before it even begins.  You are an involved parent.  Once your child starts school, you are more likely to pay attention to you child’s school.  You are more likely to check homework assignments.  You are more likely to reach out to your kids’ teachers.  You are more likely to show up for parent teacher night.  You are more likely to call the principal if you feel that there is a problem in the school.  This is critical to your child’s success, whether you are at the most resource-strapped public school or the richest private school.

Which brings me to my second point.  Please don’t get sucked into the sensationalist headlines (yes I am guilty), because those headlines often jump the gun (guilty again).  In other cases, they focus on negativity instead of real progress that is being made all over the region.  You read this blog, so I think that means you can think for yourself and draw your own conclusions.  Visit schools.  Talk to teachers and administrators.  Connect with grassroots parents’ organizations working to improve schools.  Once you are comfortable that any given school will be a safe environment, I think that you’ll find that there are a LOT of good teachers and good administrators out there, in all types of schools.  The reality is that there are also problems that will come up at your school.  Even the wealthiest private school will have issues that arise.  And, going back to the first point, as an involved parent, you will work actively to get that issue resolved.

So let yourself relax a bit.  Yes, this is anxiety inducing process, but if you bookmark this site (*wink*), you and your kid(s) are going to be just fine.

 

Photo by Liza Lagman Sperl

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Check Out This Great School….HA HA Made You Look!

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The City Paper  published an article last week entitled Urban Studies.  The article highlights the risk that parents take in choosing to go the a Philadelphia public school in the current climate.  Specifically, budget cuts and declining enrollment are forcing the district to close schools and change catchment boundaries.  The result–parents that gamble by buying a house in a desirable catchment or choose to invest in their catchment school and forgo the lottery or private school application process could end up out of luck–their intended destination becomes overburdened with students from other schools being diverted in or worse, the school is simply taken away.

Don’t think that the problem of having a school yanked out from under you is limited to public schools either.  Private schools are not immune.  Faced with declining enrollments, last week the Archdocese of Philadelphia announced that it was closing 44 elementary schools in the region (Inquirer story).

If you hadn’t noticed before last week’s news cycle that the education landscape in this city is in the midst of a sea change, how do you like the wake up call?

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Going Where the Road Takes You

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We recently circulated a request to area parents asking them to complete a survey share their school choices.  This is one parent’s response.

By Shauna Bracy

I would love to do the survey, if I felt I actually had a choice with schools.  You see, my younger son has developmental challenges. Not exactly Autism or Aspersger’s, not quite mental retardation, but a little of this and a little of that that creates an imperfect storm of being a socially aware, adaptable, Lego-loving seven year old who has academic deficiencies and  is difficult to understand. He defines the ‘I’ in IEP.

‘Choice’ is a term that makes my blood boil when you have a special son like mine, because it’s only existent to the extent you want to play roulette with your child’s education. I played.  I played charter lotteries. Of course, I’ve entered every lottery since he was 4. After touring many, in my heart I knew that if he won a seat at one of the popular charters, we’d have to pass it up. Despite their or any other charter’s legal requirements to educate any child… some programs just weren’t ideal for my son’s needs. Sometimes you have to look at your hand and walk away.

I played his fate on Catholic school. It was my educational upbringing and the perfect place for my older son. Though I felt like I was sticking a roundish peg in a squarish hole, it was better for him then our local public. Two years in Catholic School proved to be to much for them. They wanted more for him (or their reputation..) then their curriculum could offer.

By now it’s 4 years worth of defeated lotteries, unsuccessful voluntary school transfer requests, school tours, principal networking, budget crunching, contemplating moving; all no dice.  I played his fate in public school. He started Fall 2011 at our neighborhood public school. Despite paving a home-school communication road for 2 years knowing this day was on the back-burner, we still only felt a lack luster sense security in our ‘decision’. So he started and yup we were right. He didn’t like it, we didn’t like it.   And just when you’re in the space between accepting defeat and forming a new gameplan, your phone rings at work and the charter school you’ve had your sights on since he was 4 years old calls and tells me they reached his name on the wait list and they have a spot.

Technically, I didn’t choose that charter school, they chose us and we couldn’t be happier.

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Birthday Party Retrospective

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A couple of weeks ago, I took my son to a birthday party for a boy he had spent his entire preschool life with.  Ho-hum, another kids birthday party.  Except for one thing.

This was the first time I saw my most intimate school-choice cohort.  You see, the birthday boy had only been in his new kindergarten for a week.  He didn’t really know his new classmates yet, so his invitations were distributed almost exclusively to his pre-kindergarten friends, and by extenson, his friends’ parents.  The very same parents with whom, I, over the last several years, play-dated, stressed over schools, visited schools, and discussed and dissected our own school selection processes down to the finest detail.  Interestingly–on the one hand, we share a lot of the same core values and beliefs.  On the other hand, our kids ended up scattered everywhere–of the 15 or so kids, no more than 3 kids ended up at the same school, and we were scattered pretty evenly between public, private, and charter schools.

Everyone was happy with their school choice, which was nice to hear.  Our kids are all thriving, joyful and learning.  Nobody expressed any serious adjustment issues from their kids.  Though some expressed some very minor frustrations with their respective schools, I believe that the frustrations were mostly due to adjustments to new routines, communication structures, and expectations, not sincere issues with the schools that were chosen.  The frustrations involved school communication, dropoff logistics, transportation (I am not alone, apparently), and managing multiple dropoff locations with kids at separate school/day cares.

The experiece told me a few things.  The first–the buildup to kindergarten is bigger for parents than it is for kids.  Kids can get excited about it, but the volume of energy parents spend worrying about transitioning to kindergarten or picking a school that is the ‘right fit’ is at worst overblown and needlessly stressful, or at best, leading parents to make the right decisions to address those issues.  With regard to school choice–along the way we lamented that there may not be a perfect school out there, but as parents we understand our kids better than we think and have a pretty good sense of where they will thrive.  With regard to the transitioning process–we seem to be pretty good at understanding what our kids need to know and when they need to know it as they embark on the kindergarten experience.

 

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Transportation is a Dirty Word

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Wow. Who knew? Back when I started the school choice process in my third ever post, I listed “community” as one of the key factors in my school choice. I looked at it from the perspective of the benefits of a neighborhood school–the ability to walk to school, having friends in the neghborhood. I never looked at the huge negative of not choosing a neighborhood school–an extra commute.

My son started kindergarten last week. I had made a few dry runs of the trip and it seemed to work out alright–15 minutes. However, a dry run over the summer is no substitute for the real thing.  At schooltime rush hour, with all of the busses and other parents out there, it was a much different story. Add to it the storms we had during the first week of school, and what I thought would be a 15-minute ride turned out to be more like 30 (normal day) to 40 (stormy day).  I am looking for shortcuts, but as a backup plan, my friends and I have already started looking into alternatives, including taking regional rail, the bus, and carpooling. I have tried taking a SEPTA bus a couple of times already. It is more relaxing, but the timing is not any better.

My coworker had a horrifying experience last week when his mother-in-law was waiting at the bus stop for his son. The bus arrived and his son wasn’t on it. For 15 harrowing minutes, they could not locate him. It turns out that he was still at the school, mistakenly sent to an afterschool program that he was not supposed to start until November.

This is all to say that test scores, teacher quality, facilities, academic philosophy are important, but don’t skip paying attention to the nuts and bolts stuff like transportation when choosing a school.  Remember that the commute is something that you have to live with every day.

At least this problem will be alleviated because starting in first grade, kids are eligible for busing. Still, the whole transportation situation has put a sour aftertaste on what has otherwise been a sweet start to kidnergarten.