Six Down...

[ricevermicelli]

Right now, the Boston Globe is running its annual series of articles about how the public school lottery system sucks, and I am avoiding the Boston Globe like it was poison. The school district has released a spreadsheet concerning school demand which is supposed to help parents navigate the "Controlled Choice" system (which screws everyone) by showing them which school have open seats. (NB: The system is not helping me write coherent sentences.) This spreadsheet is a means of telling parents that they can't possibly have what they want.

Here is my advice: if you have children who you want to send to public school in Boston, send them to Pre-K when they are four. All the seats in all the programs are open at that point. You are very likely to get what you want. Zone-wide, roughly 50% of the seats for kindergarten are filled by kids from Pre-K programs, but the ratio for individual schools can be as high as 100%.

There are two kinds of school tours: those attended by large groups of anxious-looking white parents, and those attended by me, alone. So: twenty anxious-looking white people, or just one. Parents of color very seldom attend these events, but I can't imagine that none of them give a damn. I don't know what those people are doing. Sending their kids to parochial school? Working too hard to do anything but mark off schools based on convenience of location? That last option sounds beautifully relaxing. I could do that in about two minutes.

I have five more schools to tour. I need liquor.

(FTR, I have identified two programs I'd definitively be willing to send DL! to, both of which have open seats. I have one more that'd be at least okay. I have to mark at least five choices on the registration form. I'd like not to waste my preferences on lost causes, so I really hope that two of those five are decent, and not totally full.)

Comments

[naomikritzer]

When we were doing this with Molly and the Minneapolis schools, I had a full-fledged anxiety dream in which her school assignment was not delivered to our mailbox but NAILED TO OUR DOOR, Martin-Luther-style, and after I pried it down to look at it it was completely unreadable; when I finally parsed it out, she'd been assigned to some school I'd never heard of.

I had not had such a detailed and hilarious anxiety dream since I was getting ready to get married.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, I can so imagine that.

[naomikritzer]

Also, we had a School Choice Fair where we could go and walk around to talk to principals and kindergarten teachers who were standing by tables full of information. That was rather useful, as it let us quickly eliminate the school closest to our house. ("She'd finish her busywork really quickly and then we'd let her go draw" was not the answer I was looking for when I asked what they'd do with a kindergartner who was already reading.)

[robbbbbb.livejournal.com]

You can always just homeschool DL! instead. That way, you can set the learning pace to his level, and keep him on the track you want him on.

And you're probably a better teacher than half of the public school teachers I had in my tenure through the school system.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

I have no interest in homeschooling. After a few days at home with the kids, I start going spare. It's not good for me, and it's worse for them. I like having full-time work. I miss it.

[robbbbbb.livejournal.com]

I understand where you're coming from. I will say that your stories of wrestling with the public school bureaucracy, however tangentially, make a decision to homeschool that much more attractive.