What do you do when your public school can’t teach your child?
A mother in my community was recently told by her six year old daughter’s school that they don’t have the resources or the training to give her the challenges she deserves. This is the second school in our city that has let this family down.
I find this appalling.
The nation’s capital should be a model for the rest of the country, and yet, here we are, struggling to pull our school system out of the crapper. Yes, there are six schools following the IB requirements. Yes, we have some of the best high schools in the country — School Without Walls comes immediately to mind — but we can’t give our best and brightest what they need.
So you know what happens? They move out of the city.
Now, I’m all for improving our local schools, and making sure everyone has access to a good education, regardless of their ability to pay. But do I really want my child to be the guinnea pig upon whom the system experiments? Perhaps if I were still a stay-at-home mother, I could be a staunch advocate for my child and his friends; as a mother who works 60+ hours a week, I just can’t do it.
What would you do??
That is exactly why we moved south! I am much happier with the quality of our schools out here on the fringe of suburbia.
I’m on the fence. I suspect that very few schools are going to be prepared to challenge my little kid, and if we want his education to be valuable to him, we’re going to have to do some extra stuff on our own. thus, the posts on science experiments, the space camp, etc.
I love where i live. The Smithsonian is our back yard. What better way to get an education? I just don’t expect much from a school anymore, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.
We live in Georgia and the sad state of our public schools is well-known! My daughter is in most of the advanced-placement courses in her high school and will start dual-enrollment in college courses next year, when she is a junior. I’ve found that staying in touch with her teachers regularly inspires them to provide more challenges for her.
To help supplement her classroom experiences, she participates in extracurricular activities like Math Team and Academic Team, where she has the opportunity to compete with students from around the state and the country. She also does volunteer work and challenging camps during the summer. This summer, for instance, she will be going to a camp in Texas for mathematics and engineering.
I try to stay up with everything that’s going on in our local and state school systems and to particpate and voice my opinions. Sometimes, though, it seems as though there are way too few of us doing this.
This is exactly why we moved out of DC. Our son was 3, preschool was insanely expensive, and the charter school we had been counting on had its charter denied by the local board. I attended a DC public school (Wilson) for my senior year of high school (couldn’t get into School Without Walls so late in my high school career) and, while there are some devoted teachers in the school (mostly at the AP/Honors level), the school system is broken and it shows. I would run, run, run from DC as fast as you can unless you can afford private or are willing to put in the time and sacrifice your children to a “developing” system.
Meagan, I’m not sure what we’ll do, my kid is young enough yet that the DCPS is doing right by him. My kid is probably what most tests would label as ‘gifted’ — he runs rings round most of the other kids — but his teacher and the entire school community have taught him so much about getting along, sharing, and he has made such amazing emotional growth during these past six months, that I’m thrilled with what they have accomplished together. We’ll see what happens when it comes to learning how to think.
Gayle, I think we’re all going to have to spend more time advocating for our childrens’ rights in this brave new world. I’ve pretty much decided already that, anything significant that my son’s interested in is going to have to be pursued independently. We’ll see what the system can offer, but I don’t think my kid’s the kind of boy who is going to deal with a ’system’ anyway. He plays by the rules, but he’s already off entertaining himself and finding ways to push himself beyond what the class is doing. At least the Smithsonian is in our backyard!