This fall, my older child is headed to Kindergarten, and I have many feelings about this! First and foremost, I am excited for him, because this past year has been unpredictable in so many ways, that I hope Kindergarten will finally bring with it some more predictability and stability in friendships. I am also curious as a parent to see how he will respond to adversity and setbacks in this transition. For most of his life, he has attended the same daycare -- from about 14 months old to now, age 5. This past year, however, has shown us that he has a resilient side to him. During COVID, we have had to adjust his routine and school attendance patterns many times based on local public health data, our visits with his grandparents, and his therapy needs; he has bounced back from the many changes and disruptions by remaining mostly cheerful and optimistic. I am sure Kindergarten is going to hold challenges for him, but I feel hopeful that he will grow from those challenges and become a stronger person for it.
As a parent, of course I also have some anxieties as well. Mostly, I am still trying to figure out which elementary school my child should attend. Our district has a system of lottery-based enrollment into specialized public schools, as well as a public neighborhood school where you are guaranteed a seat. We are currently on the wait list for a particular specialized (projects-based) school in our neighborhood, and it seems quite likely that we will receive an offer by the end of the summer. I feel fine with sending my child to either that choice school or our neighborhood school based on their programs alone, but I have heard some anecdotal stories that indicate that my son may face some racial prejudices in these schools. (What parents from the local families of color have told me is that he will almost certainly have those negative interactions no matter where he goes, and the administration is either going to brush my concerns under the rug or be blatantly racist themselves. Such is the deep systemic issue of segregation in our city.) Another major issue I have learned about our district (and this is common knowledge) is that some essential academic services are funded by the PTA. The state and local governments chronically underfund public education (due to insufficient local taxation), and so every year, each school's principal creates a "wishlist" for the PTA that might include things like: hire a counselor and an art teacher. The local PTA for that particular school looks at the list of requests and approves what they think they can fundraise to support, and that is how the budget becomes complete for the year. This system is horrifically inequitable, because as our local elementary school has a PTA budget of around $250,000 per year, an elementary school in another part of the city that is predominantly made up of families of color could not consistently raise enough funds to have so many on-going programs and benefits for the students. On paper, each school is funded the same amount per student, but in reality, resources vary greatly from pocket to pocket in this huge district. What I have heard parents of color phrase it as is that they are put into the impossible position of choosing: Do I want my child to grow up in well-resourced, overwhelmingly white, schools that will subject them to regularly occurring racist experiences, or do I want my child to grow up in a diverse neighborhood with under-funded schools? I know this is not a problem unique to our city, but it breaks my heart that the opportunity gaps run so deep. And yet, another problem is also that the public schools in the more affluent parts of town are in competition with private schools. Our city has a very high attendance rate of private schools (22% of all K-12 students), and many of these parents who are donating money to the local PTA to make sure their kids receive the best-funded public education do not want to share that PTA pot with schools in other pockets of the city. At a certain point of financial contribution, the wealthiest of those public-school parents will start to consider pulling their kids out of the public schools and paying for a private education. The odds are stacked against equitable public education funding in our on-the-paper "progressive" city. This past year, as I was looking for opportunities to head back to work, I also looked at working in public versus private schools. When I left my teaching job two years ago, I was sure that I would end up in a public school next, but a pandemic and a steep public school budget cut later, I was scrambling to find any job available. In the end, I took a private school teaching job, with lots of questions about the role that I play in furthering the inequities of this broken system. (I don't regret my choice, because months later, I still have not seen any public school jobs be posted in my area of expertise, and I have been keeping a fairly close eye. That honestly is crazy, because generally there is a lot of demand in my area. I feel relieved that I had made the right choice for our family to take the private-school job that came up, when it did.) In the fall, our baby will be starting daycare for the first time (after being home for the entire pandemic thus far); our big kid will be starting Kindergarten; I will be teaching at a new-to-me school and having my first driving commute in years; my husband will need to manage the dropoffs of both kids in the morning via bicycles, since we only have one car; I will be picking both kids up and dumping big kid's bicycle in my car everyday. It will be a lot of changes! I am feeling intimidated just thinking about the huge changes ahead for our family, but I also feel so fortunate that we have been able to take so much family time this past year to slow down, breathe, and be with one another.
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About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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