Education Crisis

When I first had X-man I thought the weirdo dichotomy between breastfeeders and non-breastfeeders was frightening. I'm not a militant person by nature nor am I an absolutist. I think each family does its best, so the fact that I was berated for giving my child formula by a stranger in the baby food aisle at Target was about the same as being blindsided by a giant truck full of manure two weeks postpartum while on drugs to keep some post birth complications under control. Whatever my personal situation was didn't matter. And the words I've seen on the Internet condemning one practice over another is disheartening.

Now as elementary school approaches, I'm seeing the same disorganization, confusion, self-doubt and bewilderment as I did when I met other first-time moms who realized that they'd been sold a bill of goods about the "beauty" of motherhood and learned very quickly that the "beauty" is not in the destination of birth and arrival of a baby, but in the hard, every day work and intense love it takes to parent.

Like most other parents, I worry about my child's education. I want him to want to learn. I want him to be open minded and tolerant regarding people and theories. Period. I want the natural curiosity that comes with that learning. He might be what the school district calls gifted based on scores. He might show an aptitude for the arts or physical fitness. He might just be X-man, my cool kid who tries exceptionally hard but doesn't have critical thinking come naturally to him. Whomever he is, I just want him to have options. 

Over the last 2 years, X-man has been attending Next Generation Early Childhood Center. He started when he was 15 months old while I was teaching at Millikin. I liked that it's a small building. I liked that the kids are taught social/emotional, physical, language and cognitive development. They have structured activity time and a lot of indoor and outdoor playtime. And when I think about kindergarten, I wonder if we'll end up following our love of their Early Education Center and enrolling him in their Primary School. 

But MacTroll and I went to public schools, and, well, we can buy a whole lot of college and fun family vacations with the money we'd spend there for private school. But when MacTroll and I talk about school and our experiences, it's obvious that we came from two very different public school systems. 

MacTroll grew up in an upper-middle class suburb of Peoria called Dunlap. It was a small school district where there was no racial diversity in the student body or the teaching staff. The high school kids drove nicer cars than their teachers. I visited every once in a while when I was in high school. Besides getting used to everyone being the same color, I was kind of taken aback by the newness of things they had in their school: supplies, technology, chairs, etc. Plus, there were parents, mostly rich moms around volunteering during the workday with weird 1990s nylon track suits on with expensive running shoes and big diamond rings (Okay, there were two in the gym that day, but holy cow did they obviously make a "money" impression). They had Xerox machines while we still primarily existed off of dittoing. Plus, if you've read the Sun Times lately, you know that DHS was ranked 17th best high school in the state last year.

I went through the Rockford Public School District where a group called "People Who Care" sued the school district in the late 1980's, when I was in middle school and on my way to high school.

People Who Care were a group of citizens in Rockford who were upset over the school district's plans to move away from neighborhood schools and, instead, replace them with larger schools. It doesn't sound like a big deal, except that "this plan placed the greatest burden of school closings and transportation on minority, low income and high-risk students who lived on the west side of the Rock River, Rockford's natural dividing line." 

Ouch. So ouchy, when the school district got nailed for it and other acts of segregation in court by a Federal judge, NBC National News came to my high school. 

My sister went to neighborhood schools through eighth grade. Then my parents had her tested for the high school gifted program, where she was bused across town to Auburn, the only public high school left on the west side of town. Two years later, my parents had me test for the gifted middle school program, and I began busing to Wilson and then West Middle School, when Kennedy and Wilson were combined. 

My middle school had three times as many students as MacTroll's high school. When moving to West, I saw students doing coke in the unwatched stairwells, I saw a 13-year-old girl who was at odds with someone in her gang bring a gun and put in in her gym locker, and I swear to god, the police paddy wagon made a stop so frequently outside our middle school that if it wasn't a scheduled pick up/delivery place it should have been. This was not a building that facilitated learning, but being in that building was incredibly important for me in my social development, because I got to see humanity at its best and worst in the middle of that prison hopped up on hormones. 

So, given that introduction, it should be no shock to anyone that when I got to high school I got sexually harassed and groped at my very first pep rally, kids had Jack Daniels in their lockers and/or got baked during lunch hour, someone got shot in the parking lot, the student assistant in my art class committed suicide, after some argument in an overwhelmingly overfilled gym class someone apparently got pissed off at some other kid and threw him through a plate glass window near our courtyard, and I got pleasant experience of being questioned by police officers when my father's house was robbed once my stepmother told them which high school I attended. (By the way, the kid who was shot was hit by two east side middle school kids, should you think that only kids on the poor side of town have weapons and a desire to hurt people).

The whole time I was in high school, my mother taught at a private school. A private school with chapel time and dress codes and restricted book lists. It was small and quiet and structured. And I would have felt like hanging myself if she had made me go there, although at the time, I told her that I'd rather go there than get sent to our neighborhood high school... and I still agree that probably would have been a better choice for me.

Seeing how MacTroll and I have very different ideas of what school looks like (he was often bored and annoyed at his, while I was overprotective and slightly proud of my broken down, forgotten school even though I couldn't wait to get out of there), we're approaching the idea of kindergarten for X-man with different values and priorities.

And as my school experience taught me, a little investigation, observation and tenacity will eventually lead us to make the right choice for our child, knowing that the same choice won't be the right for everyone else's kids. 

I bring all this up because there are very few times a year when schools open up for open houses and tours. And I'm on a mission to find a school that I love as much as I love X-man's early childhood experience, but for a cheaper, already paid-for-in-my-taxes kind of price tag. 

So today I am visiting two local elementary schools for their tours. Unfortunately, I can't attend the Champaign Unit 4 open house time tonight due to a conflicting meeting, but I have 2 years to figure out this conundrum, so from time to time, you're going to see me update my reviews/information on the schools. Maybe they'll help you or maybe you'll have more information to offer me because I'm a newbie, and I know some of my readers are old pros when it comes to navigating the school district. 

And for the record... not once after I started school did I think my parents made a bad decision about where to send me.

Oh, and, um, did I mention I used to be a newspaper reporter in college?