On Parenting and School Choice

Learning about the first
Thanksgiving

My school experience began at age 5; after a mix of babysitters and daycare and preschool, I nervously walked with my mom into the kindergarten annex at my local elementary school.  My first teacher was Mrs. Hampton, who wore dresses with frilly lace collars and had a smile perpetually fixed on her face.  She taught us letters and how to share clothes in the dress-up station.  She showed us how to make goo and get fantastically messy.  Although we were only at school for half a day, we went outside for recess each morning, whether in the blistering Texas heat or the chilly months of winter.

I moved smoothly along, the hall of my elementary school beginning with First Grade at one end, with its tiny toilets and miniature desks, and growing towards Fourth Grade at the opposite side of the building.  Each year, I was taught by wonderful women and surrounded by an assortment of children from the area.  When I recall those years, I am just as likely to think about the Hispanic and Korean classmates who carried the smell on their clothes of their parents' ethnic cooking as I am to remember lessons in cursive and multiplication.  We learned songs for PTA meetings and wore our best clothes for picture days; our happiness was dependent upon how well we did in "Around the World."

My education continued in public schools, through the challenges of middle school (acne! boys! braces! changing classes! moving to a new state!) to the rigor of high school academics.  I was challenged by my teachers, I was encouraged to dream big for my future, I found myself accepting a diploma at graduation feeling as though I had exerted very little effort to arrive at that point.  I even managed to graduate from a public university in my new home of Ohio (a much harder earned degree), and everything told me that life could now begin.

The last thing I expected when I became a mother (nearly a decade ago...) was to put so much effort into my children's education.  My own experience as a student had truly been propelled by an invisible conveyor belt; my parents rarely attended parent-teacher conferences and expected me to handle disagreements with teachers and classmates myself.  But any expectation of self-reliance for my son went out the window when we received a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder.  After all, you can't very well expect a child to stand up for his rights when he can't even talk.  Suddenly, I was navigating a world I didn't even know existed in order to find the right classroom, the best teacher, for a child with very different needs from my own.  Once he had a place, then came the endless waves of evaluations and paperwork.  IEP meetings.  Speech therapy appointments.  Progress reports that were often blank or incomplete because my son refused to cooperate with his teachers.

There was no option to take his education for granted, to expect that he would attend school with his younger brothers, or even to rely on a classroom's effectiveness for longer than a year.  As his needs and abilities shifted, I had to re-assess which environment would serve him best.  By the time he was in third grade, he'd gone to four different schools.  Ideal for a child who struggles with transitions, right?

And now we find ourselves at the end of February, observing an anniversary of sorts.  A year ago, I got a phone call that changed everything, a call that determined my next steps as a mother who will do whatever is necessary to make sure her son is able to learn.  It was a Friday afternoon, and I spent the weekend ensuring that he would not set foot in his classroom again.  I kept my son home with me, my son who had transformed over six disastrous months into a ball of anxiety and emotion and couldn't even hear the word "school" without completely melting down.  I took everything I knew about third grade, about my son and his special brain, and I sat with him Monday through Friday, working on Math and Science and Language Arts.  We took a "green hour" each day at noon, a chance to walk outside and look at leaves and animals and lay in the grass.  We watched videos on pbs.org and created experiments in the kitchen.  We called it "work" instead of the dreaded "s" word.  Rather quickly, the sweet child I remembered from the summer before returned.

Doing schoolwork
on the couch

In the evenings, I researched the options.  After meeting with a district representative, it was clear that there was no solution within the district that would truly work for my son, especially given his strong feelings about returning to a school building.  I also weighed my own abilities.  I do not have a teaching degree, nor any sort of para-professional qualifications; elementary education was NEVER on my radar as a potential career.  So an interesting scenario presented itself:  what if my son enrolled in an online school, with my role basically serving as a tutor as he completed assignments and online lessons?  This prompted more research, as not all online and alternative schools are created equal.  We settled on k12 based on its reputation and recommendations from parents who had positive experiences with the school.  I spent several weeks of my summer scanning the extensive documentation for my son and coordinating with the school so that we were prepared for the first day.

It took a few weeks to adapt to the new curriculum and style of education, but with two-thirds of the coursework complete and summer break looming on the horizon, I can safely say that this option has worked well for us.  My son is thriving, both emotionally and academically, learning new concepts each week and pushing himself harder than he ever has (with more than a little prodding from this mama).  We've begun conversations about where he'd like to do school next year, with his emphatic vote going to online school.  It's challenged me in ways that I didn't expect, and certainly takes a huge chunk of time out of my days at a time when I thought I'd be luxuriating in the worst stereotypes of stay-at-home mothers.  But rather than eating bonbons and watching TV all day, I find myself wolfing sandwiches during math lessons and helping my son spell big words as he's writing a persuasive paper.

In the past year, I've become aware that I could have done more to keep my son in his brick and mortar school.  I could have escalated my concerns sooner, I could have demanded that the district enforce his rights as a student to a free and appropriate education.  But I didn't know the intricacies of the law the way educators do, I wasn't able to hold the system accountable for the services they're meant to provide.  And, quite frankly, my son's mind is too precious a thing to languish in a bad situation indefinitely.

A literacy outing
with fellow online students

I know that I did the right thing for him, just as sending my other children to the exact same school district every day is what is best for them.  And this post has been difficult to get out, because I feel so conflicted about the whole thing.  I love public schools.  I wouldn't be able to write this without the men and women who taught me year after year.  I wouldn't be the woman I am today without the experiences of changing in a girl's locker room and dissecting a fetal pig and having a teacher admonish me for talking too much and having my work praised in front of the entire class.  The traditional school system worked for me, as I believe it does for many kids.  But it doesn't work for everyone.  People like my son struggle with a barrage of sensory issues and communication challenges.  It was only because he had such compassionate and gifted educators that he was able to make it as far as he did in the system, because the single variable of being in class with a woman who was not prepared to teach him derailed the entire thing.

I don't know which side to join when people demand that public schools be given proper funding and teachers be permitted to educate their students rather than teach them how to take a standardized test...I fully support this attitude.  But then those same people insist that school choice is destroying our nation's public education system, and pulling my son from his school and switching to an online program is part of the problem.  I cannot agree with those arguments.  Likewise, I find myself nodding along with proponents of alternative schooling options, who say that not every child will do well in a traditional classroom, and having options for those kids is necessary to upholding our country's value of equal access to education for everyone.  Of course they are right!  I've seen this happen in my own house!  But they don't want schools to be held to equal standards, or they want to abolish the neighborhood schools and replace them all with for-profit charters, and I cannot give my support to such a ludicrous idea.

So here I sit in No-Moms-Land, believing in the ability to make alternative arrangements for my child as needed, but also wanting all schools to be held to high standards so that every student can receive their free and appropriate education.  I'm upset by lawmakers who don't seem to know anything about the very schools they are legislating and seem to care so little for the millions of children and teachers preparing for another day of hard work.  I'm disheartened that so many parents would rather homeschool their children than wade into the murky mess that our public school system has become.  I ache for the countless educators who abandon this most important job each year because shifting standards and changing evaluation systems have sucked their joy so they have nothing left to give their students.  And now I have to push all of this to the side so that I can prepare my son for his vocabulary test in the morning.