I agonized a bit over preschool this year. I wasn’t sure if we should send Mila to the same place as last year or if I should find something more rigorous with the option of going more than 2 or 3 times a week. She’s so smart, and I want her to be challenged, but I also want her to love learning. She is way too little to be jaded about school.
And then I decided I was thinking WAY too much about this. It’s preschool for heaven’s sake! She’s four! Right now the goal should be having fun, learning basic school and social skills, and having fun. Heavy emphasis on the fun.
This article from Design Mom sealed the deal for me. Far more important than what school my kids attend is how involved I am in their education. My clever articulate girl has something to contribute to any class, and she can learn so much from her classmates and teachers, no matter who they are. If she is thriving, who cares whether it’s at an expensive “top-rated” school or a friend’s house?
Plus (let’s be real here) it is much less stressful to just stick to what we know. More cost-effective too.
She was thrilled to do her “homework” to prepare for her first day and was ready to go half an hour before we needed to. When she skipped off happily yesterday without remembering to say goodbye or give me a hug, I felt really good about our decision. She’s happy. I’m happy.
My girl will learn because she loves to learn. As long as I continue to encourage that–always and everywhere–she’ll be just fine.
(See last year’s first day of school photos here. She has grown so much!)
So while I think the Design Mom article made a great point about being actively involved in your child's education, I still ABSOLUTELY CANNOT agree with her about not worrying about what school your child is in. I know that I'm a total outlier on this based on the comments on her original post, but as I've talked with friends about this in the last few weeks I haven't found anyone IRL who actually agrees with this.
Not to make you second-guess preschool choices AT ALL, but I do take issue with the idea of just blindly buying a house and figuring your kids will be fine no matter what school district you've landed them in, and that investing in the community/school improvement is more important than worrying about where your kids are right now. I would not be able to live with myself if I improved the schools for kids 30 years down the road and was being hailed as a huge community figure while my kids were struggling to deal with the fallout of going through crappy schools that were still in the improvement stage when they were around.
Interesting you should phrase it that way, because we absolutely bought our house blindly without considering the quality of the school district we were in! Fortunately for us, AZ has open enrollment and kids can move pretty fluidly between schools and districts as long as there is space for them. Our thought was that we would give our assigned school/district a try and if it wasn't a good fit for our kids/family, we'd go elsewhere. But having taught at one of the poorest, smallest, lowest performing schools in our state, I know that kids can thrive and there are GREAT teachers in even less than ideal schools.
That said, it turns out our district is FANTASTIC and the elementary school Mila will attend next year is pretty top notch these days…although it wasn't that way only a year or two before we moved here. Things change. We adapt.
To be fair to Design Mom, she did mention that one of her kids was a charter school as it was a better fit for her. Clearly she's not just throwing her kids into the lion's den and saying, "Don't worry! It'll get better eventually!" The way I read the article was, every school deserves a chance. Just because a few very vocal people didn't have good experiences there doesn't mean your child will inevitably fail.
And as someone who literally had no other options than the jr. high and high school I attended, who was valedictorian and received multiple scholarships, I'm pretty biased toward the "go where you're assigned unless it's really really not working" approach.
This should probably be a post of its own, though. I've pretty strong feelings about this kind of thing.
We may just have to agree to disagree–we were careful about schools even figuring that we'd only have 1 yr of school here before we moved (hah!) and Abigail moved to a different school in our district this year when I wasn't happy with her experience last year (she would have had the same teacher this year and neither the teacher nor the principal were responding to my concerns).
I really do think, however, that there is a lot of value in researching the schools. As you mention above, kids can thrive in a variety of different environments and teachers make a huge difference, but there is also something to be said for schools that simply have the money to hire enough teachers and provide AP/IB classes or sports teams or extracurriculars or whatnot. My experience at a backwoods, poorly-funded high school in Ohio was so incredibly different than my experience at the school in MI from which I graduated.
Like you said, I too believe in going where you're assigned to go…but the assigned school district will always be a factor in my choice of where to live (as in I will look for homes in certain districts, rather than looking for a home and then wondering what district it's in).
Anyway…we both have passionate feelings about this one, so I won't argue. Too much. 🙂
I also have to say I am WAY more passionate about this topic than I would have been a few years ago, or even than I was last year. Having a year where my child was really, truly, horrifically miserable–and none of the educators involved were addressing the issues at stake–has made me completely rethink my feelings & philosophies about how I will address school selection in the future.
I think you did exactly what you should have with Abigail. Obviously your kid's safety, happiness, and overall well-being should trump other considerations. But you've loved everything else about the schools your kids have been at, and you couldn't have known there would be a problem ahead of time. Sometimes it's just trial and error and you do the best you can, no matter where you are.