So now what?

This year Crusty's school was closed by the district in a very misguided attempt to alleviate some over crowding. Doesn't make sense does it? The district here, and to a certain extent, everywhere is trying to standardize classes and students. The problem is, students aren't standard. They are not all the same, they each learn, live and communicate differently. Our kids all fall squarely into the " not quite standard" category. They are quirky, smart, do not suffer fools lightly, have big loud opinions, have a healthy skepticism about absolute authority ( yeah, sometimes I regret that one) and do not fit into any ones cooky cutter. As a result they are more easily bullied, more easily overlooked and more easily dismissed. Crusty and SisterGirl both go to a k-12 school that does a pretty good job of alleviating some of those problems. It also does a fair ( notice, fair, not spectacular) job with academics. Doodle was set to go there too. Now that it will be closed it is clearly not an option. The problem is, despite the districts yammering on about available seats and excess capacity, there is no place for them to go. They each have one potential good fit school. SisterGirl will likely get in, she will also have an hour long ride on a city bus, that's an hour each way. Crusty is tougher, the target school for him took one middle school student year, they simply do not have room. Where oh, where is that excess capacity when you need it? And Doodle has even fewer options.

They could all go into neighborhood general ed classrooms and probably get through ok. My problem is, that is simply not good enough. It is not good enough to warehouse our children for 8-10-12 hours a day while throwing the bare bones of an education at them. It is not ok to get them up before dawn to wait for a bus, to eat substandard food, to be taught to the absolute lowest common denominator. Even if they are the lowest, poorest performing child in the room, that's not where I want them taught. How can we expect them to rise to the challenge of their futures if we expect nothing from them. How can we expect them to be creative problem solvers, movers and shakers, teachers, lawyers, masons, artists, mechanics, parents, scholars, doctors, writers and good decent people, if their only experiences involving choose A,B, or C?

I cannot accept that this is the best that I can do for my children. So we consider home school, private school, distance learning etc.. and where do we go now?

There are hundreds and thousands of dedicated, hardworking and creative teachers and administrators out there. There are districts flush with cash and those that are dirt poor. The successful ones are the ones that notice and nurture the differences in children ( and teachers, for that matter), not the ones that try and fit them all into standardized test bubbles.

I really don't know what we will do next year. But I cannot just send them off to somewhere "good enough" they only get one shot at this and it's our job to give them the best shot they can have. I just have to figure out what that is.