Solo Mother

life and the public school

by christina on April 6th, 2007

I thank goodness every day for my strong neighborhood coalition of mothers. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of how our public schools work. Often, our own teachers and principals haven’t got more than the vaguest of confidence that how we’re doing something conforms to how it should be done. As you know, single moms don’t have a lot of time to spend on figuring out things or doing things over. I’m lucky if I can get my kid to put his shoes on in time to make the bus.

Which is why, when I saw the big envelope in the mail today from the out of bounds school I’d appied to a month ago, I assumed that we’d not won the lottery. But we did. My son is enrolled in the Chinese language immersion elementary school near my work. They feed into the International Baccalaureate system here: apparently, there are six schools in the District that qualify.

Now what?

You see, I’ve never visited the school. The way these things run, I had to scramble when I realized the deadline was looming. I suppose now, I should get together with other parents with children in that school, and go visit and talk to the teachers, and bring the King of Everything along to be sure he wants to attend that school. But at least we’d be commuting together next September, and we’d have more time together. I don’t think the school has a before care program, but I’ll jump through that hoop when I have to. 

Our schools here are struggling, and I don’t think any of them have a gifted and talented program that could really capture my son’s interest when ‘real’ learning begins. He had the great fortune to be in an amazing teacher’s class this year at his current school, and I’d be happy if he had to stay there, too. But he’s bi-lingual, and was learning a third language in Dubai; I don’t want him to lose that flexibility.  If his school had a language for the littlest kids, we would stay.

All this to say, we get to reverse engineer things, now that I know the Kid is in the out-of-bounds school for which we applied. Now we get to see if he wants to go.

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