Learn Something Every Day
Kindergarten: The e-pit-o-me of being a Big Kid!! And in just a years time, Mags will be joining the ranks of those who have graduated from Preschool and gone onto a better place.
Husband and I have discussed it, and come next year, Mags will be off to one of the RWC public schools. This will be in part because, while there is always room for improvement, it sounds like the public schools here are pretty good. This will also be in part because private school/daycare has to date completely drained us of pretty much any excess cash we've had since the day she was BORN.
Mags is guaranteed a slot in our local school, but if we choose we can enter a lottery for a different school(s) of our choice and see if we get in there. So I've been looking at the different options and looking to see if any of them sounded better/more attractive than others. But in all my research, something eluded me and I was getting more and more confused. Why couldn't I find this information? It seems like an obvious enough thing, and I like to think of myself as pretty goddamned savvy with the interwebs....
Luckily I ran into Whizz one day. She should know; her son has been in grade school for, what, two years now?
"Hey Whizz," I asked, "Can you tell me where to find the tuition information for the RWC school district? I've been looking all over for it and scoured their website, and for the life of me, I just can-NOT find it. I feel kind of foolish; can you help me?"
Whizz kind of stopped and peered over her glasses at me with an arched brow. "Umm, MamaPajama, its public school. There is no tuition."
"There's WHAT??"
"There's no tuition. Free. Public. Like, taxes. You know."
"NO TUITION?!? Are you shitting me? Like, we don't have to pay for school ANY MORE?!?" I fell back in my chair with mouth literally agape. I dared not close it in case she had any more bean bags of information to throw into my person. No more tuition?!? You mean, we could...we could... put that mooey in savings?!? (thud)
How could this be?? And more importantly, how had I managed to go 34 years without knowing this? Man, talk about feeling foolish. But then I looked back, and realized I have never crossed paths with any public school system. For my entire life, through preschool, grade school, high school, flight school and college, I have attended private school. Well, what about taxes and voting and propositions and the like, you ask? Well, apparently I have also spent my entire life thinking that all of that money went towards extra funding at schools above and beyond the tuition. Like: Hey school, the state will help you expand on your computer/reading/math/underwater basketweaving class in exchange for them being able to tell you how to use the money, not: Hey school, we get to tell you how to do everything because we're footing the whole bill. Wow. Well, shit, I might have to revisit some of my opinions now...
34 years and I had absolutely no clue. Maybe private schools aren't so good after all?
posted by mama pajama @ 4:06 PM
3 Comments:
Hah! Dork. Then there's the whole Charter School and No Child Left Behind Act. You've been missing out on a whole sector of hotbed politics! :)
Welcome to Muslim Marxist 101, baby! We'll all be emigrating to Sweden in no time!
I can totally picture not realizing. I don't think it's something they teach you in private schools.
"HEY GUESS WHAT you could go to school for free, and not have nuns slap you! It's so awesome!"
I realized after we talked about it that I had no idea if free compulsory public education was in the constitution, or somehow in federal law, or what. So I went and looked it up. It is not! It is done state by state, but with lures of federal funding and threats of none if they do x and y and z.
There is also free or low-cost breakfast and lunch -- and subsidized child care.
So in practice each school frantically fundraises from its parents and the schools with more middle class or wealthy parents have an extra 100K or so to hire art teachers or get an extra few hours of the library being open or hire playground monitors. There are big struggles over whether to do fund raisers district wide, or do it school by school. If you don't let some of the schools make themselves elitist then the elitist parents will run to private schools which in theory hurts the district. (That is what happens in Blatherton, one town down from us.)
It is very interesting to go to the school board and district meetings, and learn about the politics.
Each school around here has some kind of pta type of thing (parent teacher association) and also a Site Council which is parents, teachers, and administration, who do some oversight on policy and on some extra funds. I went to Site Council meetings and saw that it is very easy to have an effect on the way things go in a school.
Post a Comment
<< Home