The Longest March
During admissions month, a middle schooler’s parents know no shame. None whatsoever.
“I am checking my watch, Kath,” my sister, the Bellevue dweller, declared from the hallowed land of Superintendent Mike Riley. “You will move to Bellevue by the time Sam hits third grade.” To be honest, Tom and I—philosophically urban to the marrow of our smug little bones—considered it. We considered it when we realized that in that superior district there were fewer dud schools. We considered it when Sam got assigned our 12th-choice elementary school. (We’d listed 40. I know. I know.) It was a very highly regarded school an hour and 15 minutes across town by school bus. Each way.
We considered it even harder when Sam got accepted into both of the private elementaries we’d been obsessively sending flowers and chocolates to all year, and we toted up the six-year tuition tab: $48,000 for one, $90,000 for the other.
Perhaps we had misjudged suburbia.
Instead we desperately played the last Seattle card we had left, and schlepped down to the enrollment center at 7am on the one July day the district allowed applicants to change the school for which they were wait-listed. Only the craftiest kindergarten-search nerds like me, who had the luxury of making the quest a full-time job, knew of this tactic—a fact that simultaneously filled me with guilt of privilege and a frisson of ruthless opportunism. (It’s a crying shame almost nobody knows about this. Thank God almost nobody knows about this.)
We waited. And waited, finessing non-answers to Samantha’s chirpy questions—“What’s my teacher’s name?” “Will my kindergarten have monkey bars?” When at T-minus-two-days till school the phone finally rang, the voice on the phone registered in the fuzzy slo-mo of the miraculously unlikely: “We have an opening for Samantha in the class of 2009 at [high achieving public school in moneyed northern neighborhood].”
I sank to the kitchen floor and sobbed.
Perhaps I should feel embarrassed to admit this. It was only kindergarten after all. But for a parent, the stakes are unutterably high. Elementary school launches a child’s whole educational trajectory. It’s the first place Sam would be labeled a leader by an insightful teacher—or not. The first place she’d be bullied on the playground—or not. What we asked of kindergarten was a nurturing teacher, challenging creative stimulation, and peers who were being raised to value kindness by like-minded adults. Seemed like basic requests to us.
But now, seven years later, we were not prepared for how the middle school search would take those high stakes and crank ’em. What we wanted now, absolutely, was fewer than 32 kids to a classroom, a minimum of post-orientation drug offers, and a science teacher who—please God—knew our daughter’s name. But this was middle school, that lawless land of rebellion and hormones-times-1,000 students, where trash-talking mean girls and trash-minded pubescent boys roam halls and restrooms bedecked with cinematically detailed graffiti and used tampons. Compared with this, kindergarten felt like…well, child’s play.
Published: March 2009
This is what we went through too. Even if you live close to a North End school there is no way you can be mildly confident you will get in. We are within 2 miles of Roosevelt with the next school being over 5 miles away (Hale). Where did they put the kids? Cleveland. We were on a wait list all summer too and made it by one slot.
The only part that the article missed was that north end parents volunteer at almost a 1 to every 2 student ratio and that these parents fund raise like crazy with auctions, dinners, car washes, yard work, etc. This fund raising is a double edged sword. When you fund raise to help strengthen a program (science, the arts) the school district cuts the equivalent funding from your school.