Mendolonium

Since we found out that Thomas received a coveted lottery spot at Willard Elementary School for kindergarten Jeff and I have spent several evenings engaged in the same futile conversation.  It goes something like this:

Gina:  We need to figure out a schedule for next year.

Jeff (sighing heavily):  OK.  I know.  Let’s start with Monday.

Gina:  Are we starting with before the new baby is born or after the new baby is born?  Because Thomas will only be in school for about 6 weeks before she gets here and then I’ll be on maternity leave and on a different schedule.  And then after maternity leave a different schedule still.

Jeff:  Before.

Gina:  OK.  On Mondays I will drop Thomas off at school and then go to work.  You will bike Theo to school and then go to work.  And then…Monday is that crappy day where Thomas gets out of school at 12:30.

Jeff:  12:30?  That’s ridiculous.

Gina:  Yes, but you knew that.  All the PUSD schools have a short day on Monday.

Jeff:  But it is just so stupid.  How do they expect working parents to deal with that?

Gina:  I don’t think they care.  So what are we doing on Monday?

Jeff:  I guess I will have to bike over from work and pick him up and then take him back to my office or to his after school program.  I really don’t want him to do after school though.

Gina:  Me either.  I think being away from home from 7:30 in the morning until 6:00 at night is a lot for a five year old.  It’s also not cheap – about $4000 a year for three days a week – not counting summer.

Jeff:  So what do we do?  Do I just take him back to my office and let him hang out with Legos and drawing and work on homework?

Gina (joking):  I think that you could put him in lab and teach him to do some simple synthesis.  He would love that.

Jeff:  He would love that.  I don’t really want him exposed to organic chemicals at age five though – he might want children someday.

Gina:  Are you going to be able to bike over and pick him up and get back in time for your lab?

Jeff:  I don’t know…it’s four miles…I guess I might have to drive.

Gina:  Which means we need a second car…

And then our heads exploded from the complexity of it all.

Not really.  What really happens is Jeff grabs a bag of Hershey’s kisses (his drug of choice) and I make myself a plate of nachos (Baby Girl’s craving of choice) and we agree that we should work on the Tuesday schedule instead, maybe it will be easier and we’ll come back to Monday later.  I’ll spare you the painful transcript, but the Tuesday conversation goes about as well as the Monday conversation – me trying to figure out how I am going to deal with waking up a napping Theo (I don’t work on Tuesdays) plus a newborn to get to school to pick up Thomas at 2:15.  We talk about carpooling with other families but with a Prius as our car we’re lucky we can fit three car seats across the back – there is no way we could accommodate another child unless they ride shotgun (illegal!) or we strap them on to the roof (even more illegal!).  And we’re back in second car territory – just so we can get our son to and from school, because our neighborhood school is so awful that we can’t even consider sending him there.

I am so very frustrated.  I didn’t have children so that I could spend all day in the car chauffeuring them around.  I don’t own a car that is paid for in full so that I can now “trade up” to  a big gas guzzling SUV or minivan.  I am completely confounded by a school system that has resulted in kids within a one block radius of us attending five different elementary schools.  I know that as parents we make a lot of sacrifices for our children and I do so gladly but this is not sacrifice – this is insanity.  It isn’t good for the kids, it isn’t good for the environment, and it isn’t good for parents.

Approaching kindergarten reminds me of how I felt four years ago searching for the right daycare for Thomas.  There were lots of options – none of them good.  Yes I have high standards, but many of the places I saw weren’t just mediocre – they were downright scary.  Kids parked in front of TVs for hours on end munching on fruit loops, toddlers sitting in diapers bulging with filth, infants being admonished for crying.  In the end we choose a daycare that we thought would be adequate and ended up pulling Thomas out a few months later when our concerns exploded on a day where it became clear the head provider had been lying to us.  We juggled childcare between Jeff, I, my mother, and my sister until after more than two years of waiting a spot finally opened up at the center we are at now.

I don’t want the same thing to happen to Thomas in elementary school.  I grew up changing schools and it had a profoundly negative effect on me.  I want to pick the right school for our kids on the first try and I am just not convinced that Willard or any of the PUSD schools are it.  I am not sure where that leaves us, however, by sheer luck Thomas’ birthday is such that he may go to kindergarten either this year or next.  Although it is not the financially savvy option we could keep Thomas at his current daycare/preschool for another year.  We could, essentially, punt.

In the end I keep thinking that if we are feeling this much stress over sending Thomas to Willard, spending this amount of energy trying to figure out how to make the schedule work, literally losing sleep over what to do that we should just wait another year.  Life shouldn’t be this hard.  I think we need to give ourselves the next year to find another way.

Last week we gathered our paperwork and headed to Thomas’ new school to officially enroll him for kindergarten.   In between filling out our address at least a dozen times and asking basic questions such as if there was a kindergarten orientation (“Yes!  The day before school starts.”) an old issue reared its ugly Medusa-like head:  Food allergies.

We’ve relaxed considerably about food allergies in our home over the past two years.  Thomas is now old enough to understand his allergies and is quite reasonable about the restrictions that they impose.  Even better, Thomas is no longer allergic to eggs, garlic, and pepper – three ubiquitous foods that we all sorely missed having in the house.  But the fact the remains that Thomas is still allergic to soy, peanuts, and sesame.  And because having children with the same food allergies would make life just too easy, Theo is allergic to onions and cashews.

Thomas’ allergy to sesame is anaphylactic and thus, requires an epi-pen.  During the enrollment process I casually asked, “I am sure you see this all the time, but how do you deal with food allergies?”  Given that the prevalence of childhood food allergies in our society is rampant, the answer I got was shocking to me in its ignorance.  The office staff cheerily explained to me that we could meet with the school nurse to go over the specific food allergies and an action plan and that school staff were trained in using an epi-pen.  Sensible and reassuring.  The office staff then went on to tell me that at the beginning of the year each classroom teacher would send a letter home to each student listing the food allergies in the classroom to inform the other parents of what foods were not safe for classroom treats or lunches.  I started to get nervous.  I immediately wondered, how could other parents – most with no experience of food allergies, half of whom do not reside in homes where English is the primary language, be expected to read labels the way that we do?  How many parents know that hummus, a favorite lunch item, is chock full of sesame seeds?  How many parents know that soy resides in nearly every processed food item in this country?  Even our own parents and close friends, who are well aware of the risks, have made mistakes from time to time.  It unfair and unrealistic to expect other parents to carry our burden.   And with multiple food allergic children in the same class does the collective diet of the class become so restrictive that parents are left sending their children to school with lunches of rice and potatoes?  The very notion was ridiculous and dangerous.  I told the office staff as much and they then offered that if I was really concerned, there was a special table in the cafeteria for food allergic kids.  It was then that I began to get upset.   A “special” table simply because my son, though no fault of his own, cannot eat some common foods.  He doesn’t need to sit at a special table full of kids with food allergies.  Every day, at his current school, he eats next to children who bring items in their lunches that he is allergic to and in over two years at school he has never had an incident.  Why?  Because his school has a strict no-sharing policy.  Students eat only what their parents provide them.  Period.  Snacks and treats are baked on site at the school and the school is responsible for every ingredient in the provided food.

The solution for elementary schools is similarly simple.  If outside snacks or treats are allowed parents should be able to state that they do not want their child receiving food that they [the parents] did not provide and should be allowed to provide an alternative.  Most importantly, while I am sure it would be met with protests of “not enough money in the budget to pay for adequate lunchtime supervision” the school should implement a strict no-sharing policy for all students.  Food allergies or not, I actually think that most parents want to know what their kids are eating at school and would be happy to know that their children are eating what they [the parents] provided or paid for (in the case of hot lunch).  While implementation may indeed require extra supervision at first, such a policy would quickly become routine if implemented from kindergarten on and if penalties for infraction (maybe the offending students could go sit by themselves at a “special” table) were adequately persuasive.

Clearly it is my job as a parent of a food allergic child to prepare him for the real world.  Thomas already knows not to eat food at a party or play date without checking the ingredients first.  He is as scared of his reaction to the forbidden foods as I am.  It does not do him any good to pretend to eliminate the his forbidden foods in the world around him – he needs to learn how to manage his allergies.  But his school must help him in his quest.  I worry that Thomas, taught not to share food by me, will be tempted by another student’s offer to share a cookie at lunchtime, or will one day encounter a birthday treat brought in by a parent at school, or will be offered a cracker used by a teacher as a reward.  He might protest the food, but the adult will reassure him, “We know about your allergies – this is safe.”  But that adult will be mistaken.  They won’t have thought to check for soy in a cookie.  They won’t have thought to look for sesame seeds as an ingredient on that box of crackers.  And Thomas, not even five years old when he eterns kindergarten, will experience an understandable lack in judgement and eat the proffered food.  Such mistakes are, of course, what the epi-pen is for, but every effort must be made by the school to ensure that that scenario never happens.

Life-threatening food allergies are a particularly frustrating problem for parents to deal with.  Food allergies are misunderstood, downplayed, written off as hysterical parenting.  But I have seen my childrens’ skin explode, in a matter of seconds, into red angry hives.  I have seen my son struggle for air mere minutes after a skin exposure to one of his allergens.  I have held my child in my arms as he projectile vomited over and over again utnil his stomach was empty of the offending food.  Food allergies are a serious medical problem and deserve the same intelligent response as any other medical condition a child might have.   I think my sons are the most special boys in the world, but they should never have to be excluded from other kids, forced to sit at a “special” table, just to keep them safe.

It’s decision week 2011 here in Pasadena.  If you are one of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Pasadena parents of a child entering kindergarten next year or in a older grade but wishing to change schools; this is, most likely, the week that decides your child’s future.

We received two letters this week.  The first one, from the only private school we applied to, Friends Western School, arrived in a thin, standard envelope.  “Oh crap”, I thought flashing back to those spring days in 1996 awaiting college acceptance letters.  Thin letters are never good news and indeed Thomas was wait listed at the Friends school.  A few days later we got another letter from the Pasadena Unified School district informing us of our results in the open enrollment lottery.  After nine months of school tours and discussions with other parents we had, in the end, listed Willard Elementary as our first choice, followed by Longfellow Elementary, followed by Don Benito Elementary.  The letter began, “Congratulations!  Your child has been accepted to attend Willard Elementary School…”  Out of hundreds of applicants Thomas had lucked out into one of 43 projected open kindergarten spots.   Later this week we will go to the school armed with our proof of residency, Thomas’ birth certificate, and immunization records and officially enroll him at Willard.  I am excited that Thomas got a spot at what we saw as the best public elementary school in Pasadena.  I am beyond relieved that we will not be forced to make the choice of sending him to our failed neighborhood school or homeschooling him.  But a few minutes after getting the news of Thomas’ acceptance into Willard I was overcome by a wave a sadness over what would not be.  You see, we had begun to flesh out a rather creative (some might say crazy) homeschooling scheme involving Jeff and I trading off homeschooling duties in the morning and Thomas in a well regarded after school program in the afternoons.  And despite all of the challenges homeschooling would entail, I had begun to get excited about it.

I want to spend most of every day with my children.  I don’t want to miss any of the moments where they discover something new or master a challenge.  I want to be there to see every smile, wipe every tear, moderate all of the information that they receive.  But I also want a career and a life beyond my children.  I want to write.  And I have to have enough money to pay the bills and maintain health insurance.   It is the defining struggle of modern motherhood in the United States:  children vs. self vs. necessity.  Over the past four years I have maintained a temporary truce with the struggle:  working two to three days a week, home (or out and about) with the boys two days a week, and even a bit of time all to myself.  We call the days when I am home with the boys Mama-Thomas-Theodore days.  Yesterday while talking with Thomas about school, both Thomas and I were confronted by the fact that if Thomas goes to school outside of the home there would be no more Mama-Thomas-Theodore days during the school year.  The thought of that makes us both want to scream “Nooooooooo!” I did my screaming inside my head, Thomas choose to voice his displeasure out loud.

We have some time until a final decision must be made.  For now I plan to go back to Willard and sit in on a kindergarten class for an entire day (if they let me – I have volunteered to do work or help out the teacher while I am there) to see what school there is really like.  We are going to experiment with incorporating some more formal homeschooling into our days at home – something we may keep up even once Thomas goes to school.  Yesterday  I began with a lesson on the letter “A”.  As part of the lesson Thomas brainstormed and then wrote on a whiteboard all the words he could think of that started with “A”.  When he got to apple “APL” I gently informed him that the word actually contained a second “P” and an “E” at the end.   Thomas was amenable to the second “P “but denounced the silent “E” telling me in a matter of fact voice.  “Silent Es are stupid.  I don’t believe in the them.”  Homeschooling or traditional school; educating Thomas is clearly going to be a delightful challenge and I want to be involved in it.

Next up on our tours of Pasadena elementary schools is Willard Elementary School.  I almost don’t want to write publicly about Willard, not because it was yet another unsatisfying tour, but because Willard was fantastic.  During this process I’ve come up with lists of what I am looking for in a school:  low student to teacher ratios, a creative and flexible curriculum, within walking distance of our home, a start time after 8:00 am, healthy school food, challenges for an advanced student, and art and music programs.  I remember making the same sort of lists when we were looking for our home.  I knew at that time, just as I know now, that I won’t get everything I want.  But, just like I made a home built before WWII an absolute requirement of our real-estate search, I have a few absolute requirements in our school search.  The key item that I have been looking for are teachers who are engaged with their students and students who are engaged and happy in the classroom.  I can overlook almost anything else but I hate it when I walk into a classroom and see bored teachers and students with vacant stares on their faces.

Willard is an International Baccalaureate (IB) school.  Our tour began with a detailed introduction from the school’s principal and the school’s IB coordinator.  The IB program is a an internationally developed program implemented across schools in many countries to provide for “the total growth of the developing child, addressing students’ social, physical, emotional, and cultural needs in addition to their academic needs”.  This is done by viewing the entire curriculum in the framework of six thematic units:

1. Who we are:  An inquiry into the nature of the self; beliefs and values; personal, physical, mental, social and spiritual health; human relationships including families, friends, communities and cultures; what it means to be human.
2. Where we are in place and time:  An inquiry into orientation in place and time; personal histories; homes and journeys; the discoveries, explorations and migrations of humankind; the relationships between and the interconnectedness of individuals, and civilizations from local and global perspectives.
3. How we express ourselves:  An inquiry into the ways in which we discover and express, ideas, feelings, nature, culture, beliefs and values; the ways in which we reflect on, extend and enjoy our creativity; our appreciation of the aesthetic.
4. How the world works:  An inquiry into the natural world and it’s laws; the interaction between the natural world (physical and biological) and human societies; how humans use their understandings of scientific principles; the impact of scientific and technological advances on society and on the environment.
5. How we organize ourselves:  An inquiry into the interconnectedness of human-made systems and communities; the structure and function of organizations; societal decision-making; economic activities and their impact on humankind and the environment.
6. How we share the planet:  An inquiry into rights and responsibilities in the struggle to share finite resources with other people and with other living things; communities and the relationships within and between them; access to equal opportunities; peace and conflict resolution.

The IB framework resonated with both Jeff and I.  We both feel strongly that the most important skill to develop as a person is not mathematics or even reading, but critical thinking.  I think that all of the schools we have seen so far will provide our children with a good foundation in academic fundamentals, however, they often appear to my eyes to be more of a “factory” of sorts, “producing” children who are academically proficient, yet not encouraged to be curious or to question.  At Willard there was a clear and seemingly equal emphasis on both academics and the overall development of the child as a thinking, questioning, compassionate human being.  Obviously, the school is not the only or even primary influence on children – their parents are.  That said, the typical elementary school student spends approximately 32 hours a week in school and I certainly don’t want the school to be supressing my children’s natural inquisitiveness.

As we toured Willard we saw children and teachers having animated exchanges.  We heard the sounds of many violins being played in unison (well, somewhat in unison) during music class.  We visited the Spanish classroom – every class gets 30 minutes a week of immersion Spanish instruction.  We saw the schools vibrant garden and beautiful library.  We didn’t see banners proclaiming the school’s API score or signs of corporate sponsorship.  Much to my happiness the school does not use the detestable Accelerated Reader program.  And although I couldn’t tell you exactly why, the entire school simply had a more relaxed feeling about it – somehow less competitive and pressured than the other schools we toured.  Really the only two cons at Willard were it’s location, 3.7 miles from our house, and it’s start time, 7:50 am.

We took the boys on the tour with us and Thomas was quite apprehensive at first; as we walked through the school Thomas relaxed bit by bit until at the end he was running about on his own.  And as we walked to the car Thomas smiled and said “Willard is my favorite.”