Attention parents of 4- and 5-year-olds in the Denver metro area. The most important decision of your children’s lives will be made this month.
Kindergarten registration deadlines for the autumn appear in the coming weeks. Ignore this at your peril. Schools will be one of the most significant influences in your family’s lives for years to come. They will be your new partners in raising your kids. With the exception of the military, no other organization gets both our money and our children.
While we as parents may be proud of the educational work we’ve done up to this point, none of it will be mentioned in the obituaries of our kids. If our children are ever brought before the Senate and asked to explain their qualifications to be a Supreme Court Justice, they will not say they were breast fed, played with Melissa & Doug wooden toys, and had minimal exposure to Baby Einstein or other “screen media” during their infant years.
Education is the last gap in society and it can’t be breached. We may regard others irrespective of their sex, religion or race. We know it’s blessed to be poor or rich. We can put up with the “two kinds of people in the world” no matter who they are.
We can’t, however, suffer the ignorant. This fact crept up on me when my wife asked what school our daughter will be attending. The taxpayers built us a public school nearby and it should be just fine. Right? That decision may have been that easy for our parents, but things apparently got more complicated since the mid-80’s, before standardized testing, charter schools, alternative schools, Montessori schools, etc.
I think other parents have made the same realization. While sitting in a charter school information meeting last month, I noticed we all thought we had the smartest kids in the class and would work hard to not let them fall through the cracks of the school. I know you have Kindergarten, but do you have advanced Kindergarten?
We were all there for the same reason, thinking the same thing. Is this school the right place? Who will best teach my child?
According to my father, it’s the Catholics. “The S.J.’s don’t mess around,” he said. He, a pupil of a primary Catholic education, has great stories of the Fathers and Sisters of northwest Ohio that taught him how to think. I used to have hang-ups about any kind of parochial education, but all of that has gone out the window. I have no problem putting my daughter in a uniform and a religious icon around her neck if it means she is going to learn long division. I even looked at schools where she couldn’t fake devotion, like the nearby Denver School of the Torah. I’ve been told her name sounds Jewish. Maybe we can swing it.
There are, of course, other robust private school options that all come with robust private school names and robust private school tuitions. The value of public versus private education may be ongoing, but I never realized how much that value, real or implied, was until I went to the “Tuition & Fees” sections of their Web sites. After that, I had my second realization. My daughter will be a public school kid. Like me.
What’s so wrong with that? Public education is one of the great experiments in a country of great experiments. I went to public institutions all the way through graduate school. We are a nation of mostly public school graduates.
The Denver Public School district is plagued, however, by the same reputation that hangs over every large urban school district. Scores are low. Funding is erratic. The graduation rate lags behind other school districts.
It is also governed by a board that needed a counseling session at a luxury hotel after its members started spitting venom at each other last year. This behavior I’m sure endeared themselves to their own nascent political careers but had absolutely nothing to do public education. Next time, please just see if Obama will buy you all a round of beers.
I’ve been looking for a lot of people to hold accountable to my children’s education. And why not? There are a lot of people who want to take credit and profit from the kind of thinkers they will become. But it all has driven me to my third and most important realization. The most important people in my child’s educational development will be me and my wife. It was my own mother who taught me the song I used (and still do to this day) to remember six times eight. It was my father who told me to do math with a pencil and guided me through Algebra. There was always a reckoning at report card time.
As it often is, the search for responsibility in our family comes full circle back to the house. Looking at my wife, and the better angels of my own nature, this makes me feel better.
I still do think, however, that my daughter would look fabulous in a red Kent Denver hoodie.
See you on the first day of school, wherever you are.
Ben Cape (ben.cape@gmail.com) is a technical writer living in Denver.
