School Dilemma
It is open enrollment time for the Utah schools. In Utah, your are assigned a neighborhood school based on where you live, but your child does not have to go there. You can apply for your child to attend another school in the district provided you are willing to do drop off and pick up yourself.
Mui will be starting first grade in the fall and her friends from the neighborhood go to Oakridge Elementary, not Oakwood Elementary, our assigned school. Oakridge has an outstanding reputation and the highest test scores in the state. However, the only afterschool care that busses from that school costs the equivalent of a mortgage payment.
Mui’s current day care busses from Oakwood (our assigned school). However, Oakwood does not test as high as Oakridge and is located across the street from a youth center for troubled teens.
What is a parent to do? You want the best for your child, but it must be tempered with reality. We can’t afford another mortgage payment and I can’t leave work early everyday to pick her up. So we are compromising. She will be going to Cottonwood Elementary, a school that tests higher than Oakwood, but not as high as Oakridge, is in a residential area, AND she will be bussed by her current day care afterschool. Unfortunately, her little friends don’t go to Cottonwood, but she’ll make new ones.
Valorie Said,
February 11, 2010 @ 3:38 pm
We’re having the exact same dilemmas with our oldest, who starts kindergarten in the fall. Add to the open public districts here (like yours) the charter schools and the affordable private schools, and we have a big huge mess of far too many choices! Instead of choosing, I’m mulling, which means time is passing and I’m losing track of enrollment/lottery dates.
It’s hard. Knowing which choice is the right one is certainly challenging.
melanie gao Said,
February 11, 2010 @ 7:41 pm
That is a tough choice! For what it’s worth, I look around me and I see people who went to top schools and were always at the top of their class, and they’re not doing so great in the work world. Meanwhile I see some people who went to average schools and they say their grades were always ‘just okay’, and yet they’re doing very well at work. Not that ‘doing well at work’ is the one and only goal of education, it is one important output.
Kevin Said,
February 12, 2010 @ 10:32 am
Testing higher doesn’t necessarily mean the best school. There are some schools that “teach to the tests” and these can be less fun and creative. The students also don’t do any better later, and may even do worse, because they lack critical thinking required to determine HOW to apply learned knowledge to given situations.
Also, they need to come up with more distinctive names. It reminds me of two neighboring complexes called “Woodsprings” and “Springwood.” Lots of lost people wondering around in them both.