I’ll admit, it’s a little late for this post, for anyone with children approaching kindergarten age and looking for a school.
My purpose in sharing my experience in searching for the “perfect school” is that wherever you decide to send your kids to school is nobody’s business but your own. Whether you decide to send your kids to the not so ideal school, or if you decide to take a leap and go beyond what you originally envisioned in terms of the “ideal school” for your kids. With social media and everybody’s perfect lives being available for us to see, there’s an urge for us to “keep up” with what everyone else is doing.
Anyhow, I’m losing focus. Ha! But to give a little back story, we were renting a house in a not so great school district a little over a year ago. Not only were we ready to move because of the school district, but we were also growing out of the house. On top of that, and I don’t say this in a way to brag, but my daughter is bright. So my goal was to put her in a place where she would be challenged, but also enjoy being in school. I didn’t want her to think that things always come easy. In talking with professionals that know the public school system, we concluded that we had to move to a better school district or send her to a private school.
So we applied to 2 private schools in the late fall/early winter prior to when she was supposed to start Kindergarten. Our thinking was that we wanted to at least see what was being offered. We wanted to at least have private school as a consideration- because the only thing I knew about private schools was from other people’s perceptions about them, and not from my own experience.
I considered school districts in the following order because of district ranking and location.
The four that I considered were:
Lower Merion (1/2 day kindergarten)
Haverford (1/2 day kindergarten)
Radnor (full day kindergarten)
Abington (full day kindergarten)
Prior to making our final decision on where our daughter would go to school, we had the opportunity to move to a great school district, behind our closest friends. So we hopped on that opportunity, not knowing whether our daughter got accepted/whether we could afford the private schools that we applied to.
So we moved to a great school district and I thought we were set, right?!
Being that she is bright, we felt that having her go to kindergarten wasn’t the best for her. Well, the school district that we moved to didn’t want to even consider having her skip kindergarten because she didn’t meet the age cut off. I know my daughter and felt strongly that she would be bored in kindergarten, at least at public school. If I was going to send her to public school, I wanted her to skip kindergarten. I saw the curriculum and knew that they wouldn’t be able to tend to her needs if she was placed in kindergarten.
To make this very long story short, when the decision came whether we pay money to a private school vs. sending her to a great school in a great school district for free, we decided that it was best for her to send her to private school. The payment that we were making wasn’t that much more than what we were making for daycare/preschool, so we felt that it was worth at least trying it out. In addition, the school that we chose felt that she was a good fit for 1st grade. So our thinking was that, “Hey, if this school doesn’t work out for our family financially, then maybe we can have her go to public school and she’ll be in the grade that’s more appropriate for her.” We felt that it wasn’t a permanent decision and that we had to at least give it a try.
I say all this because I have spoken with parents who are surprised with our decision. And without knowing all the facts that brought us to our decision, it’s easy to judge someone’s choices. In the end, we felt that what we were doing was best for our daughter and that the adjustments we needed to make to our budget to make it work wasn’t such that we had to drastically change our lifestyle. We were able to make adjustments to other areas of our budget and still are. It isn’t an easy choice and there isn’t a perfect fit.
Lastly, I feel like a lot of parents completely close off the idea of private schools for various reasons. They immediately think: 1) I can’t afford it 2) I don’t want my kid growing up with “those” kind of people (i.e. rich, snobby people) 3) it isn’t for our family (because they grew up going to a certain type of school, so they think that’s the kind of school that their children should go to) 4) it isn’t diverse. I think a lot of people close off the idea of sending their kids to private school without even knowing anything about it. They just completely close off the idea because they assume these things without making an informed decision.
The moral of my story is that we’ve done what we think is best for our family and are very happy with our decision. Now, that can change obviously. Before kindergarten was even on the radar, I never thought that we would send our kids to private school. But things change and I tried my best to keep an open mind throughout the decision making process. We recognize our situation is different from others and are thankful to even be able to have a choice of a great public school vs. a great private school. Every family is faced with similar decisions at some point. My thinking has always been that we have to do our best to do what’s best for our family and not what appears to make our family “look good” in the eyes of people who at the end of the day, don’t really matter!