You Send Your Kids to That School?

Education and schools are always a sensitive and lively subject. I just had a conversation last night about this with a friend who’s going back and forth on what’s the most important thing when it comes to the education of their children with her ex-husband. 

They’re going back and forth on the idea of keeping their kids in a arts magnet school that’s in a lower income area that their kids love and are getting a more wholistic experience, or relocating to another part of the county in order to attend a more academically known school in a more resourced area of our community. Tough conversation. 

My wife and I definitely thought long and hard about what schools were in the neighborhood we chose to move into prior to even having kids yet. The elementary school that our daughter and soon to be twins will go to is a really poor performing school in a really low income area. Most of our peers would never consider sending their kids to that school and we get the feeling like they think we’re crazy. The fact that we even took time to think about that aspect and we got a choice, was a privilege many in our community will never get because of their socio-economic situation.

Now, we haven’t fully made the decision to send our kids there because we’ve got a few years, but we feel compelled to consider the factors and what our hesitations would be. The tension is, we know many teachers there and we believe in them, their ability and their passion for kids. We hear their cries for change in the system as it relates to how they’re allowed to teach and for kids from stable homes to join their classrooms because it makes a tremendous difference. We also hear their reports of the kids behaviors, language, and family backgrounds. We hear them say how big a difference a parent in the classroom a couple hours a week would make. We feel that if we were to choose a different school, we’d be compromising part of why we chose to move where we did in the first place. But, to put your kids in a school that you know will have an effect on them that may or may not be positive is a tough deal.

We’re privileged with choice, why not take it right? 

The tension lies in our contempt for the education system. We believe that poor performing kids in schools is exclusively an issue of the teachers and administration of that school. We ignore the relating factors that affect that schools performance, like the neighborhood in which it’s located. Yet, many families choose to flee the urban core of our cities taking all the resources and stability with them. Why would we expect lower performing schools to get better when the situations in which those kids come from don’t improve? 

Imagine if folks began catching the vision true community change at the grassroots level. Imagine if 15 young, resourced and stable families chose to move into the neighborhood of a poor performing school and committed to sending their kids to that school and offered the same investment of time they put into their current schools. I can imagine that and about a dozen other impacts that would make on that neighborhood. Homes would improve, crime would decrease, and whole host of other social issues facing the neighbors could be improved. 

We talk a lot in Fort Wayne about making our community better through a number of initiatives. I just attend an event last Friday called, My City Summit, hosted by Young Leaders of Northeast Indiana. They brought in a speaker who did nothing but talk about great ideas of what makes cities great, and most of them revolved around grassroots ideas in urban neighborhoods. I pray that the community comprise of YLNI will catch a vision for re-locating to the downtown neighborhoods in and around mine because I know what impact they’ll make on the community. 

Place matters if we believe our community can improve. We need people willing to sacrifice and blaze new trails to see the biggest changes. If you ever want to come and spend time with my family in our neighborhood, please let me know. We’d love to have you for dinner and introduce you to great families that are choosing to invest in an area often left to stereotypes.