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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

learnin' revisited

So, when last we peeked in on Kindergarten Drama, I had initially thought Dylan would surely get in to any one of four great options, which would all be, obviously, great. Then we learned that one of the city ones, which was my fourth choice anyway, would likely be cutting all their arts. Even if she gets in there, which isn't guaranteed, we're now not sure about sending her there.

Next up, the small private school. Dylan got a spot there, and we love it, but we decided to put off accepting a place until we find out if she gets in to one of the other two (free) options. This evening was the information session for one of them, the charter school. It sounds like their funding, although public, is stable, and their presentation was even more impressive than I had expected. It is exactly what I want for Dylan. And, at the end of the HOUR AND A HALF we all sat there, they informed us that because of higher than expected sibling enrollment there will be SIX(!) spots for kindergarten next year in the lottery. There must be at least 100-150 applications. The lottery is on Monday, but I feel silly having even considered it an option.

The fourth option is the bilingual school. Dylan had the language screening they require last week. They took her away to do it, so I don't know what happened, but she said it went well. They are VERY vague about their process so I can't tell if the screening is pass/fail and if you pass you're entered into a lottery, or if it's more nuanced than that. I found a document online that I don't imagine they meant to be online saying that the decisions for that one are mailed the week of May 9th.

So I'm not sure how this happened, but it seems like we are down to one public school that we like with any real (where "real" may be ~40%) possibility of her getting in, and the private school, where she may or may not lose her spot if we wait too long. My failsafe is a year at the kindergarten at daycare, then applying again for the private school. Or moving.

This is all sort of discouraging, since we didn't leave town and we didn't move at least in part because we thought some of these schools would be great. I don't think we can do anything differently at this point, but it's hard that we won't know how it works out for over a month yet, maybe two. I know she'll do fine wherever she is, but I feel pretty invested in giving her a really engaging experience.

2 comments:

Gillianboudreau@hotmail.com said...

Oh good heavens! This sounds exhausting. It makes me think about how easy our parents had it as far as there just being pretty great public elementary schools around basically wherever one lived. I'm sure she will do great wherever she is though.

bleisenblog said...

Well, we did bring this on ourselves, to a certain extent. We had a couple different choices (moving to a different city or house) that would have had good neighborhood schools, but we really love some of these less traditional ones and wanted to try for them.