They have the kid in private school and shes a teacher.
Well, I did that for a while, and it was a good choice for us at the time:
- We were already in the habit of paying day care, so it wasn't more money -- just a continuation of the same cost. That was more of a rationalization, but it was also true.
- When we started looking into school options, I liked that the Christian school where they started their educations taught old-fashioned phonics instead of sight-words, which were popular in public schools at that point. While I'm not a reading teacher, I do know that phonics trumps everything. From the very beginning, my kids trumped everyone else in reading, and I really do think it's partially because they had that phonics instruction.
But the biggest reasons had to do with time management and location:
- It meant we could put the oldest child in kindergarten AND the youngest in day care at the other end of the same building. One drop off for my husband in the morning, one pick up for me in the afternoon; significant time saved each day = more family time.
- We lived in one county, and I worked in another; thus, when our oldest started school, I would've been 30 minutes away from her. I didn't like the idea of her being so far away. By putting her into a private school nearer to my school, I was able to -- with advanced planning -- run over to see a mid-day play, or pop in on her class parties. And if she became sick, I could be at her school in ten minutes.
- It also meant that instead of dropping the kids off, then making the drive to work, my husband had 30 minutes with them in the car every morning. Lots of good chatting time. They had certain little games that they played in the car, things that were private just between the three of them. Later on, we largely skipped over the teenaged angst part of life, and both of us are very close with our kids -- I really do think it was the choices we made early on, the choice to interact with them in significant ways when they were young, that's made the difference. So many of my students don't seem to know their parents.
And we never felt hypocritical about it because:
- Since I teach high school, she couldn't have gone to school with me anyway. We always intended to put our kids in public high school, which offers a much wider variety of options than the private high schools in our area. They have, indeed, come to high school with me, which has turned out to be a good choice. They've each pursued different details through school, but they've both been successful.
