The process of cutting another apron string.

It's that time. Kindergarten registration looms ever closer. Our kids could have gone to school this year but they have a later birthday and emotionally they are young five-year-olds so we decided to wait. Already I am so glad we waited, already I know it was the right thing to do. But we can put it off no longer. They will start school this coming September and choosing a school has been an exciting and scary ride all at the same time.

Someone recently described to me how they picture the transition from home to Kindergarten. Your child walks out a door of love and trust and safety and gets hit in the face with a bucket full of ice water. Welcome to the real world, SUCKA! When we started thinking about sending our innocent, trusting, sheltered little souls into the dog-eat-dog world of playground politics I have to admit I was severely tempted to homeschool. For about a day. And then after practicing letters for a few minutes with a boy who was trying to write with his arm hovering above the table I decided public school punks with bad attitudes and bad language are way less damaging than a mom yelling, "I said to rest your arm on the table! The table! THE TABLE! Look how shaky your lines are! You have to put your arm down on the table. The. Table. Arm. On table. The table. PUT YOUR ARM ON THE FRIGGIN' TABLE!"

We narrowed our choices down to the two schools closest to us since I don't want to have to drive 40 minutes round trip if someone forgets their snowpants. Up for consideration was a Catholic school and a Public school. Let me break them down for you before I tell you what we decided.

Tour #1. Catholic School which we will call St. A's.
Frankly the fact we were even considering Catholic school was a surprise to me as I had never imagined my kids going anywhere but public school and we are certainly not Catholic. But I had a good friend whose daughter had already spent two great years there and in those two years I heard enough about the ordinary day-to-day experiences to make me love St. A's. So we called and spoke to a very friendly secretary and set up an appointment to tour the school. The school itself is one long hallway of classrooms and reminded me strongly of the little elementary school I went to. Which, big points on the nostalgia factor. The Principal there is one of the most kind and caring individuals I have ever met. He knows every student's name in the school, interrupted every single class to introduce us to the teachers and introduce the kids to the students and halfway through the tour Sebastian, our two-year-old, was asking him for "up, up." The kids in the classes seemed bright and happy, St. A's literacy program is excellent, their playground is well supervised and the school motto is "Be Great In The Small Things". You had me at HELLO!

Compare and contrast if you will when I called the public school, which I will refer to as JH, to book a tour. Firstly I had to go through an automated system - press 1, press 2 etcetera. Then when I pressed zero for the receptionist the phone rang and rang and rang. It rang long enough that I started to prepare a message to leave on the machine. And then it continued to ring and I started to wonder if they even had an answering machine and if I should hang up or let it ring some more. I had just decided to hang up when, I am not even remotely exaggerating, Marge Simpson's sister picked up and barked/coughed, "HELLO." Startled I held the phone out to make sure I had called the right number and then tentatively introduced myself and explained why I was calling. Her response? (You need to read this like you've been smoking for 100 years to really get a feel for the conversation.) "YOU WANNA SEE THE SCHOOL? OKAY. SURE. COME IN. WELL MAYBE YOU NEED AN APPOINTMENT. I DON'T KNOW IF YOU NEED AN APPOINTMENT. YOU MIGHT NEED AN APPOINTMENT. I'D ASK THE PRINCIPAL BUT I CAN'T. SHE'S NOT HERE. NEITHER IS THE VICE PRINCIPAL. THEY'RE NOT HERE."

Understandably I was put off and in that moment had just solidified our decision to go with St. A's when she said, "MAYBE YOU COULD CALL BACK TOMORROW WHEN THE SECRETARY IS BACK IN." Sigh of relief. Marge's sister is not the secretary. When we did get to JH to go on our tour it was the secretary who gave it. This secretary, the Not-Marge's-Sister secretary, was honestly not much better than Marge's sister. When I asked her if she could tell us a bit about their literacy program and about some of their literacy strategies her response was, "We strongly believe in literacy." Well that's good. I was afraid for a moment we might have been considering the only school in the country that didn't believe in literacy. What a relief.

When we met the Principal the secretary didn't use either our names or the Principal's name so I didn't know the Principal's name until we read through the school handbook on the way home. Neither the secretary, the Principal or the Vice Principal asked our kid's their names and we didn't get to meet any of the Kindergarten teachers. However the Principal did grow on me as we talked and I found her much warmer than I originally thought she was going to be. And when we peeked into the music room the Grade 4's were playing African drums and not triangles or maracas which is what elementary school music consisted of for me. The classrooms are bright and each one has five or six computers, the playground is enormous and brand new and Kindergarten kids get Grade 4 reading buddies to help them feel comfortable around the older kids on the playground.

Walking out of JH I was much more torn than I thought I would be. I assumed that when we walked the halls of JH it would just confirm to us that St. A's was absolutely, positively the school for us. I'm not sure what I was expecting the public school to be like but my imagination had conjured up a Lord of the Flies type environment where chaos and mean girls in high heels and blue eyeshadow reined. My entire school education was at public school and besides a few miserable, lonely months when the queen bee of elementary school cast me out of her royal presence and declared me persona non grata, I liked school. So I'm not sure why I had come up with this mental picture except perhaps that everyone is always saying how kids are so much different these days, so much harder to handle, show so little respect. Shockingly, none of the kids who filed past us on their way to library were wearing eyeshadow, blue or otherwise. Amazingly, the windows we peeked through showed classes in perfect order. We didn't even get one black look or middle finger. Who knew public school was so....non-threatening? Walking out of JH I realized the kids would truly be fine in either school.

So what did we decide on in the end? It took us about a week and a couple of conversations with my mom to decide. When I talked to my mom about the differences in Principals and secretaries between the two schools she reminded me how little contact I had with either in my school experiences and that their individual teachers would be more important in forming Tristan and Ava's view of school. One of the Kindergarten teachers at JH also has a music degree and incorporates a lot of music into her lessons which I know my kids would really respond to. Plus class size at JH is more controlled. There is a maximum of 16 kids per class until Grade 3 and each class gets a teacher and an aide. When I bemoaned to my mom the kids not getting to experience the St. A's Principal she said she understood and reminded me of the dynamic and charismatic Principal I had in elementary school. Interestingly when I had been thinking of my elementary school Principal I had been drawing a complete blank. I couldn't even remember if the Principal had been a man or woman. Obviously not a big impact in my life, obviously not something to choose a school over. JH has another thing going for it. It's bigger than St. A's. This year there is three Kindergarten classes to St. A's one. A bigger school means all the good things like more options, more programs, more provincial funding etc. But it also means should some queen bee at some time oust Ava she won't have to sit alone on the playground wishing she had other options for friends.

Underlining all these considerations is the fact that we want our kids to go to the public highschool up in our area (should we still live here when that time comes). It's a really good school with a lot of sports and arts options and opportunities like overseas exchanges and school trips to New York. Bottom line, in this city you don't feed from Catholic elementary school to Public highschool. Personally I would not want to have to start over on the friend department in Grade 7. Kind of a tender age emotionally if you know what I mean. So with all that being said we chose, drum roll please.....JH, public school, and couldn't be happier with our decision. True to form Tristan is excited about gym class and getting to play on the playground everyday and Ava is excited about getting to eat lunch at school and having an after-school snack.

Initially Tristan and Ava didn't want to go to JH. They wanted to go to St. A's because they took to the Principal so strongly but when I told them he wouldn't be their teacher and the gym and playground at JH were way bigger they were sold. Isn't it great how easily convinced kids are? Oh my gosh. They're easily convinced. What if some kid convinces them they shouldn't like their parents? Or listen to their teachers? Or that all the cool kids smoke? What if they hate it? What if someone is mean to them?

Why did I think homeschooling wasn't a good idea again?