At a friend’s gathering this past weekend, I shamelessly eavesdropped on a conversation between a silver haired woman and a young mother. A two year old climbed all over the mother’s pregnant lap, joyfully oblivious that she was pouncing on the sibling she hasn’t yet met. The two women discussed schools in Boston, and the silver haired woman cautiously warned the young mother: “If you become a BPS parent, you are signing on for years of being an advocate for your child’s education.” I drank in these honest words like a glass of lemonade on a summer day. I kept silent and listened.
The young mother has not yet experienced the painful heartbreak or guilty relief of the BPS K1 lottery. She hasn’t visited a dozen schools; a grand exercise in futility to feel like we have some control over a process that is dictated by luck and sometimes by ineffective bureaucracy. She hasn’t said goodbye to friends, moving away because they just couldn’t make it all work. But she also hasn’t experienced the immense gratitude from knowing that by some miracle, her child’s school reflexively nurtures her daughter’s needs. She hasn’t seen the safety net that can be cast by a group of educators, parents and a community, collaborating to ensure that all children are given an opportunity to succeed.
After the conversation ended between the young mother and the older woman, I talked to the mother myself. Six months ago, I would have sounded like an evangelical zealot for BPS, begging her to give it a chance. After what I’ve learned during this last school budget season, I listened to her concerns, shared our own experiences, but ended with a more measured bit of advice instead of my usual upbeat recommendation: “You have to do what you think is right.”
As the parent of a second grader and a child not yet in BPS, I know my role as an advocate has only just begin. The unknown still looms largely, and this thought simultaneously exhausts and energizes me. My own mother tailored our education for us by carefully selecting towns with good schools, scaling back our lifestyle dramatically to serve this goal. By the time I finished high school in Wellesley, we lived in a tiny, cock roach infested apartment above a restaurant. Below my bedroom window, the smell of the restaurant’s dumpster was a near constant reminder of the price we paid for my excellent public education. I think of all the times my own family has had to compete with School Committee meetings, streaming City Council hearings, or me working on the laptop late into the evening. I hope they look back on this figurative “dumpster” of their childhood more fondly, and I hope our efforts serve more families than just my own.
