moscone, flynn, buena vista,bll bll bll

ahh, a saturday without much tantrumming and opposition. it has been really rough lately, with maya sick and miles regressing and worrying about getting older and not knowing how to deal with his feelings. i remember my own angst about getting older and becoming a grownup. miles wants to be a kid forever and i don't blame him.

but today was good, with enzo the musician and 2 park visits and feeling like i really have a community. let me tally up the acquaintances to feel less lonely...at enzo we are greeted by little phoebe from miles' school who is all over us like a really cute little ponytailed puppy dog. and on the sidewalk is our poor neighbor who is supervising her daughter's rather intense freakout by chloe's closet. we stop at the cortland street park and end up spending 2 hours there. there is jake and family, all connected to the creative arts charter school. jake can whistle now. i meet a woman who is studying to be a slp at state and we discuss kindergartens, what a surprise. miles becomes close enough with a little boy that they are affectionately calling each other poopy head before we leave. then later we go to parque unidos. walking there we bump into an artist and mom friend, kelly, with her daughter mika. then we see the mother of the tantrumming girl again--i am envious as the dad has taken the daughter away camping and she has the whole house 2 herself for 2 days. at the park there is our downstairs' neighbors italian friend and her cute little dog stella. and a friend from our music together class. miles makes another buddy, mateo, who just wants to get his hands on our football, really. he is about 8 and damn good.

so, these are the people in our neighborhood.


3 more school tours this week. i'm getting real tired of school tours. i guess some people do 15 or more, yikes!!

moscone. this is a very academically rigorous school walking distance from us. they have a chinese bilingual, spanish bilingual, and english language development k,1, and 2, and then in 3rd and up they combine strands. the school has very high test scores and the highest (by far, i think) for latino kids, which i like. not that i care that much about test scores for miles, but that they are closing the creepy achievement gap for the latino kids. the building is new and clean, with a big open courtyard and plants and trees here and there. the teacher turnover is extremely low. the kindergarten teacher i heard was not so great is leaving. when we arrived the kinder english class and the 1st grade spanish bilingual class were having their dance/movement class together in a huge auditorium and seemed to be having a lot of fun. the principal led all 7 of us around on the tour and seemed to know most of the kids and got big smiles from them. they have an art teacher. the mood and feel are hard to explain. very calm and mellow and focused. no raised voices but i didn't sense a huge amount of excitement from the kids either. they did seem engaged and happy. the principal said they work the kids hard but then reward them.

at the end of the tour this wacky (white) guy said "i don't want to sound racist, but is this white flight or what? where are all the white kids?" extremely tactless in front of the spanish speaking people on the tour, but good question. there were a very few caucasian faces at moscone...SO. if there were more people who looked like me at this school would i be more inclined to send miles there? probably yes. i am not writing off this school but i realized this is important for me. miles would probably be fine as the minority in his class. but i think part of this whole school search is that i want a school we can all feel involved with, as a community. it is sad but true that i have lived here for 12 years and have not become friends with any of our latino neighbors. friendly maybe, but not friends.

this would challenge us more than miles, probably, to become part of a community in which we were a definite minority. it is something to think about. oh, so much to think about!

we then saw 2, count em 2, schools with spanish immersion.

buena vista is the school two blocks away in which we vote and i always thought miles would go there, not knowing it was a hard to get into school with only spanish immersion and no attendance area. the tour group was big and unlike every other big tour, there was only one parent leader, which led to total confusion, we were basically a big loud herd wandering the narrow halls peeking in at classes and rapidly confiding our kindergarten thoughts to total strangers. there is a friendly, homey, artsy, slightly cramped feeling. there are lots of bits and pieces of arts, sports, music programs, but not quite enough money and space for things to go smoothly. there is a good before and after care program. it is 2 blocks away. it starts at 9:30. low test scores. my friend has done some computer related work there and says the teachers all seem good at keeping kids engaged and behaved. did i mention 2 blocks away and 9:30 start time?

do we want spanish immersion?

the next day i had to stay home from work because maya still had a fever and in order to speed her recovery i dragged her along on a tour of leonard flynn. this one is about 8 blocks away, on ceasar chavez and harrison. as this is another "school on the rise" a bunch of eager well-dressed parents were lined up to escort us around, using lots of adjectives like phenomenal, fantastic, wonderful, to describe the school and the teachers. it's a big building with extra space. bulletproof windows, there's a plus! the 2 k classes we peeked in on had kids sitting on the rug learning something in spanish, and all seemed pretty engaged, though for all i knew the little english speakers may have been daydreaming about recess. some art, some music. lots of pta and events to try and get things moving in the right direction. some of this "school on the rise" stuff seems a little wierd, as it really seems to mean there are more middle-class parents joining up, with energy and money and ideas. the school is in candidacy to become part of the ibo.org pyp program, which was somewhat cryptic to me, but is some kind of inquiry based learning program. the principal was nice and positive, but had some trouble answering the (surprisingly aggressive) questions of the crowd. flynn is ok. one thing i didn't think was so great was that the other half of each grade is not spanish immersion, and from what i saw was almost all african-american kids, which made the whole scene look pretty segregated.

so, we are slowly, slowly coming to some conclusions and realizations. one is that the schools we are most interested in may be ones many folks are interested in so we better put a few less popular choices on our application. i think these choices may be harvey milk, marshall, and mckinley, SO guess we better check them out too. NOOOOOOOOO. also realizing that proximity would be nice--this makes me want to do spanish immersion a little more. well, it makes me want buena vista a little more. greener too, right?? and also realizing that rooftop would be a pretty dumb gamble, and that we will have to sort all these schools and priorities out before we start listing them on an application.

this kindergarten stuff must be boring as h e double toothpick (to quote emily cronan) to those of you not in this wierd world, but it is helping my obsessive brain to get things written down.

miss you and will take a break from this kinder stuff for a while now.

carinos
jamie