12— Sending Our Kids to School

Twelve

Sending Our Kids to School

When the courts ordered schools to desegregate in the 1970s, white parents (and some black parents as well) made decisions about whether to comply, or to resist by moving out of the school district or sending their children to private schools. One topic we talked about as we were thinking about how our school desegregation experiences influenced us was the role race played in decisions we made as parents about our own children’s schooling.

Cindy

My children both went to school in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School district from kindergarten through graduation from high school, except for a two-year break when my daughter was in fifth and sixth grades while we were living in Fairfax County in Virginia, and I was working in Washington, D.C. I went to college in Chapel Hill, and I always loved it there. I loved it as a small town and as a university town. My husband and I were living in Chapel Hill when my oldest, Emily, was born, having moved there after a year in Raleigh and almost two years in Flagstaff, Arizona, where I got a master’s degree. When my daughter was born, my husband was planning to go back to school in Chapel Hill to finish his degree and get a teaching certificate. We were great believers in the public school system—whatever that meant to us at the time—for socializing our kids.

We could have moved to Durham. Having grown up there, I was comfortable there; my parents were still living there, and it was cheaper. But we chose to live in Chapel Hill instead. We liked being close to the university, the city was smaller, and we had friends there. And we also knew that the school system there had better resources and a better reputation for academic achievement. We were willing to pay more in taxes and live in a smaller house. Eventually, John taught school there.

Chapel Hill’s school system was much whiter than Durham’s, which at that time was working through a merger of the city and county school systems. Not only were Chapel Hill schools whiter, but also there was a lot of wealth privilege among its students. We did worry about our children getting a skewed view of the world because of that affluence. Our kids had us as parents, though, so there was always discussion about what was going on related to racism and civil rights. We did not see school as the only means of socialization in regard to race. We felt that being in school in Chapel Hill versus Durham (or anywhere else) was not going to be detrimental to their beliefs in racial equity. They were still in classes with black children, and they had black teachers. Both had black friends at school with whom they socialized in and out of school. My daughter had a great elementary school experience, and so did my son. And they were close to home.

As a parent and someone interested in racial justice—and given my own school experience—I sometimes consider whether I should have made other choices. Would being in a less white, less wealthy school system have been better for my children? Given them a different outlook on the world? In the end, I believe the proof is in the way they grew up. They are both very conscious of racial justice issues. My daughter is active in anti-racist advocacy wherever she is—now in Ireland. My son is not an activist, but he steps up and speaks out when necessary.

When I was in high school, I was judgmental about the families that sent their kids to private schools, because I believed it was important that people try to make desegregation work. I did not know exactly how desegregation was going to change things, and my racial consciousness was not sophisticated, but I just thought if this was something important to do, why doesn’t everybody play by the same rules? But then as you become a parent, and you weigh decisions about the welfare of your children against the greater good, sometimes decisions are not so clear-cut. It is very easy to be inconsistent when it gets personal. It is a moral dilemma that I struggled with. I think it is important to be honest about that, even if doing so complicates my self-image.

During the time we have been writing this book, I became a grandmother, and I have been thinking about what kinds of decisions my son and daughter-in-law will make for my granddaughter’s education. I hope that my granddaughter will be living in a community where there is racial and class diversity and she can go to a nearby public school that reflects that diversity and where her parents feel comfortable with the quality of the education she will get.

LaHoma

I did not really think about school for my children until I had to make a decision about daycare. When we bought our house, we were both just starting new jobs. Although we knew that we wanted children, we did not have kids, and I did not even think about looking around at schools. We were so focused on the affordability of the house. I guess I just assumed that the school system would be good. The one thing that I regret about our decision to live where we eventually did is that it limited our public school choices. When our children came along and we started to explore the local school system, I was less than pleased with what I found. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what I was expecting, either.

My husband, Tim, had been a graduate student and then a stay-at-home dad when we first became parents, while I worked and we lived in Washington, D.C. When we returned to our house in North Carolina, and Tim found a job, we knew we needed to find care for our soon-to-be 3-year-old baby girl.

My parents, both retired by then, agreed to look after her until we found a more permanent arrangement, so I began the arduous and meticulous search for the best care we could afford. Of course it made sense to look in our small rural community even if we were not very familiar with it. My preference was to find a home arrangement with someone who had only one other child, so I asked around my family. Eventually, by word of mouth, I visited half a dozen home-care facilities in the area. None of them met our needs.

After a couple of weeks of these futile efforts, I knew I needed to expand my criteria, so I reached out to a local church that I passed every day on the way to work. I had noticed small children playing in the backyard of the church grounds, and because the church was so close to my house, I thought that this arrangement would be wonderfully convenient. One day, once I arrived at work, I looked up the number in the phone book and gave them a call. The lady who answered the phone was “delighted” that I called. She said of course they had openings, and they would love to show me the facility at my convenience. I told her that the daycare was close to my home and asked her if anyone would be there to show it to me on my way home that very evening. She assured me that they would still be around because they did not close until 6 p.m. She would be waiting to give me a tour and answer all my questions.

I hung up the phone relieved that she had been so accommodating and that it looked as if I had finally found a place for our daughter. I left work a few minutes early and drove the 40-minute commute from work to the church daycare. I walked up to the door and rang the bell. A middle-age white woman opened the door, gave me the once over and asked, “Yes, may I help you?” with a rather icy tone. “Yes, hello,” I replied, alarm bells softly tinkling in my head, but not wanting to overreact.

I continued, “I am the lady who called earlier today to ask if there were any openings. I spoke with someone who said that I could stop by this evening to get more information and go on a tour of the facility.”

The woman did not move from the doorway. “Well, I don’t know who you talked to, but we don’t have any openings here.” She offered nothing further. I could not believe what she was saying.

“Are you sure?” I replied, my voice shaking. “The lady with whom I spoke sounded as though you had lots of openings, and that is why she invited me to stop by today.”

“No, sorry, she must have made a mistake.”

By this time, I realized what I was dealing with, but I wanted to see the performance through to its logical conclusion.

“Well, may I at least see the facility in case an opening becomes available? We could keep checking back to see when you have space.” The lady in the doorway was not budging from her stance.

“Well, I wouldn’t waste my time because we are full, and we will not have space anytime soon.”

“Well, that’s OK,” I said, “I don’t mind waiting, and I expect that we’ll have other children, so I would like to see the facilities anyway.”

I smiled sweetly at her obstinacy. I knew there was nothing about my exterior or mannerism to which she could object. I was professionally dressed, and I spoke with all the eloquence and confidence of a person with two higher education degrees. I had told her that we were homeowners in the area, and she could see that I was driving a late model vehicle. But yet, there she stood, refusing to engage with me any further.

A few seconds passed. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, exhaled in frustration with my persistence, but could not think quickly enough to come up with another excuse. So she stood to the side.

“Well, this is it,” she said as she waved her arm in one huge circle around the entirety of the room while she kept her eyes focused on me to make sure I did not cross the threshold. I made a point of looking slowly around the interior of the brightly lit and well-resourced room, and then I took one step back and prepared to leave.

“Well, thank you for showing it to me,” I commented after the 10-second tour, “but I do have one question,” and looked beyond her glassy stare to hit my target.

“Do you have any black children who attend this daycare?

Check and mate. I waited for her reply.

“Well, um… we don’t, umm, I don’t...ummm.”

“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t think that this is the right place for my child. Thank you for your time.” I retreated to my car. I replayed the scene over and over in my head as I drove the three minutes to my house. Then I sat in the driveway and sobbed.

After that experience, I felt the need to shield my children from this kind of small-town bigotry. And though the private schools my children attended while they were growing up were primarily white, they had an articulated goal of diversity, and they welcomed my children.

After this horrible experience with the local church daycare, I found a beautiful Montessori school that I absolutely loved. I do not even know how the idea of putting my daughter in Montessori school came to me; I think I had been reading about it. As with anything else when I have to figure something out, I started doing research and somehow, maybe through friends, I found out about this school. When I went to talk to the staff, I fell in love with the whole concept, the whole idea of it.

But it was not my intention to send my kids to private school all of their lives, because I was always a public school girl. Right? And Tim pretty much left that decision to me because I had the stronger opinion about it. After kindergarten in Montessori school, I had to think about elementary school. There is an elementary school maybe a half-mile from my house. I pass it every day on my way to work. That is how convenient and close it is. I went to look at it and made an appointment to talk to the teachers and to the principal, and here is what turned me off. In the Montessori schools, my daughter Rozalia was doing very well. She was hitting all her markers, and the Montessori people encouraged independence and self-reliance. Rather than lining all the children up to go to the bathroom one after the other, they allowed the children to go whenever the need arose. That was part of that being “in tune” with one’s self. And my daughter is like that; she is in tune with her own feelings.

After I made an appointment to visit the nearby elementary school, the teacher was taking me through the ropes. She proudly explained to me that “by the end of the first grade, they will know their numbers one through 10, and they will know the alphabet.” For me, that was a very low bar. So I asked, “What if a child comes to first grade and they can do all those things already?” She replied, “Well, we make sure everybody is at the same level by the end of the first year of school.”

I know I stayed another 30 minutes, but I did not hear anything else she said. I knew that my child was not going to that school. So that was it. I had fallen in love with the Montessori methodology, and they had a program through sixth grade. So we kept our kids in Montessori school through sixth grade, and in private schools through high school.

To be clear, the choice of where to send our children to school was never about race—it was about my perception of the quality of my children’s education. Most of the local public schools were white. So my decisions were definitely based on what I thought were matters of quality, equality, and fairness. I wanted to be clear that the stated mission of the schools would allow my children to thrive academically and not just survive.

The price of our concern for the quality of our children’s education, though, meant that the “starter” home that my husband and I moved into—well, we’re still in it 26 years later. So while a lot of my friends were able to move into what I consider nicer homes in more upscale neighborhoods, my husband and I are still in the same place, a three-bedroom brick ranch. We made the decision to invest tens of thousands of dollars into private school education, and because of that decision, we were not able to move into the type of house I would have loved to have later in my career.

Both my children are smart and have been academically successful throughout school, including college, but so are lots of children who attended the local public schools. The high school dropout rate for black teens in our state remains too high, and the lack of access to gifted programs for black children remains too limited. So were we smart to live where we do and send them to private school, or should I have moved to another school district to send them to public schools? I try not to dwell too much on that question.

I must admit that I did think about the lack of racial diversity in the schools the children attended. I remember meeting with one of the teachers in Rozalia’s preschool classroom. They were telling us all about the school. There was nothing I did not like about what they were saying, and I felt that it was a very natural decision to put her there. It felt like the kind of place that I would have liked to go to school. So the last question I remember asking was, “What is the diversity like in the school? I do not see many kids of color here, you know, black kids, here.” And she said—this was such a perfect response in my mind—she said, “Well, yes, you are right. That is one of the things we want to work on, getting more black kids in the school and Hispanic kids, but you have to remember, LaHoma, that creating a diverse environment for your child goes beyond the school grounds, so we like to emphasize with the parents that it is important who they go to school with, but it is also important who they socialize with after school and who they go to church with on Sunday and who their parents are friends with.” That was the perfect response for a person like me. She got me. There is only so much the school can do. If I send my kids to school in this environment, and for the other 18 hours of their day they live in a very different way, then that is not as effective as if there is consistency across all parts of their lives. That teacher’s response and my beliefs tie into what Cindy said earlier: that she did not use the school system as the sole socialization mechanism, as the only organizing framework for how she raised her kids.

The degree to which we had our kids involved with afterschool activities, who their friends were, who our friends were—all that is also where I put a lot of time and energy in with my children. I wanted to make sure that they were getting a very well integrated community. So that is why I went to two churches on Sunday. My family is black; Tim’s family is white. Our kids are just comfortable wherever. And in addition to all that, they were in an academic environment where they were thriving. I also put a lot of legwork into Girl Scouts and sports clubs and all those things where racial lines were more blurred, where there was a greater diversity of kids.

I am proud of what I see and hear from my children on racial issues. They have friends, and they date whomever they please, based on personality preferences, not race. My daughter developed this strong sense of identity at an early age. I will never forget the day she overheard her black camp counselors teasing each other about liking a white boy at school—emphasis on the fact that he was white. The camp coordinator later shared with me that Rozalia had asked the girls, “What’s wrong with dating a white guy? My daddy is white.” Embarrassed, the girls had no reply for her. She has continued to challenge prejudice and ignorance through high school and college, and it will be interesting to watch how she manages as she begins her professional work life. My son, who never understood my desire to discuss race at all because it never seemed like a big deal to him, has more recently tried to draw me into such conversations. He, along with the rest of the country, has witnessed via social media the tragic death of Trayvon Martin and other young black men his age. Now that he is close to college graduation, he seems to be paying closer attention to these issues, like it or not, as he makes his own way through school and beyond.

Our time together working on this book project has revealed where I have placed my time, energy, and resources: making sure that my children saw their place in a world that was welcoming to all, boldly embracing, and beautifully diverse. I look forward to continuing this same work with the generation to come.