Two articles from the NYTimes
Dec. 16th, 2011 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
A Store Where Toys Must Be Kosher
It comes with pictures
A Store Where Toys Must Be Kosher
By JOSEPH BERGER
IN this toy store, Batman and Spider-Man are not heroes.
For one thing, said Barbara Shine, manager of Double Play Toys in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the characters encourage interest in television, and the Orthodox Jewish families who make up her clientele do not watch television. More important, those toys might also teach lessons Hasidic parents don’t want their children to learn.
Thomas the Tank Engine “is a kosher character,” she said, illustrating her store’s philosophy. “He’s not hitting and killing people. We don’t want kids to learn violence.”
Even if gift-giving is not central to Hasidic celebrations of Hanukkah, which begins Tuesday evening, toys are crucial year round. Families tend to have flocks of children, and mothers need ways to amuse them when the fathers are at synagogue or study hall and when the parents take their customary Sabbath naps. So Mrs. Shine, an effervescent mother of seven who is strictly Orthodox but does not follow any sect’s grand rabbi the way most Hasidim do, knows she has a ready market. And her business flourishes because she understands the neighborhood’s unwritten codes.
The store is not the kind of airy boutique that might be found in one of the city’s tonier neighborhoods. Its aisles are narrow and the shelves run floor to ceiling, crammed with all manner of toys and games so her customers — dark-suited men, and women in long skirts and wigs — can pick out what they need.
“You have something for an upsherin?” a bearded Hasidic customer asked on a recent Friday, inquiring about a gift appropriate for the celebration marking an Orthodox boy’s first haircut, usually on his third birthday.
Mrs. Shine steered him toward a tool set.
Little boys with coiling earlocks and girls in long sleeves do come in for toy figures like the Mitzvah Kinder or the magnetic building set Magna-Tiles, though school days that stretch to 5 p.m. limit their presence.
Hula-Hoop-like toys are a hot item, but Mrs. Shine keeps them tucked away because the packaging has pictures of scantily clad women. “We have a certain code of dress,” she explained. She said she had persuaded the manufacturer of the popular card game Perpetual Commotion to change the packaging because she considered the clothing immodest.
Double Play has been in business since 1994, when Mrs. Shine, now 42, founded it in her home to earn some income for her growing family. She is now on 14th Avenue. Mrs. Shine, who grew up in Minnesota — her mother went to a Zionist camp with Bob Dylan when he was still a Zimmerman — was not raised Orthodox, but she was deeply influenced by her Minneapolis yeshiva. She sold the store 11 years ago, but remained as the manager.
One customer, Alexander Rapaport, a father of six who is executive director of the Masbia Soup Kitchen Network, said the community had confidence in her judgment. “She is her own mashgiach,” he said, using the Yiddish word for a kosher inspector.
Mrs. Shine knows not to sell stuffed lions to a Lubavitch family because members of that movement do not want their children playing with animals not kosher to eat. She is very careful about stocking books because some themes may not sit well — like the “Chronicles of Narnia” series and its Christian symbolism.
On the other hand, she is not afraid to sell an Advent calendar that consists of intriguing small toys. Though the set literally counts down to Christmas, it does not trade in religious imagery or mention the holiday by name, only Advent. “And nobody in the neighborhood knows what Advent is,” she said.
The Pre-K Underground
It was 6 p.m. on a Friday in early June, and my children’s dinnertime coincided with the moment the New York City Department of Education posted acceptance letters online for 4-year-olds seeking prekindergarten spots in public school.
I was standing at our dinner table hunched over a laptop as my two children tugged at my T-shirt and swung from my legs trying to pry me away from the computer; they didn’t know that the older one’s early education hung in the balance.
The Web site was painfully slow, jammed with parents simultaneously logging on. After two snack cups worth of Cheerios and four recorded episodes of “Yo Gabba Gabba,” my heart sank. We had not gotten a spot at the school on our block — or at any of the six other schools that my husband and I had listed on our application.
Everyone knows that getting into private preschool in New York City can be absurdly cutthroat and wildly expensive, but getting into public pre-K is not any easier. For the current school year, there were 28,817 applicants for 19,834 slots in the city’s public pre-K programs. Those numbers do not tell the entire story. The school on our street had 432 applicants — for 36 seats. With 12 children fighting for each slot, lots of families shared our predicament.
For parents like us, options are limited. Private pre-K can run more than $30,000 a year at the fanciest schools. Depending on the neighborhood, spaces with community-based organizations — private preschools that partner with the state and accept state subsidies but handle their own applications — can be as elusive as public pre-K spots. If home schooling is daunting, and if not schooling feels wrong, the only other choice, it seems, is to join the many parents who have taken matters into their own hands and formed co-ops.
In a co-op pre-K, parents work together to create a school that matches their educational philosophy and worldview. They also run it, finance it, staff it, clean it and administer it — whatever is necessary to keep costs as low as possible. Often, schools operate from members’ homes. Some pupils are taught by parents; others by professional teachers. The downside to such an arrangement? It’s a lot of work. We had learned that a year ago, when we were priced out of private options for our son and banded together with some parents from the neighborhood to form a co-op.
Beyond the effort was the challenge of getting different families to work together. When matters as personal as education, values and children are at stake, intense emotions are sure to follow, whether the issue is snacks (organic or not?), paint (machine washable?) or what religious holidays, if any, to acknowledge. Oh, and in many cases, forming a co-op school is illegal, because getting the required permits and passing background checks can be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming that most co-ops simply don’t.
Our first co-op school nearly collapsed when families disagreed over how much power our teacher should have, and my husband and I had said we were done with co-ops. And yet, without a seat for my son in a public program, and feeling convinced that he needed the academic and social benefits of prekindergarten, I found myself once again e-mailing friends and surreptitiously recruiting families on the playground.
My introduction to the world of co-op education had come the previous summer at a neighborhood park, when another mom and I began chatting as our nearly-3-year-old sons zoomed their Matchbox cars around in a patch of dirt. When she asked what we were going to do about school, I told her that I had banked on one popular option, but the day I toured it the children were barely engaged in an art project, which left me unable to justify paying nearly $7,000 a year for two half-days of school a week.
She told me she was part of a group starting a co-op and that it would cost $30 a week — roughly $1,200 for the year. I could not think of a reason not to join.
She invited me to a picnic to meet the other interested families. On a sunny day, we sat on blankets as our children hunted for rocks and sticks under the shade of some trees. We got acquainted over intimate details such as where we gave birth — a number of the other women had delivered in their living rooms. I was embarrassed to admit that I had had a Caesarean section in a hospital while high on an epidural.
As different as I thought we were, we all said our children had basically never left our sides. We did not know how they would react to school, and we wanted their first experience to be in a place where they felt loved. Those women, smart, funny and warm, were exactly the type I wanted my son — and myself — around.
The dearth of high-quality preschool education for poor children has been widely reported, but there is a growing middle-class gap when it comes to prekindergarten. “Access is actually lower for middle-income people than it is for people that are poor,” said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, a research and advocacy group that supports universal prekindergarten. Those who say middle-class families should just pay for preschool themselves, Mr. Barnett said, “don’t understand how expensive it is.”
My husband and I, products of suburban public elementary schools, certainly were not prepared for the cost of early education in New York City. In our brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood, a full-time program at even the least expensive schools can cost $13,500, about what an out-of-state student pays for a year’s tuition at one of the City University of New York’s four-year colleges. And they go up from there.
An audit of the public pre-K system by the city comptroller’s office places the blame for the lack of seats squarely on the city’s Department of Education, saying that in 2010, it got enough money from the state — $29 million — to finance an additional 8,000 seats. When those funds went unspent, they had to be returned to the state. But the department said those funds would have paid for only 2.5 hours of teaching daily, making the programs impractical for working families. What city families need is full-day programs, according to the department, and the state money will not pay for those.
The lack of affordable pre-K means that middle-class children lag behind their more affluent counterparts when they get to kindergarten. More than one quarter of upper-middle-income children entering kindergarten do not know the alphabet, and almost 20 percent of middle-income children do not understand numerical sequence, according to national statistics from the advocacy group Pre-K Now, financed in part by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Research shows tremendous long-term benefits of schooling before kindergarten. Adults in Michigan who had attended pre-K had a 33 percent higher average income than their peers who had not, according to the 2005 update of a long-term study, The HighScope Perry Preschool Study, often cited by pre-K advocates. Despite these findings, only about 30 percent of 4-year-olds in this country are enrolled in prekindergarten.
In New York, advertisements for co-op schools pepper online parent groups once every month or two, especially in spring or early summer. But you will mostly hear about them quietly, on the playground or on play dates.
Sometimes the groups are low-key because the school is formed by a circle of friends and there is no need for other children to join. The other big reason is their questionable legality.
In New York City, child care outside the home is overseen by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The city requires a permit for any child-care setting where there are at least three children who are not each accompanied by a parent and who meet for more than five hours a week. Inside the home, the state’s Office of Children and Family Services oversees regulation for any group that meets for more than three hours a day. Getting a permit means red tape. Lots of it. There are background checks, required teaching certifications, written safety plans and site inspections.
“The health department’s primary concern with parent co-ops is that individuals responsible for providing care have not undergone criminal and child-abuse background checks,” said Chanel Caraway, a spokeswoman for the department, who added that it would shut down programs that lacked permits. “These programs rarely have made provisions for adequate care.”
Even if we could wade through the bureaucracy, we would never get a permit for our current co-op. Not all the children are immunized as the health department requires. We could not find a space to rent that had the required separate bathrooms for children and adults, or the two exits excluding fire escapes, for the children to get out to a sidewalk. We would have to hire an architect, file plans with the Department of Buildings and redo the space.
“There’s a fairly stringent code and byzantine process for getting certified and code-compliant,” said City Councilman Brad Lander, a Democrat from Brooklyn, whose office held a meeting over the summer for any co-ops interested in pooling their resources and securing permits. “Some are genuinely for the safety of kids, and some are more debatable.”
We began our first year full of optimism. We hired a teacher with a soft voice and warm smile who had studied at a respected teaching college and specialized in social-emotional development. Twice a week for three hours, the children sang songs, made sculpture with homemade play dough and, when they had trouble expressing themselves, used a box that had faces with different emotions pasted on each side to help articulate things like “I feel frustrated.” Each family took turns hosting the school in their home for five weeks — two in the fall, three in the spring. That involved rearranging furniture, preparing balanced snacks, assisting the teacher and cleaning up afterward, which took up 10 to 12 hours a week.
In the winter, two families moved away and were quickly replaced by two others. Our teacher thought one of our new children needed her own aide. We original six families talked among ourselves to figure out how to proceed but ended up going around in circles: Was an aide necessary? Were we saying that if the family did not get an aide, the child would have to leave? If we did hire an aide, would the one family pay for it or would we all shoulder the burden? Were we willing to authorize our teacher to make assessments like this one?
Then things got ugly. Our broad existential questions spawned a maelstrom of 53 e-mails over four days that laid bare personal, cultural and socioeconomic biases and that pitted us against one another. E-mails previously had sign-offs like “love to all”; now they had words like “breach of ethics” and “priorities.” Some members supported the structure we had set up, in which parents acted as administrators while the teacher oversaw day-to-day operations. Other members felt that our setup had gone astray and that a teacher requiring something of one family gave her more weight in the co-op than the family had.
Two families withdrew from the school over what boiled down to a difference in the way we defined the word “co-operative.”
“I think what happened is we all thought we were on the same page,” said Piper Harrell, whose family left the school over this issue and ultimately decided to home school their child. “What really rocked my soul was that I thought I knew people and I didn’t know people all of a sudden, and that made me really sad. To be in a community like that was messier than I think people were able to let it be.”
Spring was brutal. A new family joined, but pulling extra shifts to support the co-op in our homes was overwhelming. We did what we could to make it to June, but we ended our school year three weeks early.
Emotionally burned and mentally depleted, my husband and I vowed never to do it again.
But then my son turned 4, and it felt as if the Department of Education left us with no alternative. We and the few families left over from our last co-op regained our composure and started again. Our goal was to have a complete school year, so we tried to minimize the ways in which we could get shut down. Operating out of our homes was a logistical nightmare, so we sought a neutral space. We explored the possibility of going legit and determined that it was too labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive for four families to attempt. Even if several co-ops joined forces, we were unlikely to navigate the red tape by September.
Though it was difficult, we managed to find a small, sunny performance space that was not used during the day. We stayed off the radar, filling a number of our seats by word of mouth. We wrote a handbook to lay out our goals; it bans e-mail communication and encourages face-to-face dialogue. We adapted contracts from the Internet to help us set clear expectations for parents and the teacher. We demanded deposits. We were ready for school, and we crossed our fingers that we would make it to June.
A month and a half after we opened our doors, the public school on my block called to say that a family had moved to New Jersey. A seat was open for my son.
I imagined all the free time I would get back if he went, and all the stress I would avoid. But I also had to think of our co-op. Leaving would put a financial strain on the other families. Another family could throw off the dynamics, and the trust that was just in its nascent phase. Our school was meeting just three hours a day, after which my son took a midday nap. At the public school, sessions ran from 8:20 a.m. to 3:10 p.m. I worried that he would not be able to adjust.
We ultimately declined the spot, even though his attending the public pre-K would have more or less guaranteed him a seat in the kindergarten class — and the previous year the school had ended up with a kindergarten waiting list for the first time in 30 years.
The day after we declined the seat, I went to pick up my son from the co-op. On our way home, we passed the public school and I told my son, “One day, you might go to school here.” He responded by stopping in his tracks long enough to stomp his feet and emphatically yell, “No!”
He did not want to leave his friends, he told me, and he did not want to leave his teacher. I was thrilled by how positive he was about the experience and felt drunk on my first clear view of our school’s success. Then my mind flitted to a vision of a future co-op university running out of our living rooms. The moment we got home, I called our local school’s secretary and asked her when the first day of kindergarten registration would be.
It comes with pictures
A Store Where Toys Must Be Kosher
By JOSEPH BERGER
IN this toy store, Batman and Spider-Man are not heroes.
For one thing, said Barbara Shine, manager of Double Play Toys in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the characters encourage interest in television, and the Orthodox Jewish families who make up her clientele do not watch television. More important, those toys might also teach lessons Hasidic parents don’t want their children to learn.
Thomas the Tank Engine “is a kosher character,” she said, illustrating her store’s philosophy. “He’s not hitting and killing people. We don’t want kids to learn violence.”
Even if gift-giving is not central to Hasidic celebrations of Hanukkah, which begins Tuesday evening, toys are crucial year round. Families tend to have flocks of children, and mothers need ways to amuse them when the fathers are at synagogue or study hall and when the parents take their customary Sabbath naps. So Mrs. Shine, an effervescent mother of seven who is strictly Orthodox but does not follow any sect’s grand rabbi the way most Hasidim do, knows she has a ready market. And her business flourishes because she understands the neighborhood’s unwritten codes.
The store is not the kind of airy boutique that might be found in one of the city’s tonier neighborhoods. Its aisles are narrow and the shelves run floor to ceiling, crammed with all manner of toys and games so her customers — dark-suited men, and women in long skirts and wigs — can pick out what they need.
“You have something for an upsherin?” a bearded Hasidic customer asked on a recent Friday, inquiring about a gift appropriate for the celebration marking an Orthodox boy’s first haircut, usually on his third birthday.
Mrs. Shine steered him toward a tool set.
Little boys with coiling earlocks and girls in long sleeves do come in for toy figures like the Mitzvah Kinder or the magnetic building set Magna-Tiles, though school days that stretch to 5 p.m. limit their presence.
Hula-Hoop-like toys are a hot item, but Mrs. Shine keeps them tucked away because the packaging has pictures of scantily clad women. “We have a certain code of dress,” she explained. She said she had persuaded the manufacturer of the popular card game Perpetual Commotion to change the packaging because she considered the clothing immodest.
Double Play has been in business since 1994, when Mrs. Shine, now 42, founded it in her home to earn some income for her growing family. She is now on 14th Avenue. Mrs. Shine, who grew up in Minnesota — her mother went to a Zionist camp with Bob Dylan when he was still a Zimmerman — was not raised Orthodox, but she was deeply influenced by her Minneapolis yeshiva. She sold the store 11 years ago, but remained as the manager.
One customer, Alexander Rapaport, a father of six who is executive director of the Masbia Soup Kitchen Network, said the community had confidence in her judgment. “She is her own mashgiach,” he said, using the Yiddish word for a kosher inspector.
Mrs. Shine knows not to sell stuffed lions to a Lubavitch family because members of that movement do not want their children playing with animals not kosher to eat. She is very careful about stocking books because some themes may not sit well — like the “Chronicles of Narnia” series and its Christian symbolism.
On the other hand, she is not afraid to sell an Advent calendar that consists of intriguing small toys. Though the set literally counts down to Christmas, it does not trade in religious imagery or mention the holiday by name, only Advent. “And nobody in the neighborhood knows what Advent is,” she said.
The Pre-K Underground
It was 6 p.m. on a Friday in early June, and my children’s dinnertime coincided with the moment the New York City Department of Education posted acceptance letters online for 4-year-olds seeking prekindergarten spots in public school.
I was standing at our dinner table hunched over a laptop as my two children tugged at my T-shirt and swung from my legs trying to pry me away from the computer; they didn’t know that the older one’s early education hung in the balance.
The Web site was painfully slow, jammed with parents simultaneously logging on. After two snack cups worth of Cheerios and four recorded episodes of “Yo Gabba Gabba,” my heart sank. We had not gotten a spot at the school on our block — or at any of the six other schools that my husband and I had listed on our application.
Everyone knows that getting into private preschool in New York City can be absurdly cutthroat and wildly expensive, but getting into public pre-K is not any easier. For the current school year, there were 28,817 applicants for 19,834 slots in the city’s public pre-K programs. Those numbers do not tell the entire story. The school on our street had 432 applicants — for 36 seats. With 12 children fighting for each slot, lots of families shared our predicament.
For parents like us, options are limited. Private pre-K can run more than $30,000 a year at the fanciest schools. Depending on the neighborhood, spaces with community-based organizations — private preschools that partner with the state and accept state subsidies but handle their own applications — can be as elusive as public pre-K spots. If home schooling is daunting, and if not schooling feels wrong, the only other choice, it seems, is to join the many parents who have taken matters into their own hands and formed co-ops.
In a co-op pre-K, parents work together to create a school that matches their educational philosophy and worldview. They also run it, finance it, staff it, clean it and administer it — whatever is necessary to keep costs as low as possible. Often, schools operate from members’ homes. Some pupils are taught by parents; others by professional teachers. The downside to such an arrangement? It’s a lot of work. We had learned that a year ago, when we were priced out of private options for our son and banded together with some parents from the neighborhood to form a co-op.
Beyond the effort was the challenge of getting different families to work together. When matters as personal as education, values and children are at stake, intense emotions are sure to follow, whether the issue is snacks (organic or not?), paint (machine washable?) or what religious holidays, if any, to acknowledge. Oh, and in many cases, forming a co-op school is illegal, because getting the required permits and passing background checks can be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming that most co-ops simply don’t.
Our first co-op school nearly collapsed when families disagreed over how much power our teacher should have, and my husband and I had said we were done with co-ops. And yet, without a seat for my son in a public program, and feeling convinced that he needed the academic and social benefits of prekindergarten, I found myself once again e-mailing friends and surreptitiously recruiting families on the playground.
My introduction to the world of co-op education had come the previous summer at a neighborhood park, when another mom and I began chatting as our nearly-3-year-old sons zoomed their Matchbox cars around in a patch of dirt. When she asked what we were going to do about school, I told her that I had banked on one popular option, but the day I toured it the children were barely engaged in an art project, which left me unable to justify paying nearly $7,000 a year for two half-days of school a week.
She told me she was part of a group starting a co-op and that it would cost $30 a week — roughly $1,200 for the year. I could not think of a reason not to join.
She invited me to a picnic to meet the other interested families. On a sunny day, we sat on blankets as our children hunted for rocks and sticks under the shade of some trees. We got acquainted over intimate details such as where we gave birth — a number of the other women had delivered in their living rooms. I was embarrassed to admit that I had had a Caesarean section in a hospital while high on an epidural.
As different as I thought we were, we all said our children had basically never left our sides. We did not know how they would react to school, and we wanted their first experience to be in a place where they felt loved. Those women, smart, funny and warm, were exactly the type I wanted my son — and myself — around.
The dearth of high-quality preschool education for poor children has been widely reported, but there is a growing middle-class gap when it comes to prekindergarten. “Access is actually lower for middle-income people than it is for people that are poor,” said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, a research and advocacy group that supports universal prekindergarten. Those who say middle-class families should just pay for preschool themselves, Mr. Barnett said, “don’t understand how expensive it is.”
My husband and I, products of suburban public elementary schools, certainly were not prepared for the cost of early education in New York City. In our brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood, a full-time program at even the least expensive schools can cost $13,500, about what an out-of-state student pays for a year’s tuition at one of the City University of New York’s four-year colleges. And they go up from there.
An audit of the public pre-K system by the city comptroller’s office places the blame for the lack of seats squarely on the city’s Department of Education, saying that in 2010, it got enough money from the state — $29 million — to finance an additional 8,000 seats. When those funds went unspent, they had to be returned to the state. But the department said those funds would have paid for only 2.5 hours of teaching daily, making the programs impractical for working families. What city families need is full-day programs, according to the department, and the state money will not pay for those.
The lack of affordable pre-K means that middle-class children lag behind their more affluent counterparts when they get to kindergarten. More than one quarter of upper-middle-income children entering kindergarten do not know the alphabet, and almost 20 percent of middle-income children do not understand numerical sequence, according to national statistics from the advocacy group Pre-K Now, financed in part by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Research shows tremendous long-term benefits of schooling before kindergarten. Adults in Michigan who had attended pre-K had a 33 percent higher average income than their peers who had not, according to the 2005 update of a long-term study, The HighScope Perry Preschool Study, often cited by pre-K advocates. Despite these findings, only about 30 percent of 4-year-olds in this country are enrolled in prekindergarten.
In New York, advertisements for co-op schools pepper online parent groups once every month or two, especially in spring or early summer. But you will mostly hear about them quietly, on the playground or on play dates.
Sometimes the groups are low-key because the school is formed by a circle of friends and there is no need for other children to join. The other big reason is their questionable legality.
In New York City, child care outside the home is overseen by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The city requires a permit for any child-care setting where there are at least three children who are not each accompanied by a parent and who meet for more than five hours a week. Inside the home, the state’s Office of Children and Family Services oversees regulation for any group that meets for more than three hours a day. Getting a permit means red tape. Lots of it. There are background checks, required teaching certifications, written safety plans and site inspections.
“The health department’s primary concern with parent co-ops is that individuals responsible for providing care have not undergone criminal and child-abuse background checks,” said Chanel Caraway, a spokeswoman for the department, who added that it would shut down programs that lacked permits. “These programs rarely have made provisions for adequate care.”
Even if we could wade through the bureaucracy, we would never get a permit for our current co-op. Not all the children are immunized as the health department requires. We could not find a space to rent that had the required separate bathrooms for children and adults, or the two exits excluding fire escapes, for the children to get out to a sidewalk. We would have to hire an architect, file plans with the Department of Buildings and redo the space.
“There’s a fairly stringent code and byzantine process for getting certified and code-compliant,” said City Councilman Brad Lander, a Democrat from Brooklyn, whose office held a meeting over the summer for any co-ops interested in pooling their resources and securing permits. “Some are genuinely for the safety of kids, and some are more debatable.”
We began our first year full of optimism. We hired a teacher with a soft voice and warm smile who had studied at a respected teaching college and specialized in social-emotional development. Twice a week for three hours, the children sang songs, made sculpture with homemade play dough and, when they had trouble expressing themselves, used a box that had faces with different emotions pasted on each side to help articulate things like “I feel frustrated.” Each family took turns hosting the school in their home for five weeks — two in the fall, three in the spring. That involved rearranging furniture, preparing balanced snacks, assisting the teacher and cleaning up afterward, which took up 10 to 12 hours a week.
In the winter, two families moved away and were quickly replaced by two others. Our teacher thought one of our new children needed her own aide. We original six families talked among ourselves to figure out how to proceed but ended up going around in circles: Was an aide necessary? Were we saying that if the family did not get an aide, the child would have to leave? If we did hire an aide, would the one family pay for it or would we all shoulder the burden? Were we willing to authorize our teacher to make assessments like this one?
Then things got ugly. Our broad existential questions spawned a maelstrom of 53 e-mails over four days that laid bare personal, cultural and socioeconomic biases and that pitted us against one another. E-mails previously had sign-offs like “love to all”; now they had words like “breach of ethics” and “priorities.” Some members supported the structure we had set up, in which parents acted as administrators while the teacher oversaw day-to-day operations. Other members felt that our setup had gone astray and that a teacher requiring something of one family gave her more weight in the co-op than the family had.
Two families withdrew from the school over what boiled down to a difference in the way we defined the word “co-operative.”
“I think what happened is we all thought we were on the same page,” said Piper Harrell, whose family left the school over this issue and ultimately decided to home school their child. “What really rocked my soul was that I thought I knew people and I didn’t know people all of a sudden, and that made me really sad. To be in a community like that was messier than I think people were able to let it be.”
Spring was brutal. A new family joined, but pulling extra shifts to support the co-op in our homes was overwhelming. We did what we could to make it to June, but we ended our school year three weeks early.
Emotionally burned and mentally depleted, my husband and I vowed never to do it again.
But then my son turned 4, and it felt as if the Department of Education left us with no alternative. We and the few families left over from our last co-op regained our composure and started again. Our goal was to have a complete school year, so we tried to minimize the ways in which we could get shut down. Operating out of our homes was a logistical nightmare, so we sought a neutral space. We explored the possibility of going legit and determined that it was too labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive for four families to attempt. Even if several co-ops joined forces, we were unlikely to navigate the red tape by September.
Though it was difficult, we managed to find a small, sunny performance space that was not used during the day. We stayed off the radar, filling a number of our seats by word of mouth. We wrote a handbook to lay out our goals; it bans e-mail communication and encourages face-to-face dialogue. We adapted contracts from the Internet to help us set clear expectations for parents and the teacher. We demanded deposits. We were ready for school, and we crossed our fingers that we would make it to June.
A month and a half after we opened our doors, the public school on my block called to say that a family had moved to New Jersey. A seat was open for my son.
I imagined all the free time I would get back if he went, and all the stress I would avoid. But I also had to think of our co-op. Leaving would put a financial strain on the other families. Another family could throw off the dynamics, and the trust that was just in its nascent phase. Our school was meeting just three hours a day, after which my son took a midday nap. At the public school, sessions ran from 8:20 a.m. to 3:10 p.m. I worried that he would not be able to adjust.
We ultimately declined the spot, even though his attending the public pre-K would have more or less guaranteed him a seat in the kindergarten class — and the previous year the school had ended up with a kindergarten waiting list for the first time in 30 years.
The day after we declined the seat, I went to pick up my son from the co-op. On our way home, we passed the public school and I told my son, “One day, you might go to school here.” He responded by stopping in his tracks long enough to stomp his feet and emphatically yell, “No!”
He did not want to leave his friends, he told me, and he did not want to leave his teacher. I was thrilled by how positive he was about the experience and felt drunk on my first clear view of our school’s success. Then my mind flitted to a vision of a future co-op university running out of our living rooms. The moment we got home, I called our local school’s secretary and asked her when the first day of kindergarten registration would be.
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Um, wow.
Date: 2011-12-18 05:39 pm (UTC)If home schooling is daunting, and if not schooling feels wrong
*shrug* I wasn't "schooled"--my first educational experience was kindergarten. Remember that kindergarten was a controversial concept when it started? I could read and write when I entered it though, so I suspect that what my generation called "reading to your kids" and "playing with them", is now called "early homeschooling".
He responded by stopping in his tracks long enough to stomp his feet and emphatically yell, “No!”
He did not want to leave his friends, he told me, and he did not want to leave his teacher. I was thrilled by how positive he was about the experience and felt drunk on my first clear view of our school’s success.
Wow again. Yelling and stomping being viewed as positive, I mean.
Yeah, I'm sure
daycarepreschool is fun and all, but really.Re: Um, wow.
Date: 2011-12-18 06:19 pm (UTC)Which is why it bugs me so much that the city basically turned down that money because "it'd only cover half day pre-k". Well, that'd largely suck, but those people who WANT a half day pre-k would no longer be taking slots in the full day programs, and those who were just stuck with it would still be able to save 12.5 hours a week in childcare expenses. (Plus, a lot of pre-k in NYC is "UPK", which is public funds sending your kid to a privately run program. There aren't enough classrooms in the schools to make them all run by the city! Guaranteed that if those programs only got funding for half day pre-k they'd offer half-price if you wanted your kid to be in the 1/2 UPK but be in the center the rest of the day as well.)