Yesterday, when I went to pick Sasha up from day care, the school’s director, Ms. Zoe, cornered me in the hallway outside the classroom and said she wanted to talk. Maybe I should sit down.
Oh, fuck, I thought, who did Sasha bite?
No one, it turned out. Instead, Ms. Zoe told me, with Sasha’s 2nd birthday about six weeks away, we should get ready for her to move up a class—and, in fact, if we wanted to move her early, there would be a spot opening up next week.
Um, yes! I can’t begin to describe to you the waves of joy that seized me, and not only because we’ll now be spending $100 less per month to warehouse our daughter in Chinatown. See, Sasha is one of three kids of almost exactly the same age in her class—the others being her friends Paige and Caterina—but Sasha’s selection as the first to ascend to the 2-year-old class irrefutably demonstrates that she’s ahead of her peers. In other words, Sasha is better, smarter, and more able to follow directions. She fucking rocks. And now, at last, I understand New York parents a little better: From a distance, all that competition looks and feels weird, unseemly, but once your in the thick of it, you can’t help but hope your little precious will best her schoolmates. And when it happens—awesome! I’m thinking of buying a bumper sticker.
When it opened in 1998, the Shuang Wen Academy was heralded as a new kind of boutique public school, rooted in a mission of cross-cultural understanding. Small and open to children of any background, it was billed as the nation’s first dual-language English-Mandarin public school, teaching fluency in both languages. Twelve years later, the school, on the Lower East Side, which runs from prekindergarten to eighth grade and has an enrollment of 660, boasts outstanding scores on standardized tests but is in turmoil.
The school is the target of nine city investigations stemming from allegations that it compelled families to pay for after-school instruction, tampered with the city enrollment process, mismanaged its finances and manipulated surveys on parents’ satisfaction with the school. In addition, a series of anonymous, threatening letters directed at the principal and parent leaders prompted the parents association to budget $20,000 for legal assistance and stepped-up security…
Among the issues under investigation is whether an instructional after-school program at Shuang Wen may charge $1,000 per student, as it began doing this year. After-school programs run by private organizations may charge a fee if they are not providing necessary instruction, the city said. Shuang Wen’s after-school program is run by a nonprofit group, the Shuang Wen Academy Network, or SWAN, which was instrumental in founding the school.
I’m going to let the notion of a “boutique” public school go, and focus more on the idea of how this bi-lingual public school is structured. Apparently, Shuang Wen’s daily curriculum is almost entirely taught in English; the Mandarin-language education comes as part of an after-school program, which is technically voluntary, but strikes me as less so (what’s the point of going to a bi-lingual, English-Mandarin school if you’re not going to study Mandarin?). When the school first opened, the after-school language instruction was free, and as mentioned in the quote above, administered by a non-profit that was instrumental in founding the school in the first place.
Now, though, with the recession, and New York’s dire financial situation, state funding for the program has been cut, and the non-profit is requiring families to pay as much as $1000 to participate in the program, which, again, is only nominally voluntary. It should also be pointed out that the school is located on New York’s Lower East Side, a predominantly low-income neighborhood.
Let me repeat: $1000 fee for a public school. Granted, this is far cheaper than what a private school would charge for the same education, but still: this is a public school in a poor neighborhood that is charging students to deliver the bi-lingual education that is the basis for the school’s existence.
New Jersey!
Given the presence on the site this week of Todd–guest blogger, swell fellow, and Jersey resident–I feel compelled to ask a few simple questions of my fellow DadWagoners:
What the hell are we doing in New York?
Are we gluttons for punishment? Masochists? Opera lovers?
Shouldn’t we all just sell our meager holdings on the proper side of the Hudson, and skedaddle for the swamps, pine barrens, chemical dumps, and gangster graveyards of the Garden State?
The reasons to go are patently obvious: (relatively) affordable homes; adequate schools; and of course, the gas, the lovely, sweet petrol, is always full-serve, by law! What’s not to love?
For me, though, the answer is, no, we should not move to New Jersey, and largely because it would be a breach of contract if I did so. My divorce agreement stipulates where I can live (to prevent one parent from moving out of state, or the like, and thereby making it impossible for the other one to see JP), and New Jersey isn’t on the list of acceptable neighborhoods (then again, Queens isn’t either, but Manhattan is–you figure out that logic). But would I go if I could? I don’t really know. The idea of it doesn’t seem all that appealing–the traffic at the Holland Tunnel, the spray-on tans–but without it being a possibility, it’s hard to say what I’d do.
So, I will leave the residential existentialism to my colleagues. Boys, I put it to you: Meadowlands or bust?
All Is Quiet on All Saint’s Day. You wouldn’t have confused our Maplewood street for Greenwich Village on Sunday night, but the kids gave it their all. There wasn’t anything much scarier than the house down the block, decorated with a crossover SUV artfully arranged to look like it had crashed into a port-a-john and killing the skeleton within it. (No blood; plenty of dry ice.) Nora chose to ring in All Hallow’s Eve dressed as a bat, and no question she was a lot cuter than the actual dead bat I’d found on the floor of our basement a year earlier, reporting to Rachel: “Well, the good news is, it’s not a mouse.”
The evening began as stock-photo-perfect: dozens of kids and parents, nobody getting hurt, the sky darkening into an authentically spooky pink-streaked indigo. Nora wore her colors (well… black) proudly for her first Halloween of real significance, joining her next-door neighbors, Strawberry Shortcake and a bumblebee, and a girl from down the block, iCarly. I nodded and laughed at this one, feeling like President Obama on The View when he chuckled gamely at a Snooki joke before confessing, “…I actually don’t know who Snooki is.”
Nora got about two dozen houses into her candy basket before bedtime approached. Rachel and I made our routine observation borrowed from the Dyson vacuum marketing campaign—”She’s experiencing loss of suction”—but back home, Nora and I handed out a little candy, then read a couple of genuinely creepy library books in front of a nice fire—hey! a fire I built! Myself! Nora was asleep within five minutes of heading to bed.
That was just after 8, and then things took a scary turn. Halloween, as everyone with school-age kids knows, is closely followed by Election Day, which for many coincides with School Bake-Sale Day. Our co-op’s reasonable tuition is paired with this devilish pact, signed by parents every year at the crossroads at midnight. We’ll teach your children well. They’ll be happy and healthy. Just provide your signature, your check, and two homemade baked goods—one sweet, one savory—to sell to hungry voters. All well and good. Although it turned out the sweet and savory had to be at the school Monday afternoon, not Tuesday, as we had thought.
Rachel, as always, had done a masterful job with the prep-work, and that saved us from blowing our deadline. And Mark Bittman was a true sherpa, leading us through his unchallenging lasagna. We were chugging up K2 right alongside him until we hit our first snag. Now, I don’t know how long it takes you to make a béchamel sauce, but Bittman says it takes him less than 20 minutes, which is precisely how long it took for us to figure out we’d wrecked ours. And that might’ve been funny in the afternoon. But after 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, two rapidly aging parents found the matter taking on far greater import.
I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, but the two trays of lasagna were cooling their boots in the fridge no later than 1:30 a.m. Which gave us two full hours of sleep before Nora would awaken and call out for her parents, as she’s been doing every night lately. Yes, somehow, we’re back to that. And that’s how I finished my pagan celebrations this year, and observed the wee hours of All Saint’s Day.
