Rustico – I am very sympathetic to jg’s point of view. I also live in La Jolla and am pretty uncomfortable with the public school system. La Jolla and Carmel Valley (two of the 3 places I have lived since coming here from NY 8 years ago) have the best schools in SD – but they are sorely lacking in comparison to east coast public schools and private schools.
Each child is different, each parent and home life is different and different things work for different people (apologize for using different so many times…). I have one child in private school (Junior High) and one who is in public (but both have been in both private and public). Schools are financed very differently out here than lets say in NY. I think that the NY system is horrifically unfair but it does create great public schools for the better towns. Carmel Valley and La Jolla schools are some of the best that SD has to offer and I am so underwhelmed.
The second child is pretty bored by public school and is amazed at the lack of civility. The kids curse, are mean to each other, etc. In the public school it is 100% different. The kids are held to the kind of standard that the last 3 pages of this blog envision as the gold standard. My son hadn’t heard a kid cursing the whole time he was in private school (and it is a non-religious school) but witnessed kids cursing at teachers here in LJ.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think the school is terrible. But to get him into private school in 7th grade I am going to get a tutor, keep having him excel at home (he has to write a report weekly on a weekly book to earn weekend video games), and otherwise be very involved from a parenting standpoint. He is a smart sensitive kid and I wish that the public school emulated the private schools – but they don’t. Even in the most expensive communities, they are trapped in a system which doesn’t reward excellence and must serve all levels of intelligence, mental problems, family issues, etc. all on a very tiny budget.
p.s. What makes NY so unfair is that a percentage of the property and business taxes are directly given to the school system. In poor areas with no businesses, they have a tiny fraction of the money that rich areas have. This works against societies long term interests… Here in LJ (and CV) the parents dig in and sell, create, fund, etc. but they have the money to add to the schools resources. In other parts of SD they don’t have the economics to support it so it’s pretty much the same around the US. Also you get what you pay for. In NY the taxes on the house we sold in the north county would be around 30K – here they were 20K and only because we bought so recently.
