our yard: spring heaven–
filtered crabapple flowers,
burgeoning aspen
red tulips bursting
while puppy and Daddy rest
for Sunday funday
crabapple city
beckons my perfect cycle
through pink and white parks
family
Backyard Camping
ready for summer
with their nightly hammock fest
childhood remains
Live
walk until you can’t
then pull a hundred grass roots
out of the flowers
buy new bicycle
for youngest daughter’s growth spurt
(get new tape for yours)
visit local art
at museum exhibit
amazement beckons
a Sunday funday
filled with every last life lived
in these bright moments
Spring Forward
words have been long gone
too many pics and lives lived
since when i last wrote
Snowpocalypse
a journey through snow
inspired Pi Day baking
with just a few prints
Choose Students, Not Charters
For most of my daughter’s sixth-grade year, I hated 2:00 p.m. Like clockwork, I’d receive a call and an email at 2 telling me that she had to stay after school for some form of detention, euphemistically labeled college prep, mandatory tutoring, or refocus.
My husband and I, both working parents with inflexible schedules, had to scramble to figure out something.
At 4:00, she’d have to sit in a room with all the other misguided students and compose essays about why she forgot her MLA heading on her paper, why her computer wasn’t 80% charged at the start of the school day, why her belt was brown and not black, why she DIDN’T HAVE AN ERASER ON HER PENCIL.
At 5:00, I’d have to fight rush hour traffic, carpool absent because of the delay, trek across town to extract her after a 9-hour school day and sit with her as she cried over ninety minutes of homework.
These are the hoops “involved” parents jump through to get “the best” charter school education.
Imagine these hoops for single parents, parents without this school near their neighborhood, or parents of special needs children who struggle with remembering things.
Imagine students of color being held after more than all the white kids combined as they groom them to obey the norms of white society.
You don’t have to imagine it because the majority of families at these charter schools have helicopter parents whose sole goal is COLLEGE. At any cost. Even the cost of shutting down neighborhood schools, stripping Black and Brown neighborhoods of their sense of community and teachers of a decent salary.
Imagine a typical public school, where we open our doors to every student, and we don’t make parents sign contracts where they agree to last-minute detentions because we work with students on second chances.
Imagine students of every demographic and race, every language, whose family circumstances prevent their parents from being as involved as the parents at these charter schools, finding a teacher who will give them an eraser, a teacher who will forgive their missteps, a teacher who will listen to their whole story and guide them to wherever their future might be, college or elsewhere.
Imagine if there was a regular public school in every neighborhood, some with magnet programs, some with choice-integration bussing, and all with teacher salaries with public pension retirement plans that hold them in the profession years longer than their Teach-for-America counterparts promise.
Imagine if our school board put their vote of confidence in those students who don’t have involved parents instead of putting money into the pockets of charter-bond-selling millionaires and charter CEO salaries.
Imagine if school choice was just one word different: student choice.
Choose students. Not the broken promise and the disruption to our day, our lives, and our public education.
March Mantra
skiing is breathing
fresh snow brings fresh life to life
winter is heaven
My Chauffeur
a milestone reached
after sixteen years a mom
she earns her license
Fresh Powder
ski like life needs it
soon the powder will be gone
and we’ll miss this choice
Give Us a Choice, and We’ll Take It from You
Give us a choice, and we’ll take it from you.
This could be the motto of the education reform movement that has gripped Colorado and the nation.
I know because I am part of the problem.
I fell for school choice when the idea was nearly unheard of. In 1991, miserable after two years at Merrill, I heard an announcement that changed my life.
There was going to be a new arts school opening with theatre, creative writing, visual arts, and music. To me, it sounded like a dream.
I spent two weeks preparing for my audition.
And, even though my family thought I was crazy, I took the bus every day that fall and for the next five years to attend Denver School of the Arts, located in the low-income Cole neighborhood.
What did I learn at my school of choice? I learned that it takes a village, led by amazing teachers, to put together a literary magazine. A theatre production. A music concert.
And that village could include kids whose experiences and faces and belief systems looked and sounded nothing like my own. And that art could provide a guttural release of emotion more meaningful to me than anything I’d experienced in education. And that the “low-income” village included the most tenacious, beautiful people I would come to love.
That is why, twelve years after graduating from Denver’s premier school of choice, I bought into the idea of charter schools. An 80/20 bilingual pre-IB program starting as young as kindergarten? Sign my daughters up!
My fifth grader getting bullied at the regular school? Let me put her in the super-structured, flawless-reputation charter network where culture is king. Let her sister follow her.
Let us white privileged parents with the ability to chauffeur our children choose their schools for them.
School choice is all about privilege. I have the privilege, as a highly-educated, middle-class white woman, to send my kids to a charter school. To sift through school ratings. To take over something that was intended to bring better schools into “bad” neighborhoods, and, upon seeing their successes, the privileged flocked to.
And the schools? They run the gamut of success stories piled on top of failures. They pay teachers so minimally that the majority leave the profession within five years. They are plagued with mismanagement of funds and classrooms. They are run by people who have no experience in an educational setting and by people who want “something better.”
But I’ll tell you what’s better.
Not having the choice. A regular public school in every neighborhood that meets the needs of every student. Teachers with decent salaries who love the diversity of where they work and paychecks that help them sustain their families.
And a district willing to see that the phrases education reform, charterization, and school choice are synonyms for privilege.
You gave us a choice. In turn, we privileged took that choice away from those who needed it most.
This needs to stop. Now.
Step Write Up 