Dylan Stafford

Our son will turn five years old this April. That means we begin kindergarten this September.

I say “we begin” because in 2012, in Los Angeles on the west side, picking a kindergarten might was well be a family-based reality show.

In 1974, in Denison, Texas, there was only one kindergarten. My mom signed me up. I went. My first-day-of-school photo was taken in front of a chain-link fence with me styling with my chili-bowl, tow-headed haircut and soul-train-inspired, checkered pants. Go Mom with the fashion throw-down!

The only kindergarten variable was which teacher you got. There were two. My teacher was Mrs. Steward.

I have our kindergarten class photo too. That photo has friends in it I still talk to today. Travis was be the best man at my wedding and Roger would sing the Ave Maria. Priscilla is in the kindergarten photo and in two weekends I fly home to Denison to attend her wedding. She is re-marrying another friend of mine, Scott, who sent me the very first positive “review” of my book Daddy Muscles.

Denison had 20,000 people. Los Angeles has 4 million.

And just when I thought I was getting the hang of living here, along comes a new chance to feel like a novice all over again–choosing a kindergarten.

The trouble started last fall at a parent brown-bag luncheon hosted by parents at the UCLA pre-school Jack attends. These were parents whose children had already “graduated” pre-school and “matriculated” successfully on to kindergarten.

They talked about the importance of the decision and the choices of public and private and charter.

One person shared about driving over the hill each day, from the west side to the valley, to have her child in a good school. An hour of traffic, each morning and each afternoon. I sat in my seat and cringed.

There was a tone in the air–a sense of the overwhelming importance of this decision. I had the vision in my head of life-as-dominos.

Push the right kindergarten-domino and then elementary and high-school and college and a good job and marriage and babies and it all works out.

Push the wrong kindergarten-domino and Johnny-won’t-sit-still-in-class and video-games and hooky and teenage-pregnancy and high-school-dropout and drug-addiction and Las-Vegas-streetcorners and it’s all-your-fault-bad-parent.

I thought the tenor of the panel was too significant. Were the public school choices in Los Angeles really so horrible? Have I been living under a rock? Am I so naive and out-of-touch that I need to be as serious as these panelists? Is Jackson already doomed because his daddy is a small-town-Texas boy who isn’t qualified to make real decisions in Los Angeles?

I raised my hand and asked a question with a statement at the beginning.

“I appreciate you all organizing this panel today. Thank you for that. I’m new to this conversation of choosing a kindergarten and there’s obviously a lot to learn. My job here at UCLA is to be admissions director in one of the MBA programs. I just have to compete with the University of Chicago and Berkeley. Nothing nearly as competitive as finding a seat in kindergarten on the west side of Los Angeles…”

The audience laughed with me.

The panel… crickets.

I finished my sermonette with my question, “…So one of the things I always try to do when recruiting MBA students is to dial-down the pressure, to let them know that whatever they choose is going to work out. Can’t you say in retrospect that after all the hard work of choosing your kindergarten, to us the nervous parents following your footsteps, that it all will work out?”

Maybe it’s just that my question was too long. Probably just that.

But at that moment I felt like an idiot.  And not just an idiot, but the world’s worst parent too.

The panelists all stared at me inertly, like scientists passively looking at a bug.

I’d thrown them a softball. I’d given them a chance to dial down the tension that I thought was in the room. But maybe there was no tension from their point of view. Or even worse, maybe there was tension because this really was a big deal. This really was the most-important-domino and their job on the planet was to educate knuckle-heads like me to keep us from screwing up our children forever.

After the event I talked with some of the other parents and got a few, “Thanks for saying that” comments. The comments re-assured me but the panelists tone hung with me afterwards.

Was I really missing something here? Obviously there were more choices in LA than in Denison and we needed to get going to make a good choice for Jackson.

There was a journey ahead. The first stop was a kindergarten fair of all the 42 Los Angeles private schools. There was a flyer and I scheduled the date into my calendar. Marisa would be out-of-town on business the evening of the fair. I would have to go solo, all by my little-town, Texas-boy self…