Dylan Stafford

We went to another kindergarten open house last night. We’ve been to six.

We have six applications, six health and immunization forms, six preparatory interview evaluations. I have labeled manilla file folders for each school, with all the pastel-colored handouts sorted.

Ultimately, Jackson is going to get admitted, and also not get admitted, to some combination of these places and we’ll have to decide what we think is best from the choices remaining.

I’ve been a UCLA admission director the past nine years in the business school and I’m wondering if my kindergarten experience is karma, some cosmic payback. At least we got rid of pastel-colored handouts a few years back when we put our UCLA application online.

What I’m seeing is that kindergarten shopping is not about comparing apples to apples. These schools emphasize different things, and they do so boldly and unapologetically.

The six school are three public schools, two Catholic schools and one public charter. Two schools are dual-language programs, Spanish-English, while one is German-English, and all talk about the extra challenge dual-language is for children. The Catholic schools melt my heart by unreservedly talking about developing character, and the secular, public schools still speak about whole-child development, even while they must use more coded language of diversity and respect and cross-cultural awareness.

Last fall, as we entered the pre-kindergarten, first-time-parent, big-city-Los Angeles, decision year, my uninformed stereotype was that hell-hath-come-to-education.

At my son’s UCLA daycare, from the first kindergarten panel of parents speaking about kindergarten, I left feeling that I’d been living under a rock, was hopelessly naive, and had already doomed my son to obscurity by my ignorance of the sad state of affairs in Los Angeles. I left that session feeling socio-economically lost, that because I can’t afford $25,000/year kindergarten, all was doomed.

Now, four months into the pre-kindergarten orientation, I’m seeing the opposite. Instead of disaster, what we have here in Los Angeles is an embarrassment of riches. While these six schools all offer different emphases, there were some striking, overwhelmingly positive, similarities:

• Parent involvement
• Leadership
• Big hearts and a fighter’s spirit
• Cookies

Every school had volunteer-armies of current parents, at the welcome tables, mingling, organizing the evenings. Each school has fund-raising/booster-groups of parents actively making the schools better places by providing the means for teacher’s aides, after-school enrichment and a myriad of other ancillary services. Yes, these services were probably paid for by the state in year’s past, so these are reactionary, but their spirit was always can-do-because-we-should-do.

Every school’s information evening was kicked off by a principal, the leader of each tribe, and the Catholic school’s evening was opened by our own monsignor, the head of our parish. There was no dearth of top-down leadership represented. Every one of these six schools is a thriving village, which led to next observation.

Big hearts and a fighter’s spirit were on display in each of the six. Obviously, teaching and school administration attracts people who want to make the world a better place, the big hearts.

But also, in our times of political-screaming and non-listening, these schools’ principals and teachers across the board were warriors for what is possible for children. There were no wimps. There were no whiners.

From one school, budget cuts from Governor Brown eliminating Transitional-K? Well, we’re still going to offer it, even though we’re not sure how, because we can’t just leave these kids in limbo for a year.

From another school, the private-Catholic school, “Every detail counts. We’re raising little ladies and gentlemen here. We wear uniforms and we think it is for the best.”

From the language schools: Your kid may have a strong will. He may not want to learn a dual-language. It’s hard. But we tell our kids it’s like the car seat, non-negotiable, and for their own good.

These were just three examples of this warrior-spirit, warrior in the noble sense that there are things worth fighting for, like our children’s futures.

What struck me was the can-do attitudes across all the schools. The whining and blaming that so sickens me in our politics right now was absent.

Politics reminds me of boys-gone-bad, like petulant, chubby, spoiled little ten-year-old boys shrilly screaming the sky is falling, who have more than they could ever use, but still don’t know how to share. Whereas all of these schools made me think of grandmothers’ wisdom, of the village where the elders are taking the long view and making decisions for the good of everyone. No complaining. No whining. No one left behind.

And cookies.

All the schools had snacks–brilliant. My wife laughed at me as we mingled afterwards and I helped myself to chips and dip–and cookies.

“I love the way you just make yourself at home,” she said.

Maybe I am at home. Maybe, at 42, with a four-year-old, living in the big-old-megapolis of Los Angeles, light-years away from my own small-town-Texas childhood with one kindergarten and no drama, maybe in spite of all of that, I’m realizing I’m home here.

We are going to do right by our son, with the help of one of these kindergarten villages. And more than that, other families, and our American experiment, is going to do right also. The sky isn’t falling. With courageous teachers and administrators like the ones we’ve been meeting, maybe things aren’t so dire after all.