Like so many parents, my kiddo's life was absolutely put on hold last March. He was in preschool, excelling, happy and well socialized. Then boom goes the world. Partner and I both lost our fulltime jobs and we all went on lockdown mode.Fast forward through the crazy and we made the somewhat desperate decision to pick up and move 400 miles away to an old mountain farmhouse so we could split costs with family and start something new. Our jobs weren't coming back (entertainment industries) and it was that or rapidly run out of money in our old beloved city with very few prospects aside from delivering food.So we did the big thing and decided to start a small farm and contracting business to boot. But that left our five year old without his friends, isolated beyond just covid in a rural region where the closest school is literally up hill both ways and a half hour away on the best day.We homeschooled. We tried to at least. But between starting a small business, a farm and working part-time and remotely to make ends meet, it hasn't been fair to our dude. He's made huge leaps in math and science and I can't believe how fast he's picking up coding just by playing minecraft on a raspberry pi linux system. But he can't read, at least not fluently. He gets frustrated with the alphabet and writing. And it makes me feel like I'm failing him.So, we just enrolled in the far off rural combined school that I was worried would be too white, too behind in academics and too outdated due to its location. I was a privileged, prejudiced nimrod about it, turns out. Even though I always planned to enroll him in school in our new county eventually, I couldn't let go of all the guilt I felt taking away city advantages from him in his education, despite the advantages of growing up on a permaculture farm in a national forest.I took kiddo today to turn in paperwork for registration and get a look at the school. The school is brand new. Nestled between rolling hills with a backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains and multiple playgrounds, green space and fields to play in.I rang the bell and was greeted by the principal no less. He walked me through the paperwork with the front desk admin who told me she knew exactly whose house we now lived in, as she had grown up down the road.The principal was planning a fire drill but still found time to give us a tour when kiddo said he wanted to see everything. He showed us every wing, the beautiful gym, the playgrounds, the music room and the magical library. And he even introduced us to kiddo's TWO teachers, in a class of 15 kids average.The cake was the lego robotics lab for kiddo. And also the cake was me trying not to cry at not only the excellent display of fine tuned education but also the fact that I was so wrong in my expectations.This has been a very long story about how excited I am for my son to go to school in a rural region, and how very prejudiced I still am about rural education coming from an inner city environment.I can't wait for kiddos first day, even if we have to be up at dawn to get on the bus. And he can't wait either. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/3aSUhHI
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