Rant Against the Atlanta Private School Application Process
When I was a kid, when you turned five you got on the bus that stopped in front of your house and rode it to the elementary school down the street. You liked it and you learned a lot.
My son is about to turn five. Because the local elementary school is scarily inadequate, we have to find another school for him. Our quest for the perfect school started this past August. Since then, we have visited THIRTEEN schools of the private, public, parochial, and charter variety.
When I was preparing to apply to college, I visited ONE school. And applied to another one sight unseen.
Once we visited all the potential schools for my son, we whittled the list down to our top four choices for the sake of the (extensive and expensive) application process. We spent a month and a half filling out applications, writing and revising essays (yep!), and gathering teacher recommendations.
When I applied to the (very good) state school where I attended college, I signed my name at the bottom of a scan-tron application that had my demographic info pre-filled because I was graduating in the top ten percent of my high school class. Signed a scan-tron to get into college, people. No joke.
The most extensive essay we wrote for our child's school application spanned five pages.
Then we got to the really good part - the Joint Admissions Testing Program (JATP). I am convinced that the racket known as the JATP was conceived many years ago by a group of aging psychologists (none of whom had children, I'm sure), as a way to keep themselves and their successors in business in Atlanta for the rest of their lives. They rounded up all the major private schools in the area and convinced them that it would be a good idea to spare children and parents the agony of undergoing individual psychological testing for each school and instead have a uniform test, the results of which get sent to all the schools. Sounds good in theory, right?
For just $160, you pay for the privilege of an hour-long test and the psychologist sends you a meaningless one-page matrix with x's in boxes to summarize your entire child. For another $180, you can get the full write-up, which the psychologist has already had to type up anyway, and get more material on your child to feed your neurosis. If you're lucky, during this follow-up session the psychologist will recommend that your child needs another $3,000 in testing in order to determine if he will ever function at a "normal" level (didn't happen to me, but happened to people I know).
After that, you still have individual and group observations with each school, where your children are squirreled away to an undetermined location in the building while their over-anxious parents sit in a gym with "relaxing" chamber music piped in and coffee and danishes to offer cold comfort. Or even worse, one school offers you the opportunity to come back and observe the first 40 minutes of the group observation. This is awesome because you can watch your kid squirm in his seat, act like he doesn't know your address when asked (even though you have drilled him 1,000 times on it), and opt to skip the assessment activities in favor of insisting on asking questions about the hamster cage in the classroom. He does this as the little girl next to him promptly follows the assessor's instructions and completes the activities in record time. Stressful? Just a tad.
For his part, my son has has enjoyed checking out the different schools he may or may not attend next year. The psychological was apparently not as much fun, as he told me the psychologist was "an old lady who asked tricky questions". He was, however, all too happy to answer most of her questions, which included telling her about his family. He told her that his dad "goes to work", his mom "answers the door and talks on the phone" and his brother "eats too much junk food". He neglected to mention the baby brother at all, prompting the psychologist to ask me at the follow-up session if he had any unresolved conflicting feelings about the baby.
At every step of the process, my stomach has been tied in knots about whether he will or won't get in, will or won't be a fit, will or won't succeed once he does get there, and the worst - wondering if he even has a chance of succeeding if he doesn't get there. Fueling this paranoia is (first and foremost) is my husband, who has a mean competitive streak and also comes from a family of intellectual hyper-achievers. On the off-chance that he manages to freaking SPAZ DOWN for five minutes, I have other parents going through the process and also the JATP psychologist that did our assessment to fan the flames of my self-doubts. Ironically enough, only the schools themselves are doing nothing to contribute to my anxiety. So far, my dealings with them have been totally pleasant, completely transparent about the process, and very reassuring about the process playing itself out in the bests interests of my child.
And yet, the surrounding culture and environment is making me question every parenting decision I've made for my child thus far. I am second-guessing whether we should we have had so many children so close together, which didn't leave me much time for one-on-one skill building activities. I wonder if we should have sent him to a different, more academic preschool? Signed him up for more music/sports/art classes? Conducted drills at home to build his focus and discipline? Even worse, I find myself thinking about what I need to be doing NOW for his three-year and five-month old brothers so that I can still "save" them, as if my five-year old's academic career is over before it even starts.
But the important thing is that my son remains blissfully unaware of the stress surrounding this process. And I do have faith that it will play out the way it was meant to, despite my fretting and machinations to control the process. So in the meantime, I guess I'll just answer the door and talk on the phone some more, which is apparently the only part of parenting I'm any good at.
An original Deep South Moms blog post. Cara writes about parenting her three boys on Baby Bunching, The Fox Factor and at Atlanta Parent Online.
