Wow, this thread has really gotten off track. I only provided the free and reduced lunch stats to cite diversity, which I think is a good thing. If you want to have a debate about whether or not children from low income families will drag a school down, please start another thread. And as for school #1 having something to hide because kids have to be dropped off at the door and picked up in the car lane or at the corner..... that's reading a whole lot into a simple procedural choice. It's just an administrative decision that's made differently at two different schools. School #1 highly encourages parents to volunteer and welcomes families for a wide variety of school wide events in the evenings. It has problems, as I think any school does. DS's experience there has not been all roses. But, if they were hiding some kind of dastardly secret by not letting parents come into the building to drop off an pick up their kids, I think I would have figured it out by now.

I recommend speaking to the teacher first, and if he/she is not receptive then go to the principal.

Yes, school really can be a place where atypical kids get the help and structure they need and thrive. School has been a mixed bag for my dyslexic and ADHDish (no diagnosis, but quite a few signs) kid, but the structure has actually been quite good for him overall. We're considering homeschooling him just for middle school and my biggest fear is that I won't be able to provide the discipline and structure he needs. That kind of thing is not my strong point. And if we do homeschool him for a few years, it will be partly enabled by the fact that his sister will be starting public school. I know there are tons of people who homeschool multiple kids and do it well, but I know I personally couldn't meet the needs of two kids at such different levels in school and with such different personalities and do them both justice. So, yes, if you can meet the needs of your other kids at home better by having Aries at school, go for it! As others have said, it doesn't have to be forever. It may be that he gets some intervention he needs at school and is able to come home later. It may be that school is the best place for him long term, and that doesn't make you a bad mom or a bad homeschooler. I used to think that public school was the best choice for most kids. I know there are people who think homeschool is the best choice for all (or most) kids, but now that I've sent one kid most of the way through public elementary school and gotten to know several homeschool families, I think that there's no one method of education that's best for every kid. Some kids will thrive best at home. Some will thrive best in school. Some could do wonderfully in either place. The key is to find what is best for your kid and, if you have a kid who could do well anywhere, you find what's best for your family and your values. Your relatives might think you're weird if you end up with some kids at school and some at home, but it doesn't matter what they think. It matters what will be the best choice for your kids and your family.

Thanks for those thoughts. Yes, it's possible he could drive DD to school, and even park a block or two away and walk part of the way. It would be harder, though, since he'd then want to just continue on to work and that would mean he'd have to be ready for the day earlier. He usually comes back from walking DS and finishes eating breakfast. That's definitely something worth considering that I didn't really think about.

No, we're not planning to homeschool after K. DH and I are both pretty pro public education in principle, though we're looking seriously into homeschooling her brother for middle school due to a lack of choices we think would be great for him. If DD goes to this elementary school and thrives the plan would be for her to stay in the program all the way through provided we don't move. We don't have any immediate plans to move, but DH's company isn't doing wonderfully, so that's always in the back of our minds. I think we need to make the decision as if we'll be here at least through elementary school, however. Homeschool would only happen for DD if we reached a point where we didn't think any of the local schools would be a good option for one reason or another.

The particular school is K-5, but there's a strong K-12 program and kids can automatically move onto the middle school and then the high school programs if they choose to do so.

It's interesting to hear that some of you would choose immersion over homeschooling if it were available. The Open House at the private school is tonight, so I may post more details about it later. Currently I'm leaning toward the immersion school, but DH is unsure because of the location. He really enjoys walking Squirrelboy to school every day.

I appreciate the input, especially about #3. The concerns some of you have expressed have also been in my mind. Yes, the school is an awesome idea, but will it really stand the test of time and provide kids with the education they need? Maybe I'll be convinced it's the best choice possible at the Open House tomorrow, but I definitely think it has potential weaknesses. The fact that there are strong advocates of both #1 and #2 assures me that they're both good candidates. Here's some extra info that might or might not sway your view. As a former Spanish teacher and a lover of languages, I always thought it would be awesome for my kids to attend an immersion school. However, I didn't even put my son in the lottery because he had much more severe speech issues than his sister and I didn't think adding another language in would be a good thing for him. Since he turned out to be dyslexic, I know it would have been a horrible fit. He got little enough proper reading support at his current school. At the immersion school it would have been a nightmare. However, DD shows no signs of a reading disability. She's already sounding out CVC words and I haven't pushed it. My sig says we're using The Reading Lesson, but we only pull it out occasionally and we're on lesson 2. I do really like the idea of her being introduced to another language early and hopefully falling in love with it. The local school is very good in a lot of ways, walkability and diversity being high on the list. However, even though I know it's good, even though I think DD has a high probability of thriving there, I kind of want to try another school. This is partly because my son had some really negative experiences there in kindergarten and first grade due to his reading disability. The teachers really did try to help and I really don't think it would be a problem for DD anyway, but my impressions of K and 1st there are tainted because of DS's experience. I kind of just want a fresh start. Plus, DS started preschool there when he was 3. I'm also just ready to go somewhere new. The drive and annoying pickup, though, do really give me pause. I should clarify that there's actually a much better chance of seeing my kid's teacher at dropoff and pickup if she goes to school #2, however. At our local school you can walk your kids in for the first week, then they have to be left at the door (or dropped off in the car lane if they're car riders). Walkers are walked by a staff member out to a corner near the school. There's no chance to interact with the teacher in person unless you volunteer in the classroom. At school #2 you can walk kids up to their room whenever you want to. In fact, the principal said that there are some fifth graders whose parents still walk them up every morning. She's not a huge fan of that because she thinks it stifles their independence, but it's perfectly allowable. And kids who are picked up by a parent or other caregiver are picked up in the classroom, so there's at least a possibility of interacting with the teacher. And in case you missed it in the long paragraph about school #1, DS is in fifth grade so he won't be at that school when DD starts kindergarten. Where he'll go to school is still way up in the air since we're not considering the local middle school and the middle school magnet decisions have not been sent out yet. There's actually a possibility that he'll be homeschooled if a) he doesn't get into either magnet we applied to or b) we decide neither one would be a good fit. ETA: It's not that DD is uninterested in learning Spanish, it's more that she just never considered it. I didn't talk up the school to her because so many people apply for the lottery that I figured the chance of us getting a spot was pretty low. I didn't want to talk up the school and then have her be disappointed when we didn't get a spot. Also, after the tour, she was pretty interested.

In case you've been wondering, we decided to go with school #2, the Spanish Immersion school. It's the only one we can't choose later if our first choice is a bad fit, and I don't want to deny our daughter the opportunity to learn a second language well just because we can't walk to the school. Most days, DH will be able to drive her on the way to work, so she'll still get special time with Dad on the way to school like her brother has gotten. This may seem weird, since I just had a thread on the chat board about the possibility of moving, but that's far from a certainty at this point, so we have to proceed with school choices as if we'll be here in the fall. We're finding ourselves faced with three school choices for Kittygirl, who will start kindergarten in the fall. There are a variety of reasons homeschooling is not among our choices, including the fact that she really wants to go to school, so please don't try to throw that in as an option. All three choices have pluses and minuses. Ultimately we have to decide what's best for our child and our family, but I'm always curious to see what others would choose. Choice #1: local elementary school, which also has magnet status. This means that about half the kids are from our neighborhood and half from all over the city. Squirrelboy is a 5th grader at this school. We've had a variety of bad experiences, but also a lot of good experiences. Frankly, I think the bad experiences we had could have happened at any school. He's just not an ideal fit for a school environment, but I think his sister is a much better fit. The school is a magnet for STEAM (STEM plus arts) and differentiated education. The differentiation tends to decrease in the upper grades, but it's much better than average in the primary years. The two things we love most about this school are that a) we can walk to it and b) it's very diverse, but ethnically and socioeconomically. For instance, Squirrelboy's class this year has 28 kids, about half white and the other half evenly mixed between African American and Hispanic. There aren't very many Asians at the school. About 45% of the school population is on free or reduced lunch, but there are kids on the other end, like Squirrelboy's friend whose house out in the country has a gate with its own entry code on the super long driveway leading to the mansion. There are a whole lot of families, like us, in between those extremes. Obviously this isn't diversity at its best, but it's very good as compared to most of the elementary schools in our district, which are usually 80-90% one ethnicity, some almost all White, some almost all African American, some almost all Hispanic. Choice #2: Spanish immersion magnet school - I put her name in on a whim, because I'm a former Spanish teacher and thought it might be cool for my kid to learn Spanish, and was amazed when I got an email Monday that she got a spot in the lottery. Kittygirl was not the least bit excited when I told her, because she had her heart set on going to school where brother went, even though he won't be there. This school uses a 50/50 immersion model. Kids spend half the day in an English language classroom, learning reading, science, and social studies, and half the day in a Spanish language classroom learning math and science. Specials are in English, except that Art is taught in Spanish, so, on art days, kids go a bit over the 50% ratio. We took a tour yesterday and, after the tour, Kittygirl said she'd like this school just as much as the local school. DH and I felt like the principal oversold the diversity when she talked about the school on the tour. Based on the classrooms we went into it's about 70% white, with the rest pretty evenly divided between African American, Hispanic, and Asian. The current free and reduced lunch ratio is 27%. That's actually quite a bit more diversity than I was expecting, and more than many other schools in our city, but not as much as our local school has. What really impressed both me and DH about this school on our tour was that all the teachers were clearly enjoying their jobs and all the kids we saw were engaged in learning. It's not that the teachers at our local school tend to hate their jobs, but I don't see the same level of enjoyment and engagement as I saw at this school. The major disadvantage to this school is that it's downtown, as opposed to right down the road. It took us about 15 minutes to drive there and find parking yesterday morning. At the school start and pickup times it might take longer, especially since it's right next to the university campus. The school parking lot doesn't even have enough spots for all the staff to park, let alone the parents. At dropoff time you can pull to the front of the school after the buses have left and let your kid out to be shepherded in by a staff member, but at pickup time you have to find a place to park and go in to get your kid. There are buses, but none that go to our area. Plus, I'm not keen on a kindergartener riding the bus anyway. Choice #3 Small Cooperative Private School - we're going to an Open House for this school tomorrow night, but this is what I know so far: It was started by former parents from the cooperative preschool Kittygirl currently attends, who wanted their children to have an elementary experience following a similar model. Currently they have a mixed grade class of K-2. Next year they'll add third grade and might add a teacher, depending on enrollment. The school meets in the basement of a church approximately 20 minutes from our house, though it could be 25-30 with heavy traffic. The curriculum is teacher designed and based mostly on a constructivist philosophy, with a lot of learning through projects and discovery. Students go outside 4 times a day in most weather (as opposed to the public schools, which have one 20 minute recess, which can be moved inside for the flimsiest of reasons). They take field trips once a month. Basically, I love this school's educational philosophy, but I don't know how it really works out in practice. A drawback (most serious in DH's mind than mine) is that it's never going to have the diversity that either of our public choices has. Tuition is pretty reasonable ($320 a month if you work in the classroom once every six weeks and participate in school cleanup days) but you're not going to get low income families at any school that charges tuition. Also, the majority of the students (at least for the moment) come out of the Cooperative preschool, which is about 90% White. If you've made it through this long post, congrats. Please feel free to comment on what you would do if you had these choices.

Thanks for the input, everyone. The school follows a 50/50 model, though once a week they go slightly over that because art is taught in Spanish. We toured the school today, and I was favorably impressed. Our local school is also a magnet, for STEAM (STEM plus arts) and "individually prescribed education," which isn't actually possible but in practice means more differentiated instruction than is normal and lots of team teaching. Our son is a fifth grader there, and we've had some bumps in the road, but we've had a mostly positive experience. One thing we love about our local school is the diversity. We were afraid the immersion school would be mostly white and upper middle class just because people in that demographic are more likely to know about the lottery and put their kids in, but we were pleasantly surprised by the diversity. It's more white than our local school, but only a little bit more. DD was not the least bit excited when I told her yesterday that she got a spot at the immersion school because she has seen her brother go off to school for her whole life and wanted to go to that school, even though he won't be there anymore. However, after touring the school today and seeing the kindergarten classes in action she decided she'd be just as happy going there. I was a little concerned about whether her speech would hold her back, but I talked to her therapist today (she happened to have her weekly session right after the tour) and she didn't have any concerns. DD doesn't have any language processing issues, but rather articulation issues due to a weak jaw and tongue (which are getting progressively stronger), and the therapist doesn't see any reason that that should hold her back in an immersion environment. Now we're waiting to make a decision after we find out more about the private school we're interested at an Open House on Thursday evening. It's a small, fairly new school started by former parents from DD's current preschool. It follows a constructivist model of education with lots of learning through exploration and is cooperatively run by the parents and teachers. I love the idea of it, but it will have to really impress me at this point for me to press DH to both leave the public school system and pay tuition.

So my daughter will be kindergarten age in the fall. Last fall I put her in the lottery for the Spanish Immersion elementary school. I was pretty ambiguous about it, because our local school is within walking distance and pretty good and there's also a private school I'd love to send her to. Just this afternoon I got an email offering her a spot in the school. I need to decide by next Friday. In theory, I think this is a great idea. It's easier for young children to learn a foreign language than for teenagers or adults, and I'm a former Spanish teacher and still proficient, so I could easily help with homework in Spanish. However, I'm also unsure about it. Public school kindergarten can be stressful already what with all the expected seatwork and little recess. Would also having to learn a new language be too much? If your kid goes/went to an immersion school and you want to share your experience, please reply.

I was very pro public school until my son went to school and I realized that it's far from a great fit for a kid like him (he has diagnosed dyslexia and ADHD tendencies but no diagnosis). However, my DH has remained pro public school despite the difficulties our son has had. One of the things I do like is that our local elementary school is very diverse both ethnically and socioeconomically. You wouldn't get that kind of diversity in a homeschool co-op. While he's tended to make friends with other white upper middle class kids like him, he spends the day with lots of kids who don't look like him or come from families like his, and it's been good for him to see that. He also has always had a hard time accepting instruction from us, so it's been easier helping with school assignments (even if I think they're ridiculous, which I sometimes do) than it would have been being the one to give the assignments. Early in his school years, our afterschooling focused mainly on intervention for his reading disability and also help with math, since his dyslexia made that harder for him as well. Now he's doing well in both areas, so I'm concentrating on giving him lots of exposure to science and history topics the school doesn't cover or doesn't cover in depth. This is mostly accomplished through books, both read alouds and books that I recommend to him or just leave lying around the house. My daughter is coming up on kindergarten age and she hasn't shown any signs that reading will be difficult for her, so I may focus on enrichment for her from the beginning. I disagree with the PP who said that you should reconsider your marriage because of this disagreement. If you generally agree, there's no reason this one difference will lead to a bad marriage. You don't even have kids now. It's possible that one of you will change your mind by the time you actually have school age kids. If not, and you're the one who has to give in, rest assured that, though public school has its problems, it's possible for kids to get a good education in the public school system, and it's possible for them to get an even better education with involved parents who are there to help where they need help and provide outside enrichment.

Wow, there are so many great suggestions I can't comment on them all individually. Thanks for your help! Hopefully my picky kid will like at least one or two of these :).

I've tried to turn him onto the Walter Farley books, because I adored them and own all of the original series, but so far he hasn't bitten. Thanks for the other suggestions!

Thanks for all the great suggestions! The Travels of Thelonious looks like an almost sure bet. He adores squirrels (hence his nickname on here) and chipmunks are a type of squirrel. Our library actually has a copy of that one.

This sounds really good, though a search shows our library doesn't have them, sadly. I can get the first one on Amazon for $4, though, so maybe I'll order it for his birthday and see what he thinks.

Yeah, that's the problem, There are so many beautiful classic dog books that end with the death of the dog.

My son discovered the TinTin books over the summer between 4th and 5th grade. He read all of them, and he's still saying all the other books he reads are disappointing because they're not as good as TinTin. For good or for ill, TinTin started a graphic novel obsession with him and that's what he prefers to read, but he reads on grade level and reads standard books for school without a problem. He just hasn't recently found any that interest him enough to read them for pleasure. So is there some great book or series I can recommend that he might love as much as TinTin? I asked him this morning what it was he loved about the series, and he said he loved that it was about a boy having adventures with his dog. I read a lot as a kid (and still do) but I don't remember any boy/dog adventure books. I thought about trying to turn him on to the adventure books by Lloyd Alexander that I loved when I was about his age (I think the main character was named Vesper Holly?) but the main character is a girl and I don't remember any dogs being involved, so I don't think they would meet his criteria.

I also adored the series as a kid, but I realized when I reread the original as an adult just how many objectionable things happened in the book. I think it's fine if you don't like them. I also think it's fine if you let your kids read them or read them to your kids. The goal of the books is not to inspire kids to be just like The Great Brain. For the record, I hate The Swiss Family Robinson with the burning passion of a thousand suns, and there are apparently a lot of people out there who love it. I also have no great love for Robinson Crusoe. I do love The Lord of the Rings, though.

It happens in Kentucky, too. I find it weird, coming from West Michigan where we got lots of lake effect snow every winter and things rarely shut down. Snow day #3 has already been called by our district. Of course, the whole city seems to have about 3 snowplows (not really, but not as many as they need for a serious snow event) and most people don't have a clue how to drive in the snow. I never understood the run on bread and milk, however. Why those things particularly? I'm just hoping the roads are mostly clear by Sunday so we don't have to reschedule Kittygirl's birthday party.

I'm glad to see that many people agree with my first thought - DH should look for a job while he still has time to decide and then take the package if he finds one. He started looking at what's available in areas we might want to live in last night. Whether he actually sends out his resume, well, I think at this point there's a 50% chance. He hates change and making big decisions that bring on change. I'm amazed sometimes that he managed to decide he wanted to marry me. I may tell him that a bunch of people who don't actually know us agree with me. That probably won't sway his decisionmaking, but at least I'll have some evidence that I'm not a lunatic :).

He's some more info: DH has been looking at jobs casually in the areas we'd like to live in for years. A good friend was laid off from the same company a few years ago, and he got a job at Whirlpool in St. Joseph, Michigan. Since he already knows someone who works there (and like it) and it's in an area we'd like to live in, that would be a strong possibility. I appreciate the advice about sending his resume out and then deciding about whether to take the package (he has until the end of February to decide). However, given his personality, he's unlikely to make the move of sending out resumes unless he's made a firm decision to leave. The ideal, of course, would be to start a new job very shortly after leaving the old one, but there's no guarantee that would happen. Oh, and in answer to the last question - he has some stock options that won't mature unless he spends 3 more years at the company, but nothing really major would be affected financially. edited for fix typo

So, DH is an engineer. He works for a printer company, which means he works in a shrinking industry, what with everything going digital. He's worked for the same company since he graduated from college in 1998. When he hired on in 1998 they employed approximately 10,000 people in Lexington. Now they're down to 3,000. They're moving more and more in the direction of being a software company, and DH has always worked in hardware. His degree is in mechanical engineering, but, at this point in his career, having designed motors for nearly 18 years, he is often mistaken for an electrical engineer. The company has had a pattern over the past decade of layoffs approximately every other year. They first start with a "voluntary reduction program" wherein employees are invited to choose to leave with a pretty decent package (including 1 week of pay for every year of their employment). They just announced another "voluntary reduction program" on Monday, and, for the first time ever, we're really torn about what to do. Every other time DH has decided pretty quickly not to take the package and hoped he won't be involuntarily reduced. Obviously, he never has been. The odds are low that he'll be let go involuntarily this time because someone from his division just left late last year and his supervisor is really happy with his work. He's also doing the work of about 1 1/2 people. The reason we're actually considering taking this step is that, for years, we've talked about this year (the year Squirrelboy will start middle school and Kittygirl will start kindergarten) as being an ideal year to move, school-wise, because both kids would go to new schools regardless (although if we stay here homeschool might be an option for Squirrelboy, as I've posted in another thread). Neither of us is from here, and neither of us intended to stay here so long when we both moved here (separately) in 1998. I just planned to get my graduate degree and then find a job closer to home and he planned to log a few years of work experience and then find a job closer to home. Then we met, got married, he still loved his job, I wanted to stay home with the kids, and it just didn't make a lot of sense to move. However, he's from Wisconsin and I'm from Michigan and we both still miss the Upper Midwest. His parents still live in his hometown, but they're hoping to move to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, where one his brothers lives. My parents still live in my hometown and one of my brothers lives a couple hours away. I also have lots of extended family within an hour of where my parents live. So we've talked for years on and off about moving north, preferably to West Michigan but, if he couldn't find a job there, our second choice would be the twin cities area in Minnesota. Third choice would be somewhere in Wisconsin, though that's less preferable since his parents don't intend to stay there. Every time we drive to one of those places for a visit we wish we lived there, but when we come home we remember all the things we love about living here. And, the fact is, moving can be expensive and is always a huge hassle. So, if you were us, what would you do? Keep the status quo that we really like most of the time and hope DH keeps his job, or take a risk that is bound to be really annoying in the short run but could make us really happy in the long run?

Thanks for all the advice so far, both in regard to materials and homeschooling in general. We'll definitely have an eye one what the local public schools will expect DS to have learned if we homeschool for middle school, since the plan would be for him to return for high school. There's a new high school being built right down the road from us which we'll be districted for. This would keep him out of the scary high school that we're currently districted for and the local middle school we want to avoid feeds into. There's also a huge variety of magnet choices for high school, many more than for middle school. I appreciate the advice about not pushing algebra in 8th grade just for the sake of keeping up with the school. I still want to keep algebra in 8th grade as my initial goal, but it's good to be reminded that an advantage to homeschooling is that I can assess my child's academic needs and readiness and not move on if he's not totally ready. So far, I'm most attracted to Bravewriter (plus something else for spelling) for LA and Math Mammoth for Math. I know two homeschoolers in real life who started using Bravewriter in the past year and they say it's transformed the way their kids look at writing, in a very good way. I'll save posting more subject specific threads until we've made a definite decision (I won't need to post them if we decide on a magnet school, of course), and I'll definitely come back to this thread if and when the time comes that I actually need to make a choice.

Answering the question about secular vs. religious material: we're evangelical Christians, but we're adamantly not young earth creationists, so we'd probably want secular materials for science. For history I think we could go either way. Oh, and we tried Life of Fred for Math enrichment, and Squirrelboy was not a fan.