Didn't I Feed You Yesterday__ A Mother's Guide to Sanity in Stilettos - Laura Bennett [37]
Here in the city we have an urban myth that families are forced to move out to the suburbs because their kids didn’t get into private school—they run screaming to the quiet hamlets of New Jersey or Connecticut to seek a decent public school. Much like the Hermès bag waiting list, this is pure fiction: I have never in my fifteen years here met one person who has waited two years for a purse or moved out of the city because of a catastrophic preschool denial. I do know people who have moved out because they thought the public schools sucked and couldn’t bear the thought of paying $32,000 for kindergarten, but never anyone who just walked away. Real New Yorkers don’t give up that easy.
Jon and Kate and their eight little goslings claim they are able to raise their family with the strength and courage they receive from God. That may work in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, but here in the city it takes money to raise a gaggle. Lots of money. The reality is that New York is an extremely expensive place to live, but that doesn’t mean those who make it here are necessarily rich—we may earn bigger salaries, but we also have bigger bills. It’s simply a matter of scale, and our scale is incomprehensible when compared to the suburban lifestyle. What with having to pay to park our car in a garage a taxi fare away from our front doors, or pay the grocery store to deliver the food that we don’t have the luxury of throwing into the back of the SUV, the little things add up nearly as fast as the big ones, like rent, or mortgages, or a Larsonterages. This is where couples eventually choose to game the system: keep the big-city paycheck, but live a few commuter rail stops away from the burn rate of Manhattan. In the end, though, this means one parent gives up a hard-won career, because once in the suburbs you must spend quality time becoming part of a community—volunteering at the school library, coaching Little League, organizing bake sales. In the city we use our second incomes to pay people to do that crap for us. I’ve never once in fifteen years baked a cupcake for a classroom birthday. Why would I, when Cupcake Café can do it better, cheaper, and faster? And if I’m going to stay in the city, I’m going to buy the best education I can afford, just as I would go to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center if I found a lump, and not some rinky-dink hospital that doesn’t have “cancer” right there in the name.
The private school application process is daunting, but I’d say the panic is caused by parents: if every family would simply apply only to the three schools they are most interested in, instead of applying to ten schools and clogging up the admissions process, everyone would get what they want in some measure. I have even seen families turn down a school acceptance because they decided they couldn’t afford it. Did they think a winning lottery ticket was in their future? Was Aunt Selma going to die and mention little Johnny in her will? Was the school going to hold an unprecedented tuition clearance sale? Why are these people clogging up the system? I actually don’t know anyone who didn’t get their kid into private school if that’s what they wanted. There are enough spaces to go around.
Believe me, if the process were easy, and people could just walk into the hallowed halls of the school of their choice, check in hand, New York parents would not be interested. We expect to have to win.
“EXECUTE YOUR ENEMIES. LEAVE NO SURVIVORS,” A MENACING voice intoned over the cacophony of warfare coming out of the TV connected to the Xbox.
“What was that?” I exclaimed, turning from my desk toward my son. Peik