Please Introduce Yourself What's your connection to St. Paul public schools? mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________
At first I thought these introductions were just for people with a stake in the SPPS? Not sure, so here's my intro anyway.
I am Mary Baker originally from Oklahoma but spent a few formative years in California. I've been in St. Paul for 5 years now. I work at 3M, took 9 years of college at the University of Oklahoma. 10 of the 12 years of lower school was spent at the same rural Oklahoma district. For being out in the sticks, it was still in the top 5 schools in the state on nearly all the positive fronts.
Interestingly I married a man who went to an urban Oklahoma school that was always in the top 5 for negative things: dropouts, teen pregnancies, incarceration, murders. So on our school experiences we were on opposite ends of the spectrum. One thing our conversations about that have taught me is that a kid can learn a lot in either environment. For both of us though, most of the learning came outside the classroom proper and usually in self-directed study. His parents weren't very supportive and mine were proud, but not involved. This has been a big contributor to my interest in home schooling, since I haven't seen a lot of point to schooling anyway. My experience in school led me to have a sympathy for Klebold and Harris. My husband's experience led him to putting several other kids in the hospital. Not uncommon for his school, but still, our combined memories of public education aren't good ones.
My current interest in SPPS is because I have a 4 year old son. Tonight I go to a Kindergarten Open House arranged by my work and I've been very interested to listen to the discussions here about education. The idea of "choice" is a new one. In Oklahoma you went to the nearest school period, unless your parents were "rich" and could afford to drive you to a private school. My firm intention to home school has been softened a lot by the excellent daycare my son goes to about 10 days out of the year. Plus, the revelation that he wouldn't go to a school with the kids from our neighborhood.
Yes - I'm not willing to put my kid with the kids from the neighborhood I live in. I took a poll a couple years ago and out of 20 kids that I knew well enough to know their family situation, only three or four had both parents available. An equal number had NO parental figures of any sort available - they were 15 to 19 and living on the streets or in a friend's house, couch surfing. We've had 4 or 5 garages burn down last year due to a single miscreant. That individual's younger brother has egged our house a couple times and vandalized our cars (we haven't been singled out - he's like that to a lot of people). It's only a matter of time until he's in the juvenile justice system and the neighborhood will be safer when he is. Theft out of garages is a big deal among a few kids around here. There's not a lot you can do when kids walk down the alley and brazenly poke their heads into every garage they can get into. Then they come back in the night for the ones that had saleable stuff in them.
So, kids in this neighborhood aren't the sort I want my child socializing with. The problem is bigger than the kids. I can tell it originates from their family situations and their family situations arise from economic conditions. Someone's always got to be in the bottom percentile ranks. Bottom percentile in the US is better than bottom percentile elsewhere, but I still want my son fraternizing with kids in other areas. I'm heartened to hear that when you send a kid to a school out of your neighborhood that they don't tend to form close friendships with the neighbors.
Mary Baker East Side
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