We live next door, quite literally, to a high school that’s been named one of the top two in the state.##M:[more]## You can see the playing fields of West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North from our windows and hear the roar of the crowd on any football Saturday.
Our children would have been walkers, hot-footing it straight across the neighborhood and in through the front doors. Across the street is Millstone River School where both our daughters went to 4th and 5th grades. Next door to that is the Community Middle School where Katie graduated from 8th grade last year and where Molly just finished 6th.
As so many transplants to our community do, we chose where we would build a home and raise our children in large part because of the excellent reputation of the West Windsor-Plainsboro School District. Our location has also been mighty convenient when the girls have forgotten lunch money or homework and I’ve had to scoot across the street to bail them out.
So why did we pull Katie out of the district to enroll her in Princeton Day School for high school? And why have we done the same with Molly to send her to Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart in Princeton where she will begin the 7th grade the week after next?
Some of our friends think we’re certifiably nuts. “You live next door to and across the street from some of the finest public schools in the state and you’re choosing to spend a truckload of money to send your children to private school? Do you enjoy eating rice and beans and macaroni all that much?”
The price tag is steep. Tuition alone for each school runs about $23,”000. That doesn’t include books. Katie lost her Sacred Traditions textbook. It cost $50 the first time we bought it and it wasn’t any cheaper the second time when she had to pay for it. That was for one subject. Multiply that by the five or six courses kids normally take. You get the idea.
We just did a round of back-to-school shopping at Staples. Almost 100 bucks. Notebooks, calculators, that kind of thing. Never knew paper and pencils could add up so quickly. The $23,”000 price tag also doesn’t include clothes, including the uniform we’ve had to order for Molly. It doesn’t factor in the time and gas it takes to haul across Route 1 into Princeton, negotiating the side streets to get the girls to and from school and all their school-related activities. Sending your children to private school requires a huge amount of commitment in terms of time, money, and family sacrifice.
We warned our daughters that we’d have to make some adjustments. Fewer family vacations and definitely less fancy. A reassessment of budgets and expectations and put-down-those-jeans-you-already-have-plenty-and-they’re-not-in-the-budget.
Speaking of reassessments, we’re writing higher checks for property taxes. Our rising taxes support our excellent schools and aside from William, who will be a first-grader at Town Center Elementary, we’re not using them. We’ve also backed ourselves somewhat into a financial corner. Two private school tuitions mean Mommy has to get a real job this year to help make ends meet. And the college piggy bank? What college piggy bank? (Fortunately, we are blessed with wise parents who have set up one of those 529 college savings plans for their grandchildren. Otherwise, we’d be totally doomed.)
So back to the question our friends pose to us… WHY??? First, let me say that I graduated from a class of more than 400 from public high school in northern New Jersey and did just fine. Took a bunch of AP courses, aced the SAT and got into my first-choice school.
On the other hand, Bill also graduated from a very large high school in Connecticut and feels like he could have done better. Very smart but a late bloomer. Not highly motivated, at least, not then. A little lost in a very large crowd. He caught up later in life, getting a law degree in addition to a masters degree from NYU but still feels like he could have done better had he been a larger fish in a smaller pond and gotten closer attention.
And there’s part of the answer right there. The fish in the pond thing. While we appreciate our schools and loved many of the teachers, we simply felt that our kids were very small fish in a very large pond. In her 6th grade at CMS, only one of the two middle schools in town, Molly had four teams of about 100 students each. Roughly 400 students for each grade at one middle school. Her science class had 50 kids because two teachers, each with a class of 25, decided to team-teach two classes together. Wonderful teachers, each in his own right. But Molly came home upset early in the year and said she hadn’t understood the science lesson that day. “So why didn’t you raise your hand and tell your teacher,” I queried. “And look stupid in front of 50 kids?” she responded, with a look that said mom, are you really that clueless.
Some classes are just better taught in a smaller environment. Fifty kids for an introductory college psychology class is okay. Fifty kids for a middle school science class is not so okay. In her freshman algebra class at Princeton Day School this past year, Katie had seven kids in her class. Seven. It was a tremendous year for her in terms of growth and understanding in a subject that’s traditionally not been so friendly to her.
With seven kids in a classroom, the teacher can really build a strong foundation and identify crumbles in the mortar before the whole thing comes crashing down. We worried about the large class sizes in the high school. We worried about the fierce competition for honors and AP courses. It wasn’t that we didn’t think our kids could cut the mustard, but we feared that they would get lost in the crowd. We wanted them driven not so much by competition and external pressure but by a love of learning and internal passion. We wanted a smaller environment where that spirit would be nurtured.
In a smaller class where the teacher really knows you it’s hard to get away with any kind of nonsense. Molly related a story about a class discussion at school where she knew her friends hadn’t done the reading but were chiming in with the discussion nonetheless and getting away with it. Katie laughed and said. “I used to do that too!”
“And you were able to get away with it,” I asked in mock horror.
“Mom, all the kids did it.” “Well, I guess you can’t get away with it now,” I chided. Katie tackled her classes with a rigor and dedication that I’d rarely seen before.
Going into Princeton Day School in 9th grade with many students, “lifers,” who had been there since kindergarten, definitely was a challenge. She had to tap deep into a wellspring of strength and mental vigor she never knew she had. She stumbled a little bit her first trimester, but held the line with a B minus as her lowest grade. Second and third trimesters she made the honor roll.
There are other pluses to private school that work well for the kinds of personalities our children have. The focus on athletics and the requirement of universal participation. The importance of community service. The emphasis on the arts. Programs such as the artist-in-residence who has one hand in real world pursuits and the other in sharing that experience with students. The peer leadership program that partners seniors with freshman to help them transition to high school. Traditions including “Imagine the Possibilities” that bring highly acclaimed writers on campus to invite students to imagine their own possibilities. The early partnership between parents and college guidance counselors to begin that all-important process.
The West Windsor-Plainsboro schools offer a tremendous opportunity with dedicated teachers, rigorous academics, and a wealth of athletics and extracurricular activities. I know that firsthand because I’ve interviewed for my alma mater, Yale University, for a good part of the last 20 years, and have encountered some of the most impressive students from our two high schools. But how you educate your children is a personal choice and one of the most important you will make because it provides the foundation on which they will build the rest of their lives. The choice we’ve made for our children works for us. It’s not necessarily better, but it’s different, just as all children tend to be.
