School began in Milwaukee this week. At my daughter’s elementary school, there was a balloon arch and a front walkway packed with students. Eager, anxious, bouncy. The unstoppable force of pre-adolescent kinetic energy colliding with the (not so) immovable object of outfits their parents begged them to please keep clean. A few pre-kindergarten wails, but mostly joy and the hope that this year might be perfect. At my son’s middle school, a mom wiped tears from her eyes. Her son is an eighth grader, far taller than her, but as she assured me, outside of his earshot, “he’s still my baby.” We had both spent the night before scrolling through old front porch pictures. They were so tiny. They aren’t anymore. But we’re still allowed to cry over them.
It’s a minor miracle, this whole business of sending your children to public school. Such an individually vulnerable act, but so dependent on trust in strangers, not just on teachers and immediate administrators, but on unseen district, state, and federal agencies. Hundreds of millions of families with our own unique dreams and dreads for our kids, but above and around us, a nation of anonymous somebodies charged with making a trillion decisions on our behalf.
We have been trained, thanks to a craven political project spanning an entire half-century, to distrust bureaucracy. A dirty word, that one. So too “red tape.” But as a parent, I am immensely grateful for all the decisions that I don’t have to make that enable my kids to walk in the door of a classroom every day. Not just the big pedagogical questions (what constitutes the least inclusive special education environment; how to train a teacher in the science of reading; what is calculus, exactly, and how does a high schooler show that they are proficient at it). I’m talking about the million accessory decisions. Which grade gets to have lunch at which time. Whether to start before or after Labor Day. Who wins the contract for cleaning supplies, for dry-erase boards, for murals that say “Home of the Wildcats who READ!”…