11/8/2010: I Vote School Choice is winding down after the election - this website will no longer be updated. A huge thank you to all of our dedicated volunteers. SchoolChoiceVermont.com and VermontAct153.org will continue to have current information for you.
Parents Share Their Stories
Parents from all over the state are sharing their school choice stories,
we invite you to share yours.
____________________________________________________________________
Without commenting on the relative merits of public vs. private vs. home school education, I do believe that each family should be allowed to choose the educational solution that works best for them and their children. In our case, the "best" solution has varied over the years, though public school has not been part of the equation. Since the 2009-10 school year, our child has attended a not-so-nearby independent day school, thanks in large part to the school's generous scholarships and financial aid. Although we do not live in a town that offers choice or provides any tuition assistance, the school's population is drawn from MANY towns that do pay a substantial portion of tuition. While we would be thrilled if our town offered choice, we also know that we benefit directly from other towns' choice/tuition. Without such assistance to our child's school and others like it, the schools would not be able to offer as much financial aid as it does, and for many families, ours included, that could very well spell the end of independent school as a viable choice.
J.D., Wallingford
____________________________________________________________________
We have four children. Our two older daughters attended 12 miserable years at our local school. It was a fight every day regarding one thing or another. There are problems too numerous to list. After meeting with the School District's supervisory union and with lawyers we decided to pay for our two younger children to go to a different school. We are a lot less stressed about school and our children are doing great.
If schools were run like businesses only the good would survive. We need to reward schools that perform the way they should and weed out the the bad ones. It is so simple.
A.J., Concord
____________________________________________________________________
I am a step-parent of a 28 yr. son, who I have co-parented since he was 5. A very serious hand injury kept me from working for a whole year. The opportunity to home school my stepson was presented at the same time when he was a 6th grader. He had been to daycare since infancy, then preschool, then kindergarten. When grade school began he was sure that school was a place you went while mom and dad worked. He had been a parochial school student and a public school student and neither was working. We enrolled him in an "independent study" home school program that truly empowered him. It was his responsibility to read, comprehend and present information. He discovered his own learning style and has not looked back. It was very affordable at the time but that was California. My location in Vermont only gives me a choice of high schools. For most of us it is too late by then to get the spark back. Our family is bearing the hardship of paying taxes AND schooling our 12 yr.old son at home for all the same reasons we did it the first time, overwhelming love and concern for our child's well being.
D.P., Lunenburg
____________________________________________________________________
We are working on providing the best education possible for our children through a mix of public school, homeschool, phone conference classes and cooperatives. Our local high school, MMU, has been very accommodating. Our children have taken art, English, foreign languages, Driver's Ed, etc. there. In addition to taking about two classes per year, our daughter Molly also played sports for MMU. She was offered a sports and academic scholarship which helped her pay for college. Heather also took classes at MMU and participated in extracurriculars: drama, music, and dance. She is currently recording a CD of original songs to help fund her way through college. Meghan enjoyed four years of Latin with Mr. Slayton at MMU. One year Mr. Slayton actually taught a class of four students during his "free period"!!! I cannot thank him enough for his talent and commitment. Our fourth daughter Colleen is going into ninth grade and will be joining cooperatives and taking conference call classes. We don't yet know her future involvement with the public high school, but it is marvelous to have MMU as an option. We have been blessed to live near a public school that has been so open and accommodating. I would love to publicly thank all the teachers and coaches who have taught my kids so much. I am a strong advocate for school choice because I see that it works. All Vermont children would benefit from choice, even the ones who choose to remain at their current public school, because it creates a climate of commitment and trust. And if transportation is an issue, all the more reason to have statewide access to excellent online classes. We have statewide school taxes, we should have statewide school choice.
K.B., Jericho
____________________________________________________________________
From as early as preschool I knew that my daughters were fragile. I knew that they were going to need a certain kind of relationship with their school and teachers to survive. I chose their schools very carefully and sometimes the place they needed to be was not our local school. For four years when I was first on my own with my daughters living in a rented basement apartment after loosing my wife, my job, and my income, I paid full tuition to the public school in the neighboring town, despite the severe financial hardship, so they could be where they needed to be. One size does not fit all.
George Abrams
____________________________________________________________________
Our daughter has severe dyslexia when it comes to writing but she has 8 wonderful years at Southshire Community School where we paid tuition of $4500. Now she is in our local high school and is miserable and has been made to feel "stupid" because they do not know how to deal with her challenges. Our only other options are private high schools beginning at $15K, on a teachers salary there is no way we can afford to send our daughter to a school that works while putting our son through college. Public school does not work for everyone, please do not punish towns which support school choice and more importantly give each Vermont child the education that they deserve.
C.H., North Bennington
____________________________________________________________________
I'm a single parent and could barely afford my rent or mortgage but was able to move to a town that had school choice for HS. My daughter wasn't challenged and taught good work and study ethics at the public school. She wasn't happy at the Waldorf School. I was fortunate enough to find a living situation in a town that supported School Choice and she was accepted into the Sharon Academy. That has made all the difference. Unfortunately our public school experience was a bit of a nightmare. Now she is well recognized in her school, she is challenged to grow emotionally and mentally in an emotionally supportive and stimulating environment. It seems like a great injustice that not every child is entitled to school choice and that towns that support such a reasonable civil right should get punished by paying higher taxes (under Act 153 if they are unable to participate in voluntary merger).
J.C., Tunbridge
____________________________________________________________________
We had our child in public school for two and a half years. We really tried, and to be honest, we felt that the school really tried too. But it wasn't working for our son, and he was getting extremely depressed. He had pretty much stopped learning anything he was so miserable. The same child that used to read _constantly_ refused to read anything. We enrolled him in a Waldorf school, even though we were baffled as to how we were going to afford it. For our child, it was the best decision we could have made. We have our son back. He is happy, enthusiastic, and once again reading anything he can get his hands on. The artistic, engaging and in-depth nature of his school program really works for him. Sadly, I can't say that it is working so well for the whole family. We don't make much (we qualify for reduced lunches) and paying for both an independent school while supporting the public school with our taxes has been just horrible. But really, there is no choice, I can't have my child return to not learning, and hating everything to do with learning. We are still looking for answers, so that we can have a child who is learning, and still put food on the table. It is just wrong that we feel we currently have to choose between the two. One size most certainly does not fit all.
J.V., Greensboro Bend
____________________________________________________________________
I have one daughter who is currently a sophomore at the St. Johnsbury Academy. I have spent the last thirteen years trying to navigate Vermont‘s Educational system to ensure that her educational needs were being met in a school that was the best fit for her. The current system of school choice is discriminatory. Basing school choice on geography is ridiculous. What is a right for one Vermonter should be a right for all Vermonters. Let us make it simple: Funding follows the child.
My daughter’s elementary school tuition was half the price of the public school, yet she received an excellent education; one that has prepared her extremely well for high school. She is thriving at the Academy. We have spent $74,000.00 on her education and have paid our property taxes on top of that, well over $100,000.00. We have done all this on salaries that would designate her for “free or reduced lunch”. We have moved from our dream home to a school choice town in order for her to continue her education at the Academy. It is too late for us to reap any benefit from any changes made but I hope that future generations of children and their parents will not have to sacrifice so much in order to meet their child’s educational needs.
Trudie Baker
____________________________________________________________________
In 2006 we settled in new community to gain access to educational choice for our kids - that meant selling our homestead in a community we loved. In the past 4 years in our new community, I have witnessed parents removing their children from schools that were not a good fit only to have a neighbor enroll their child in that very same school with great results. I’m involved in our local library and see lots of parents and kids, everyone is happy and doing well, there is a huge amount of educational satisfaction in our town. We have school choice from K-12 and our town’s children attend NINE different schools. I find the idea that each child is in a school that best fits their needs to be compelling on many levels, particularly with the improvement in classroom dynamics which benefits all children.
Angelique Lee, Founder, School Choice Vermont
____________________________________________________________________
Even in our family with three middle schoolers, one size does not fit all. Fortunately, Grafton has choice but, unfortunately, it's only for 7th and 8th grade. When my daughter was in 6th grade, I toured 10 different schools and was fortunate to find Hilltop Montessori School in Brattleboro. She flourished there both academically and socially. Though it is a wonderful school with great teachers, it wasn't as good of a fit for my twin boys mainly because there were three siblings in one small class. They were all also unprepared academically which presented a challenge to us all and made me wish we had had choice for elementary school. After struggling again to find a fit for high school, we have decided to move to a choice town even though we haven't sold our house and have a property tax bill of close to $10,000. We now have to add rent to those expenses. For the naysayers, I would like to add that Hilltop was a relative bargain for the taxpayers of our town since tuition was capped at $11,576 per student compared to the $14,320 tuition for the public school--a savings of $8,232 for our family alone. In addition, we paid tutoring fees for our daughter who would have continued on an IEP in the public system. Charter and magnet schools are on the rise in other states, giving students and families more and more choice. Yet Vermont--one of the few states left that doesn't allow charters--is moving backwards, now looking to take away the choice we do have. Had we been able to sell our house, chances are that we would now be living in another state and Vermont would have lost another family.
Molly Leuschel
____________________________________________________________________
My husband and I are parents of twins. We sent the kids to the local K-6 public school for 2 years, and then homeschooled for 2 years. The math program, Everyday Math, was not working for our daughter, the kids were not challenged enough, the curriculum had too little emphasis on content, the school climate seemed more about making the kids feel good than about serious learning, and discipline was not consistent or morally grounded. Grafton only has choice in grades 7-8. We now send our kids to New England Classical Academy in Claremont, NH, and we're all happy, kids and parents, except for paying both high property taxes and a very reasonable tuition. A group of Grafton parents has been working to expand our current 7 & 8 choice to high school by petitioning a town vote to withdraw from the Bellows Falls Union High School District. The town voted the withdrawal down, in large part to be sure, because of fears that more tuitioning would make our taxes more unstable. Because of the way the state calculates spending per child (the student count is taken from the two years previous to the expenditure year) our taxes swing up and down depending on our small middle school population. Voters thus identify tuitioning with tax hikes caused by arbitrary measures of Acts 60/68 and are wary of extending choice. Nevertheless, it is interesting that for grades 7 & 8, the two grades that we do have choice, students go to a number of the area public and independent schools including the Compass School and The Grammar School. For sure, one size does not fit all, and parents know what is best for their children and for their families. Choice should rest with those who know best -- families.
Anna Vesely Pilette
we invite you to share yours.
____________________________________________________________________
Without commenting on the relative merits of public vs. private vs. home school education, I do believe that each family should be allowed to choose the educational solution that works best for them and their children. In our case, the "best" solution has varied over the years, though public school has not been part of the equation. Since the 2009-10 school year, our child has attended a not-so-nearby independent day school, thanks in large part to the school's generous scholarships and financial aid. Although we do not live in a town that offers choice or provides any tuition assistance, the school's population is drawn from MANY towns that do pay a substantial portion of tuition. While we would be thrilled if our town offered choice, we also know that we benefit directly from other towns' choice/tuition. Without such assistance to our child's school and others like it, the schools would not be able to offer as much financial aid as it does, and for many families, ours included, that could very well spell the end of independent school as a viable choice.
J.D., Wallingford
____________________________________________________________________
We have four children. Our two older daughters attended 12 miserable years at our local school. It was a fight every day regarding one thing or another. There are problems too numerous to list. After meeting with the School District's supervisory union and with lawyers we decided to pay for our two younger children to go to a different school. We are a lot less stressed about school and our children are doing great.
If schools were run like businesses only the good would survive. We need to reward schools that perform the way they should and weed out the the bad ones. It is so simple.
A.J., Concord
____________________________________________________________________
I am a step-parent of a 28 yr. son, who I have co-parented since he was 5. A very serious hand injury kept me from working for a whole year. The opportunity to home school my stepson was presented at the same time when he was a 6th grader. He had been to daycare since infancy, then preschool, then kindergarten. When grade school began he was sure that school was a place you went while mom and dad worked. He had been a parochial school student and a public school student and neither was working. We enrolled him in an "independent study" home school program that truly empowered him. It was his responsibility to read, comprehend and present information. He discovered his own learning style and has not looked back. It was very affordable at the time but that was California. My location in Vermont only gives me a choice of high schools. For most of us it is too late by then to get the spark back. Our family is bearing the hardship of paying taxes AND schooling our 12 yr.old son at home for all the same reasons we did it the first time, overwhelming love and concern for our child's well being.
D.P., Lunenburg
____________________________________________________________________
We are working on providing the best education possible for our children through a mix of public school, homeschool, phone conference classes and cooperatives. Our local high school, MMU, has been very accommodating. Our children have taken art, English, foreign languages, Driver's Ed, etc. there. In addition to taking about two classes per year, our daughter Molly also played sports for MMU. She was offered a sports and academic scholarship which helped her pay for college. Heather also took classes at MMU and participated in extracurriculars: drama, music, and dance. She is currently recording a CD of original songs to help fund her way through college. Meghan enjoyed four years of Latin with Mr. Slayton at MMU. One year Mr. Slayton actually taught a class of four students during his "free period"!!! I cannot thank him enough for his talent and commitment. Our fourth daughter Colleen is going into ninth grade and will be joining cooperatives and taking conference call classes. We don't yet know her future involvement with the public high school, but it is marvelous to have MMU as an option. We have been blessed to live near a public school that has been so open and accommodating. I would love to publicly thank all the teachers and coaches who have taught my kids so much. I am a strong advocate for school choice because I see that it works. All Vermont children would benefit from choice, even the ones who choose to remain at their current public school, because it creates a climate of commitment and trust. And if transportation is an issue, all the more reason to have statewide access to excellent online classes. We have statewide school taxes, we should have statewide school choice.
K.B., Jericho
____________________________________________________________________
From as early as preschool I knew that my daughters were fragile. I knew that they were going to need a certain kind of relationship with their school and teachers to survive. I chose their schools very carefully and sometimes the place they needed to be was not our local school. For four years when I was first on my own with my daughters living in a rented basement apartment after loosing my wife, my job, and my income, I paid full tuition to the public school in the neighboring town, despite the severe financial hardship, so they could be where they needed to be. One size does not fit all.
George Abrams
____________________________________________________________________
Our daughter has severe dyslexia when it comes to writing but she has 8 wonderful years at Southshire Community School where we paid tuition of $4500. Now she is in our local high school and is miserable and has been made to feel "stupid" because they do not know how to deal with her challenges. Our only other options are private high schools beginning at $15K, on a teachers salary there is no way we can afford to send our daughter to a school that works while putting our son through college. Public school does not work for everyone, please do not punish towns which support school choice and more importantly give each Vermont child the education that they deserve.
C.H., North Bennington
____________________________________________________________________
I'm a single parent and could barely afford my rent or mortgage but was able to move to a town that had school choice for HS. My daughter wasn't challenged and taught good work and study ethics at the public school. She wasn't happy at the Waldorf School. I was fortunate enough to find a living situation in a town that supported School Choice and she was accepted into the Sharon Academy. That has made all the difference. Unfortunately our public school experience was a bit of a nightmare. Now she is well recognized in her school, she is challenged to grow emotionally and mentally in an emotionally supportive and stimulating environment. It seems like a great injustice that not every child is entitled to school choice and that towns that support such a reasonable civil right should get punished by paying higher taxes (under Act 153 if they are unable to participate in voluntary merger).
J.C., Tunbridge
____________________________________________________________________
We had our child in public school for two and a half years. We really tried, and to be honest, we felt that the school really tried too. But it wasn't working for our son, and he was getting extremely depressed. He had pretty much stopped learning anything he was so miserable. The same child that used to read _constantly_ refused to read anything. We enrolled him in a Waldorf school, even though we were baffled as to how we were going to afford it. For our child, it was the best decision we could have made. We have our son back. He is happy, enthusiastic, and once again reading anything he can get his hands on. The artistic, engaging and in-depth nature of his school program really works for him. Sadly, I can't say that it is working so well for the whole family. We don't make much (we qualify for reduced lunches) and paying for both an independent school while supporting the public school with our taxes has been just horrible. But really, there is no choice, I can't have my child return to not learning, and hating everything to do with learning. We are still looking for answers, so that we can have a child who is learning, and still put food on the table. It is just wrong that we feel we currently have to choose between the two. One size most certainly does not fit all.
J.V., Greensboro Bend
____________________________________________________________________
I have one daughter who is currently a sophomore at the St. Johnsbury Academy. I have spent the last thirteen years trying to navigate Vermont‘s Educational system to ensure that her educational needs were being met in a school that was the best fit for her. The current system of school choice is discriminatory. Basing school choice on geography is ridiculous. What is a right for one Vermonter should be a right for all Vermonters. Let us make it simple: Funding follows the child.
My daughter’s elementary school tuition was half the price of the public school, yet she received an excellent education; one that has prepared her extremely well for high school. She is thriving at the Academy. We have spent $74,000.00 on her education and have paid our property taxes on top of that, well over $100,000.00. We have done all this on salaries that would designate her for “free or reduced lunch”. We have moved from our dream home to a school choice town in order for her to continue her education at the Academy. It is too late for us to reap any benefit from any changes made but I hope that future generations of children and their parents will not have to sacrifice so much in order to meet their child’s educational needs.
Trudie Baker
____________________________________________________________________
In 2006 we settled in new community to gain access to educational choice for our kids - that meant selling our homestead in a community we loved. In the past 4 years in our new community, I have witnessed parents removing their children from schools that were not a good fit only to have a neighbor enroll their child in that very same school with great results. I’m involved in our local library and see lots of parents and kids, everyone is happy and doing well, there is a huge amount of educational satisfaction in our town. We have school choice from K-12 and our town’s children attend NINE different schools. I find the idea that each child is in a school that best fits their needs to be compelling on many levels, particularly with the improvement in classroom dynamics which benefits all children.
Angelique Lee, Founder, School Choice Vermont
____________________________________________________________________
Even in our family with three middle schoolers, one size does not fit all. Fortunately, Grafton has choice but, unfortunately, it's only for 7th and 8th grade. When my daughter was in 6th grade, I toured 10 different schools and was fortunate to find Hilltop Montessori School in Brattleboro. She flourished there both academically and socially. Though it is a wonderful school with great teachers, it wasn't as good of a fit for my twin boys mainly because there were three siblings in one small class. They were all also unprepared academically which presented a challenge to us all and made me wish we had had choice for elementary school. After struggling again to find a fit for high school, we have decided to move to a choice town even though we haven't sold our house and have a property tax bill of close to $10,000. We now have to add rent to those expenses. For the naysayers, I would like to add that Hilltop was a relative bargain for the taxpayers of our town since tuition was capped at $11,576 per student compared to the $14,320 tuition for the public school--a savings of $8,232 for our family alone. In addition, we paid tutoring fees for our daughter who would have continued on an IEP in the public system. Charter and magnet schools are on the rise in other states, giving students and families more and more choice. Yet Vermont--one of the few states left that doesn't allow charters--is moving backwards, now looking to take away the choice we do have. Had we been able to sell our house, chances are that we would now be living in another state and Vermont would have lost another family.
Molly Leuschel
____________________________________________________________________
My husband and I are parents of twins. We sent the kids to the local K-6 public school for 2 years, and then homeschooled for 2 years. The math program, Everyday Math, was not working for our daughter, the kids were not challenged enough, the curriculum had too little emphasis on content, the school climate seemed more about making the kids feel good than about serious learning, and discipline was not consistent or morally grounded. Grafton only has choice in grades 7-8. We now send our kids to New England Classical Academy in Claremont, NH, and we're all happy, kids and parents, except for paying both high property taxes and a very reasonable tuition. A group of Grafton parents has been working to expand our current 7 & 8 choice to high school by petitioning a town vote to withdraw from the Bellows Falls Union High School District. The town voted the withdrawal down, in large part to be sure, because of fears that more tuitioning would make our taxes more unstable. Because of the way the state calculates spending per child (the student count is taken from the two years previous to the expenditure year) our taxes swing up and down depending on our small middle school population. Voters thus identify tuitioning with tax hikes caused by arbitrary measures of Acts 60/68 and are wary of extending choice. Nevertheless, it is interesting that for grades 7 & 8, the two grades that we do have choice, students go to a number of the area public and independent schools including the Compass School and The Grammar School. For sure, one size does not fit all, and parents know what is best for their children and for their families. Choice should rest with those who know best -- families.
Anna Vesely Pilette
