Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Schooling Blues (also Titled, “Why It’s Hard to Recruit New Doctors With Families to Live Here”)

When Husband & I first moved here (a year and a half ago), we started out with a three year contract. This would conveniently allow us to move somewhere else the summer before the Papaya became kindergarten material, thus expanding our school options for him.

Last September, however, Husband (with my blessing) signed a four year contract, making our total stay here five years, two of which the Papaya will be school-aged. So the theoretical question of whether or not we’ll send him to First Mesa Elementary School has become not-so-theoretical. On top of this quandary, we’ve added the question of whether or not we should send the Papaya to the Head Start program here this coming Fall.

In response to the schooling debate over on Jordana’s blogsite, I’ve been inspired to type out some of our own struggles regarding school options for our children. While I’ve learned recently that our dilemmas are in no way exceptional to us, but that even parents in suburbia struggle with how to school their kids, I think that living here has presented us with some unique concerns.

If someone had asked me those two questions (from paragraph before last) the first month we lived here, I would have answered, 1. “Probably”, and 2. “No way! Who needs it?”. After a year and a half of living here, these answers have changed to 1. “Almost certainly not”, and 2. “No way, but I wish there was something of some sort available to us.”

The reasons we initially considered sending the Papaya to First Mesa Elementary included the following:

1. We really wanted to fit in here, and not be seen as the high and mighty Pahanna (white people), too good to send their children to school with everybody else. After all, we came here to serve and to try to befriend and live in community (to some extent) with other Hopi.

2. We thought it would be neat for the Papaya to go to school in a multicultural setting. The schools here really do try to teach Hopi culture, and even some of the Hopi language, to their students. We plan to spend most of our lives living & working in cultures different from our own, and we really want the Papaya to play and be friends with kids who are different from himself.

3. The elementary school building was brand new, and beautiful. We were hoping that the nice facility might draw some higher caliber teachers.

4. We know that (for a variety of sad reasons) most reservation schools are ranked near the bottom of any list. But we planned to teach the Papaya a lot at home, anyway. We figured that even if he didn’t learn anything at school, what we could teach him at home would be sufficient for his early years.

5. Our MD friends who sent their children there had mostly positive (or at least not a lot of negative) things to say.

The idea of sending my child to Head Start (or that a child with a parent earning an MD salary would even be eligible for Head Start) seemed crazy. But I soon found out that not only was everyone living here eligible, no matter what their economic circumstances (because there are NO other preschool options of any sort within 80 miles), but that it was the expected thing to do when your child turned 4 (or even 3 ½). My next door neighbor and good friend of last year, who was also pahanna (and whose husband was another doctor) sent her 4 year old daughter to Head Start, and it was a great experience for all concerned. While it’s doubtful whether or not her daughter learned anything academically she hadn’t already learned at home, she matured socially & became a much nicer person to be with, and my neighbor finally developed friendships with Hopi women, something she had been hoping to do for over two years. She urged me strongly to send the Papaya there as soon as he was eligible (he actually has been eligible since Christmas).

Meanwhile, over the past year and a half, just about all of the families with kids that lived on the health care center compound moved away. It’s hard to express the isolation here to somebody who’s never visited. We lived on a compound, attached to the health care center, that is owned by the Hopi Tribe and houses health care center staff. There’s a playground at the center of the compound, which, for my first few months, was a real social center for parents & children during the day. But now all but 3 of these families have moved away (and two of the remaining families are moving in the next few months) & the playground is usually empty. On the entire reservation (a fairly large area), there are 2 gas stations and 2 small food marts that I know of, as well as one convenience store. There’s not even a library. The nearest town with real services is Winslow, 80 miles away, and the nearest town that’s really fun to go to is Flagstaff, about 100 miles and a 2 hour drive away. Our small church is a 30 minute drive away. When I look out my back window, I can usually see for over 100 miles (there are no trees) and there is not another house in sight.

Before moving here, we lived in downtown York, PA. I don’t recommend it (the downtown area) as a place to bring up kids – it has a gritty, Eastern inner-city feel; we had no yard and sometimes heard gunshots from our house; we could watch drug deals taking place in our back alley. However, even from inner-city York, the Papaya and I could walk to a nice library, where he could play with other kids and we could read together. We could walk to the YWCA and take a Mom & Tots swimming class together, where he would interact with other kids & I would interact with other women. We could walk to a church where I went to a Tuesday morning Bible study. He would play with the other kids in the nursery & I would enjoy relationships with other women. We could get in our car and, within 15 minutes, drive to a grocery store, the mall, and several lovely parks/ playgrounds.

I actually love the place where we live – after all, we chose to extend our time here. There are many wonderful things about living here, and I’m starting to build some relationships and beginning to feel a sense of belonging. But I hadn’t really thought about how much all of the things I just mentioned had become part of the fabric of my day, and how much the Papaya (& the Banana) & I would be left to our own resources here, especially when the majority of the other families moved away.

So, mostly for the social interaction aspect of it (for both of us), and because enough people were recommending it to me, I played around (just a little bit) with the idea of sending the Papaya to Head Start. But over the last few months, I’ve heard enough negative things about it (some just unbelievable) that I’ve gone back to my original “No way!” Moreover, Husband & I have gotten uncomfortable enough about the school system here in general to pretty much decide on an alternative for the Papaya when he enters kindergarten.

For one, the nearest Head Start program (First Mesa) runs all day (including breakfast & lunch), four days a week. This just seems like an awful lot for a 3 or 4 year old. You are not allowed to enroll your child “part time” – it’s all or nothing. This, by itself, is enough of a reason for me not to send the Papaya. Unfortunately, there are more:

Last year, there were three occasions in which the Head Start school bus driver just didn’t show up to pick up my neighbor’s daughter (or anybody else, for that matter) for a few days. He didn’t even call in to say he wouldn’t be able to do it – he just completely disappeared. “He’s got to be in jail,” my neighbor reasoned. “Why else can nobody reach him?” “Yeah,” I joked, “he’s in jail for DUI!” Well, as it turned out, he was in jail for DUI – three times throughout the course of the school year. The administrators knew about it, but kept on giving him another chance. And it turned out that this had been going on the previous year, too! My neighbor, slightly guiltily (see reason #1 above that we considered sending the Papaya to public school), started driving her daughter to Head Start. Not until the statewide Head Start evaluation team showed up & heard about it (because of some whistle-blower teacher) was the driver fired (with no one to take his place). And this was almost at the end of the school year!

Despite her & her daughter’s good experience with Head Start, my neighbor was disgusted & angered at the end of last year because the bad teachers were retained or promoted, while the good, dedicated teachers were not. This had to do with clan connections and local politics.

A Head Start teacher from the Third Mesa program who goes to our church complained to another church member (a HVAC specialist) that the staff & students at her Head Start had just been feeling sick and dizzy and tired all day, for several weeks. The HVAC guy went to check things out. Although he was not allowed to make any repairs or get too close, he quickly ascertained that the school’s heater was not installed properly, meaning that carbon monoxide was being piped into the building all day. There were no detectors.

Two of our Christian Hopi friends pulled their children out of Head Start last year, largely because the Hopi religion was pushed so strongly & their children were not allowed to express their Christian religion at all. This is a tricky thing – it seems that the Hopi religion is tied so closely into the Hopi culture, that when a Hopi school tries to instill a sense of cultural pride & belonging in its students, it nearly always involves teaching & promoting Hopi religion. For example (from what I’ve heard), our friends’ children were not allowed to say grace over their meals, and were asked to leave some of each meal untouched, for the kachinas (spiritual messengers, almost like gods). This is one of the main reasons we’re reluctant to send the Papaya to public school here at such an impressionable age. I don’t think public school should promote any religion, Christian or Hopi or anything else, and it makes me uncomfortable that they do (although I understand and even sympathize with the reasons behind it).

Homeschooling sounds somewhat fun, but I’d really like us to have a little more contact with the reservation world. We’re isolated enough as it is.

Happily, it looks like there is an option that, starting in kindergarten, would allow the Papaya to still interact with other children, different from himself, and even learn some of the Hopi culture (but not the Hopi religion). It would also provide a small class size (this year, I think there are about 6 students in the kindergarten), and, hopefully, a more flexible environment and dedicated teachers than the public school. The Hopi Mission School is a small school (about 50 students, grades K-6), founded about 50 years ago by the Mennonites. Though no longer officially Mennonite (it has a local board now), it is still staffed largely by Mennonite teachers. It really is a small school, and brings back happy memories of small, fairly informal schools I went to in Bangladesh & Kenya. It seems to be pretty good academically, at least compared to surrounding schools (my husband works with a nurse whose husband is a teacher at the public elementary school, but sends their son to the Hopi Mission School), and has dedicated teachers. I’m actually pretty excited about the option, and hope it proves to be a positive start for the Papaya’s academic (and social) experience.

And as for preschool – I’m still hoping I can work some sort of “co-op” thing out with a couple of my Hopi friends with preschoolers (all girls). Now, if we could only find a boy around the Papaya’s age for him to play with…

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