Eight years ago, I wrote a blog post the night after my daughter’s first day of kindergarten.
I wrote it in a rush of conviction, the kind that comes when you’ve made a decision that surprises everyone around you and you need to say it out loud before the doubt creeps back in. I wrote about being a White family and choosing our local neighborhood public school (72% Latine, 83% low-income, no PTA, no yoga, not Montessori) when we had other options. I wrote about what I believed: that good intentions were no longer enough, that my child deserved exactly as good an education as every child in my neighborhood, nothing more and nothing less, and that I wasn’t willing to continue to prop up a segregated school system by opting out of it.
Scary Mommy picked it up. It went wide. And then the comments came.
“When your kids grow up and realize what you have done to them, they will never forgive you.”
“You’re setting your children on fire to keep other kids warm.”
“Stop virtue signaling and sacrificing your kids on the altar of social justice.”
“I would, but my kid is too sensitive. Too smart. Too special.”
I POURED over the comments. Bookmarking the blog, the article, the facebook post, for weeks I read what The Internet thought about me and my parenting. In fairness, there were a lot of kind, thoughtful comments. And some people showed up to Integrated Schools to hear more about our work. But my sweet beautiful brain, wired to look for the bad over the good, sat in the morass of the critique. The negative comments triggered a physical response in my body that was already on edge. I can remember the frozen feeling down my back and the sour taste in my mouth as I read them. The criticism triggered a fear that felt like a bear chasing me. What if they’re right? What if my precious, sweet, thoughtful kindergartner is going to be ruined?
Yesterday, that kindergartner started high school.
She walked through the metal detectors at the entrance (which I wish weren’t there), and which she registered approximately the way the rest of us register airport security: annoying, apparently inevitable, not worth getting derailed by. She found her two friends from junior high within minutes of arriving in the quad. She located her crush and her “number one op” (teenager for nemesis, I’m told) and successfully avoided both. She got lost twice. She made three new friends. She reported that the cafeteria lunch was “mid.” Her low point of the day was discovering that her 7th and 8th period classes are on opposite sides of campus, which means she will, in her words, “never ever be on time to that class.” I believe there may be some teenage exaggeration there.
It was, in other words, a typical first day at our neighborhood comprehensive high school. She just happens to be a White kid from an affluent home and the school just happens to be 67% Latine, 15% Black, 7% White, 6% Indigenous, and 80% low income students.
I want to report about the years between that kindergarten post and today, because they were not all easy, and I don’t think it serves anyone for me to skip the hard parts.
I made mistakes. Some of them were the earnest, well-meaning, cringe-worthy mistakes of a White woman who believed so much in the work that she occasionally forgot what the work was about. I hosted a wine and cheese night for preschool parents to rally them toward our neighborhood school, which, I can see now, was basically attempted school gentrification over slices of gouda and Sauv Blanc. I over-engineered PTO meetings. I got into conflict with other White families about how much they were steamrolling the principal. In other words, there were moments when my commitment to the work of integration looked a lot more like performance than practice, and I was so activated in my own nervous system that I couldn’t always tell the difference.
There were also times that ranged from annoying to brutal for my kid. Navigating difference, often being one of the only White kids in the room. Too much testing. Too many worksheets. Too many screens. There was also some conflict, some teasing, some less-than-effective teachers, some dumb rules. There were moments that felt real shitty, both for my kid and for their mom.
Often, when those challenging moments arrived, it felt like proof that the commenters were right. I had truly ruined my kid, forever. I had invested so much in this project, that it felt like every experience my kid had had to prove the concept that public schools were magical perfect places and everyone who didn’t choose them was dumb. So every time something went wrong, I felt like I was being chased by a bear again.
I started doing some inner work through politicized and generative somatics. I started feeling my feelings as data points, not as life-or-death experiences. My therapist once told me this amazing thing about our big brained, highly tuned nervous systems. We are wired to look out for pain and danger. If we see a squiggly green thing on the ground in front of us, it is safer for us to jump back and think “snake!” even if it is a garden hose. But as we grow to trust our selves, our systems, and our bodies, we can better distinguish what is a snake, and what is actually a garden hose.
I had, for years, been parenting like everything, anything, was a snake. And most of the time, my path was littered with garden hoses. I was slowly starting to recognize fear as a part of my experience, not the whole of me. I could notice a moment of challenge for my kids as a difficult experience, not as a total fiasco or permanent catastrophe.
Prentis Hemphill writes in What It Takes to Heal (our current Integrated Schools book club pick) about how our histories live in our bodies, and how showing up differently in the world requires more than a changed mind. It requires a more connected, integrated nervous system. I know this is true because I have felt it. I grew up in profoundly segregated and privileged spaces, and for years I would walk into our kid’s school community wanting so badly to be fully present, but find something in me scanning, tightening, hypervigilant in ways I didn’t have words for. Not because anything was wrong. Because my body had never learned to be at home in spaces that looked different than the ones I came from.
Learning to tend to that and to stay in my body when it wanted to flee, to listen without crafting a response, to feel the discomfort without letting it run the show… that is what made it possible to actually be in community rather than just adjacent to it. And being in community, real community across difference, is where the world opened up. The friendships that have lasted. The fights for resources that we actually won. I began to feel the belonging that I had long intellectualized, in my tissues. I felt less guarded and on edge. And when, occasionally, things happened that were objectively NOT GOOD… I actually had the presence to respond, holding both my feelings and fears, along with an emerging inner knowing of what to do next.
And then came High School. For many years, I heard the same thing from people we knew: well, you can do this for elementary. But the stakes are too high for high school.
I won’t pretend this didn’t get under my skin, because it did. And really, because I feared they were right. Our neighborhood high school is a large, comprehensive high school – 1700 students. There was something about the scale that felt different. Scarier.
And then I remembered something Nikole Hannah-Jones has said: if that school is good enough for any student, it’s good enough for my student. And if it’s not, then what are we doing to give it the support it needs?
There are students who go to that school. They deserve a great educational experience. Either it’s good enough for all the kids in it, or it isn’t good enough for any of them. That is not a comfortable thought. It is also the only honest one.
So, we toured the school. We went inside. We talked to kids and counselors and looked at the clubs and the sports and the drama program and the AP offerings and the band room and the Costa Rica global studies trip. My daughter, who is fourteen and nearly only expresses herself through eye rolls and extremely specific opinions about what’s cringe, looked at me after the tour and said: “It has good vibes.”
We enrolled.
When we did, the counselor called to check in on her interests. She signed up for Acting, Honors Spanish and Symphonic Band. She wants to try out for Softball and join Student Government. As it turns out – it’s a pretty typical high school.
Almost all of the stories we heard about that school came from people who had never been inside it. I want to be precise about that: not people who had a bad experience there, not families who had tried it and left, but people who had absorbed a reputation built by other people who also had never been inside it. Stories traveling the parenting whisper networks between people who had never visited, landing as facts, calcifying into “everyone knows.” Assumptions and decisions made without ever walking through the door.
Choosing a school is not a permanent declaration of identity. It is not a contract you sign. It is a decision you make with the information and the courage you have in the moment you are in. You keep paying attention, and you stay in honest communication with your kid and with the school, and if something is genuinely not working — if your child is being harmed, if the fit is truly wrong in ways you’ve actually experienced rather than imagined — you make a different decision. The one-day-at-a-time philosophy has held me in good stead: the things I thought were the worst were often more garden hose than snake.
What I’m less willing to let go of is what we’re participating in when we make school choices. Not as a moral cudgel but as an honest question. If more families in my neighborhood made the choice we made, what would happen to our district’s high schools, most of which are currently under-enrolled? If the families with the most access and the most options stay in their neighborhood schools and bring their social and political capital with them, what becomes possible for those schools? And when families show up (this is a BIG caveat), what happens when they show up to join the community, not change it or fix it or take it over (something I really stumbled over at first). And if all families with the privilege of choice opt out, following a reputation based more on lore than real, lived experience… What happens then?
We know what happens. We have watched it happen, for decades, across this country.
A few nights before the first day of school, I asked my daughter what she thought of me. Of us. Of nine years of global majority, Title I, public schools when other options were available. I asked her if she felt like we had set her on fire to keep other kids warm.
She gave me the side eye that I have come to understand as one of her primary forms of communication.
Then she said: “Mom. You are like my main hero. I am proud of myself, and of us, and of where we go to school. There have been things that have sucked. But mostly things have been good. And I know how to take care of myself and help others. And it’s just not that serious.”
She is fourteen. She is, as I said, mostly an eye-rolling, surly teenager. She chose (emphasis on she, we just set some parameters) her high school from a list of public schools within a twenty minute drive of our home. She may be a little bit indoctrinated. But she is also a person who understands that the level of financial comfort our family has is partly a product of historical injustice — from my grandfather benefiting from the GI Bill to the redlining that shaped this city’s geography and our ability to turn homeownership into wealth— and who sees our privilege as one way of being, not the only way of being, and certainly not the only thing that makes a person have value or be deserving of safety, health, and justice.
She knows how to move in community with people who are not like her. She knows, in her bones in the way that only proximity teaches, that all kids are her kids. She doesn’t have to like everybody, but she knows how to learn alongside pretty much anybody. She did not get that from a lesson or a lecture. She got it from where she went to school, and from the friends she made there, and from nine years of belonging to something bigger than our family’s private optimization scheme.
I think about Courtney Everts Mykytyn every time I write something like this. She founded Integrated Schools. She was my friend. She would say: people like you do things like this.
Not because it’s easy. Not because you’ll do it perfectly. But because someone else already did, and because the next person watching, The family on the fence, the one afraid, the one who has heard the rumors and never walked through the door, is taking their cues from you.
This is the practice. It is imperfect and ongoing and sometimes uncomfortable. But it is a practice, and it compounds over time, and the person it has profoundly shaped in my household isn’t just the fourteen-year-old who walked through the metal detector this morning and didn’t miss a beat. It’s all of us.
We did not set her on fire.
She found her people in the quad.
She joined the band.
Anna Lodder is a Project Manager for Integrated Schools and serves on the board of the Save Our Schools Arizona Network. She has been sending her kids to global majority, Title I public schools for nine years and counting. If you are sitting with this decision and want to talk to a parent who has been there, our Caregiver Connection program exists exactly for you.
Oh my goodness i love this so much. “It’s Just not that serious.” I want to embroider that and hang it on my wall. Thank you for this.