Change is Scary

I’m not from here.  But then again, neither are you.  Most of us in Los Angeles County are transplants from somewhere.  If you’re a parent, then we understand each other.  If you have a mother, an aunt, a granddaughter, a sister, then we understand each other.  We are family.  

I’m a DAR gypsy who has lived all over the United States.  I’m married to an immigrant.  My children have attended every type of school imaginable. Montessori.  Inner-city Public. Parochial.  And every single time, I tried my best to find what would work.  That’s not entitled.  That’s what you do for family.  

When I was in graduate school, the founder of my program used to say, “There is no such thing as bad press.”  Well, negativity is how I became aware of The Incubator School after they were blocked from locating at Venice High School.  One concern that I understand was voiced is  coexistence.  That, I can speak about.  

We last came from Minnesota.  Ya know, the land of the funny accent, cheese curds, and good people.  My kids went to public school.  For two years, they grew at a colocation, a “school within a school”, called The Lighthouse Program.  There were kids ages 1st to 12th grade (yep, all together!), and we were in the same wing as the alternative high school. 

You know the type.  The bad kids.  The dropouts.   I put my precious daughter and son in a building with the ‘rejects’.  And they thrived. 

Our program had classrooms on one separate end, but everyone walked through the same doors   My kids shared the same Physical Education teacher that taught teenage moms. They used the same bathrooms and ate in the high school cafeteria with the teenage dads.  

Why?  How?  What!?!  

Respect.  Those ‘bad’ kids were no different than mine. That is the simplest explanation.  Our two small schools, The Lighthouse and the Alternative School,     were housed in a regular “normal” high school, so actually there were three schools that shared the same roof. Every program had separate lunchroom times.  Rules were in place for the older kids in regards to behavior around the younger kids.   

The little school my kids were in was project- and inquiry-based.  I found it when I was desperate because my oldest, my son was miserable.  This wasn’t the “I-got-my-iPhone-taken-away” misery or some other pseudo-pain.  This was the “I was right about a problem, and the gifted teacher took me into the hall, cornered me and yelled at me because I corrected her in class” misery.  

I want to tell you why we stayed until the move to Los Angeles.  My kids were learning.  They were happy.  

We didn’t have much equipment.  But the teachers were great.  They were positive and engaged.  We had very little money for fieldtrips.  But the museum trained us, and we taught art in the classrooms. The walls were rough.  But we painted them.  It wasn’t perfect, as nothing is, but there was no “un-learning”, no drama to undo.

Colocation worked just fine for us.  

My son, who by the way also has a learning disability, did a project that earned him an invitation to LSU and an interview with a Nobel Laureate.    

But when we moved to California last year, he became a dropout.  

What happened?   

He went to University. At 14.   

We need programs like the Incubator School, and that Lighthouse program in Minnesota.  And we have to make room for them.  Our world has shifted to a global economy, and to give our kids the best chance we should provide innovative programs that can meet their needs.  

Change is scary, just like the usual family reunion.  But we must embrace it and each other.  

Lisa Li