Peabody Open House

At 9am this morning they had an open house at Peabody Elementary School.  For those of you who don't know, Peabody is a early childhood education campus located on Capitol Hill; they have a three year-old program, a Pre-K program, Kindergarten, and a Reggio Emilia program all in one building.  It's kind of cool because kids get to start their scholastic career in a place that is just for them, rather than being in some sort of segregated section of an elementary school.

 

When I was doing some online research I found that the demographic breakdown showed that Peabody was 84% Black, but when I arrived at the school at 8:55 I was surprised to see that I was the only Black parent there.  Before things got started some more parents trickled in, including a few other Black people.  I don't know why I cared that I wasn't the only Black person there, but I did.

 

Anyway, the collection of administrators start up with a fairly disjointed presentation about the school that mostly consisted of, "Hey, we do a lot of art here!"  That's cool, art is good, I was surprised to see some of the quotes from the kids during the presentation saying things about Matisse and Monet; I was in college before I knew who either of them were.  I have to say that I was a little disappointed at the lack of polish during the presentation, these people are educators you would think that presenting information would more or less be in their organizational DNA.  I dunno, maybe the folks that run the school know that they don't really need to impress the parents because they're generally acknowledged to be the best public education option for kids on the Hill.

 

There was some discussion of in boundary vs out of boundary admission and how many spots were going to be available.  We live just outside of the boundary for Peabody, and it seems like we're pretty much fucked because I was told that they didn't enroll any kids that were out of boundary for the three year old program last year.

 

I saw some other parents that I knew from BabyRat's daycare center and hanging out at the park across the street from Peabody; a few of them were out of boundary too and they mostly seemed resigned to paying for private school for a year and applying to get into the Pre-K program which has more spots.