My passion for my sons’ education is deeply rooted in my personal experiences with the U.S. public school system and my parents’ idiosyncratic, I dare say eccentric view of the world. While I grew up in Kentucky, I was raised with a diverse environment filled with people from all over the world, various areas of academia, and culture. But these experiences are deeply laden in adversity that gave me a unique outlook.
My mother grew up in Appalachian Kentucky with the quintessential associated difficulties of the region compounded by the death of her mother at the age of 8. She drowned her fate in books, reading with the same illusions of an ostrich. Her thirst had the single sided effect of propelling her in her academic pursues. As it had been explained to me years later, she maintained straight As throughout her elementary and secondary education and later in Nursing School in Louisville Kentucky. Her church paid her tuition and periodically checked in on her while enrolled. After her death I found her paperwork, admissions, letters of recommendation, notes that seem to also contain money and the welcome pamphlet from the Nursing School. She had changed her fate.
My father who due to his brother’s asthma grew up in San Jose after having taken a train west with his family at the age of 6. Transitioning from a one room schoolhouse to the state-of-the-art modern school systems in California were jolting. He clearly told me of his first day, the laugher after he said ‘yes Ma’am’ to the teacher and the transition to calling the teachers by their first names. His evolution of academic passions and religious exploration would not have had the same outcome in Kentucky but would end up molding him into an inquisitive young man at odd with public school and higher education in search for knowledge rather than an education or vocational training. Like my mother, my father was an avid reader. Often with more knowledge base than his instructors. He ended up dropping out of high school to join the U.S. Army as a Medic. A path that would lead him onto the journey that would find him at a hospital in Louisville Kentucky as an electrocardiogram technician to the same patient that would be in my mother’s care. By this time my father’s passions were fully engulfed in the nuances of Eastern Religions, from Advaita Vedanta to Theravadan Buddhism, and my mother was a Nurse who spent her spare time auditing Physic and Art classes. It was the late sixties, and they would soon fall in love.
By the time I was born, 1971, my father was known for his knowledge of Buddhism and was the representative for the interfaith community of Louisville for Buddhism, one of the Chaplin’s for a local Prison and later would be an ongoing guest expert on Buddhism at the University of Louisville and while he was never published was a prolific writer of religion, poetry, and short stories. My mother flourish in her Nursing career, later returning to school to further her education, which lead to her heading studies and seminars.
My parents decided to move to the countryside to raise me closer to nature, grow a garden, raise animals and be content. My father aimed for the aspirations of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, with a strong belief in self-reliance and a returning to nature. It was also 1976 and the first year of school integration in the public schools in Louisville Kentucky. So began my childhood, a web woven by
a small Kentucky town’s politics, school systems, social hierarchy, transcendentalism, Buddhism, Hinduism, The Indian Community, classical music, NPR, Chess, Catholicism, Thomas Merton, pets, rescuing wild animals, Ballet, painting, talking, and more talking.
In my 9th grade year, I was accepted into DuPont Manual, YPAS (Youth Performing Art High School) a Magnet School, that was created out of integration of the 1970s. While this path didn’t lead me where I had dreamed (Despite an acceptance into The Juilliard School in New York), I now see in retrospect a gambit of experiences that would lead me to where I am now.
The Louisville school system is a matrix of OPEN ENROLLMENT schools created by the need to integrate. (https://tcf.org/content/report/louisville-kentucky-reflection-school-integration/)
In contrast to my current residence in Ohio with a system so draconian in his deadlock of neighborhood schools based on home of residence that a lady was convicted for mispresenting her residency to facilitate a better fate for her daughter. (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/her-only-crime-was-helping-her-kid/597979/). This is only one example since I moved here in 2004 but it was a big difference from the system in Jefferson County Kentucky where, when I grew up a student or their parents only had to call up the school (unless there were other requirements like an audition) and ask to be transferred. The bus would change its route to pick you up and off you went.
I found myself at that stage in my life where one starts a family. Living in a place where there is zero school choice, unless you attend a private school. At the same time my oldest son had just be diagnosed with a speech delay. So, I quickly booked tours, dug deep into school course manuals, learned about school ranking systems and IEPs. I learned about Montessori school versus Waldorf, Independent schools versus Parochial schools, which schools had Speech Therapy, and which did not.
Once the pandemic made its rounds, we were in a new world once again. I watched once flourishing school systems break because their computer systems weren’t up to date or their style of teaching didn’t translate well to distance learning. It was at this point that my sons had consistently begun to show through testing, performance and interest gifted qualities. I was new to this area of education and unaware that the U.S. at the Federal level does not support Gifted Education and it is rare to find a state with gifted regulations. I found a used book in a corner bookstore called, “What High Schools Don’t Tell You (and what other parents don’t want you to know)” by Elizabeth Wissner-Gross. I read the book over cover to cover and slowly woke up to a world of underground education I was completely unaware existed. From online gifted math courses to Gifted and Talented Talent Search Programs ran by propionate
However, since Covid-19, the world has evolved greatly in the realm of online education and what Elizabeth had begun in her book was now changed. I was now on an adventure to research these avenues further. Elizabeth Wissner-Gross has a wonderful Ted Talk that’s definitely worth the time.
EduSavvy Mama 
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