Mommy Mondays: The Kindergarten Dilemma

I feel like so much of "mommy mondays" is devoted to my littlest guy, which makes sense.  These are NOT the salad days.  Let's check in on the reason Mommy Mondays started.

When we first moved into our house, one of my concerns was that the school system where we live is terrible.  No really. This isn't like a skinny girl telling you how fat she is.  The elementary school that we're zoned for based on our address is one of the absolute worst in the state.

Our original plan involved us potentially moving before Thatkid started kindergarten, although, in truth, that was never Thatboy's plan.  He loves our house, he loves where we live.  So for that, among many other reasons, Thatkid is due to start kindergarten in the fall and we're still stuck with the same school.

Back in March, Thatkid attended a "kindergarten assessment" for the school he is zoned for.

At the assessment they took a photo of Thatkid with the school mascots, and asked him a bunch of questions to determine what he already knew.

They were unbelievably impressed with the fact that he knew his alphabet, how to count, shapes, colors, sight words, things that all the kids in his preschool know.  And Thatkid reveled in the attention.  Being told he was so smart, so impressive, the best kid they had seen all days.  All the teachers fought over who would get to have him in his class.  He ate it up, and declared that night that this was the only school he wanted to go to.  But the fact that the school was so impressed by him only confirmed my concerns with the school.

So we've been on the hunt.  With plans A, B, and C to get him out of the bad school and into a better one.

Plan A involved a lottery to get into a better school.  Our district allows interdistrict transfers, if there's room in the school you wish to transfer to, and you get selected in the lottery for those empty seats.  The school we attempted to get Thatkid into just  happened to also be the school where all of his preschool friends are distictred (is that a word?) for.

Plan B involved a lottery to get into a charter school in our area.  There are 2 in our school district. One is a homeschool charter school - where the children attend classes 2 days a week, and are homeschooled 3 days a week.  Which does not work for us as working parents.  The other is a more traditional school, but after the application and lottery process we were 37 on the waitlist.   Which doesn't look so good.

Plan C involves some shadiness - using a friend's address to claim we're in the district for the school we want to go to.

Luckily, we didn't have to resort to plan C, because we got into the better school in our district through the lottery process.    The only process we now have to worry about is telling Thatkid, who wants to go to the other school.  He's got another assessment at the new school next week, so I'm hoping that goes well enough that he's sold on the new school!