Navigating High School

My oldest son started high school this year -a major transition for our family in many ways. Yes, I was one of those people who swore that my child would never darken the doors of a public school, but a beautiful new school with the promise of wonderful opportunities and a great principal beckoned us to soften our stance. We reasoned that he had had a solid grounding in both academics and our values through his early years homeschooling and more recently at his private school. I realized that interacting with only 10 classmates and walking between two classrooms across the hall were probably not going to provide him the depth of social skills and problem-solving experiences he needed to successfully navigate college away from home in a few short years. And, the private school he was attending decided last spring not to offer high school this fall, as originally planned. So, with some excitement and a great deal of trepidation, we dropped him off for his first day of school. I felt very helpless as I watched him walking in to that HUGE school with 1200 people that he didn’t know. I breathed a prayer of ” Lord, you have to look out for him now, because I can’t.” I had held a false sense of security and control as long as he was at home or in the small school, where talking with the teachers and headmaster was an almost daily occurrence. Now, I knew I had to let go.