The Kindergarten Wars

by Alan Eisenstock

  “Hey, kiddo, how was breakfast with Daddy?”

  “Good.”

  “Great.” Katie claps her hands. “Okay. Time to get dressed. We have to go.”

  Alex leans back on her elbows, cranes her neck up toward Katie. “Mom, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to Hunsford.”

  Katie grabs the remote and clicks off the TV. “Of course we’re going. Now come on, we don’t want to be late.”

  “I told you. I’m not going.”

  And then as if she hadn’t made herself completely clear, Alex repeats, “I’m not going to that school.”

  From somewhere deep inside, Katie summons an entire reservoir of perkiness and with her cheeks puffed out grotesquely says, “But, honey, we accepted the invitation. They invited us and we said we were gonna come . . .”

  Here it comes. The whining. A high-gear, pedal-down, head-crunching whirrr straight out of a power drill.

  “I don’t wanna go. I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna—”

  I’m dying, Katie says to herself. I’m gonna die right here, right now.

  “I don’t WANNA.”

  I’m in hell.

  Come on, come on. Get ahold of yourself. Okay. Now . . .

  What am I gonna do?

  I can’t believe this is happening. Of all the times and of all the places . . . Think. Think.

  SHIT! WHERE ARE MY PARENTING TOOLS RIGHT NOW? SHITTTTT!!!

  “I am not going.”

  Ice. Creepy as that little kid from The Ring.

  Through gritted teeth, low, inaudibly, Katie hisses back, “The fuck you’re not.”

  Do not do this.

  Katie feels herself starting to sweat. She looks at her daughter, glances at the time, 10:04, and she just wants to rip the pajamas off her, throw her clothes on, and shove her into the car seat.

  “MILES!”

  She has never heard herself scream that loudly or that frantically.

  “HELP!”

  As if out of a mist, he appears. He is wearing a white T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. His hair is a fright. He looks as if he’s just stepped out of a wind. He is holding the latest copy of Rolling Stone.

  “Yeah?”

  “I DON’T WANNA GO TO HUNSFORD.” Daring them now. Alex’s face reads, “Make me.”

  Katie’s pulse is pounding in her head like a jackhammer. She can barely hear herself speak.

  “Miles, what do we do? We have to be there in five minutes. What do we do?”

  His eyes scan the living room, from his daughter, sitting defiantly on the living room floor, to his wife, standing unsteadily in front of the couch, her eyes red with panic. His knees creak as he bends down, eye to eye with Alex.

  “Will you go to Hunsford if I take you? Just you and me?”

  A two-second hold that feels like twenty minutes.

  “Yes,” Alex says.

  “Let me get your clothes,” Katie says, sprinting out of the room.

  She is in Alex’s room in less than a heartbeat, her hands reaching for the drawstring pants. But where is the drawstring? Great. Disappeared somewhere inside the waistband.

  “Aw hell,” Katie says, her voice deepening into disaster register. She flings the pants into the corner, whips open Alex’s dresser, and pulls out a pair of jeans. This will do. They’ll have to. It is no longer about the outfit. It is only about getting her there in one piece, in some semblance of a cooperative mood. Katie races back into the living room. With lightning speed, she hoists the pajama tops over her daughter’s head, wrestles the blue top on. PJ bottoms off, jeans on, shoes on, tied, and let’s go!

  And they are gone, her daughter in an outfit that is actually cute, and her husband, the last-second replacement, off to Hunsford, the school of her dreams, looking as if he’s just come in from washing the car.

  “I can’t believe this,” she says aloud. “This is not happening. I cannot sit here for two hours.”

  She checks the flyer on the bulletin board in the kitchen and sees that, thankfully, Nick has a gym class scheduled at ten-thirty. They are in the SUV in seconds, he stuffed into the car seat, looking confused, she driving, her hands gripping the steering wheel in a state of shock. Ten minutes later, she settles Nick into class, walks outside, and calls Miles on her cell.

  “Well?”

  “It’s okay,” Miles says.

  “Did she separate?”

  “No problem. She wouldn’t even say good-bye to me.”

  Katie is dying another death. She should be at Hunsford with Alex. Seeing it through. It’s the least she deserves. This has been her cause, her purpose. All the time, emotion, and angst she has expended. The nightmare vomit dream. All of it. All leading up to this day, this moment, and she is not even there. She feels abandoned.

  “Tell me,” she says.

  “We get there, we’re a little late, but it’s fine. This teacher comes over, Cary or something, or Amy, I don’t remember her name. Anyway, she says, ‘Hi, Alex, will you come with me?’ Alex says, ‘Sure,’ and that was it. She starts to go off with her. I say, ‘Aren’t you going to say good-bye to me?’ She says, ‘No.’ I say, ‘Okay, then blow me a kiss. One little kiss.’ She says, ‘No,’ and they go off.”

  “Great. They must think she’s like the wildest little bitch in the world.”

  Miles says nothing. Katie pictures him sitting at Hunsford, so out of place. She starts to ask if he feels uncomfortable, thinks better of it. At least Alex is there. And she seems all right.

  “I have to do something to keep my mind off this. But call me.”

  “I will.”

  “Or I’ll call you.”

  “Either way.”

  Katie flips her cell closed. She steps back inside the kids’ gym, catches Nick’s eye, fastens on a smile, and waves excitedly, as if he’d just won a gold medal.

  They met back at home at noon. Katie, desperate for details, begged for the morning’s play-by-play. Miles, doing the best he could, which is not much because he is both a guy and Miles, remembered that when it was over, the teachers brought the parents into the classroom. Alex climbed into his lap and he read her a couple of books. He said he was there for a couple of minutes, tops.

  Katie tried to pump Alex for information. She said she had a pretty good time. Katie asked her what kind of projects she did. Alex said they did Play-Doh and she made three red hearts. Then they had her draw a horse. Katie laughed. She knew that Alex had never drawn a horse in her life. Alex slammed her thumb into her mouth and curled up on the couch and within a few minutes she was asleep.

  Well, as long as she didn’t hate Hunsford, Katie thought.

  Katie sat on the couch next to her sleeping daughter and stroked her hair. She thought about something a friend had told her. She said that you should ask your kid for her opinion. Make them a part of the process. Katie smiled, recalling an expression she’d heard from another mom: “You have your say, but you don’t get your way.”

  “Sorry, honey,” she whispered to Alex. “You don’t get your say about picking your school. High school, yes. College, yes. Kindergarten, no. This is all about me, sweetheart.”

  The truth was that while Alex was being interviewed, or tested, or whatever they call it at Hunsford, Katie was doing something else. Yes, she did all those errands. She needed to divert her attention. Needed to keep busy. But that’s not really what Katie did.

  What she really did was pray.

  The whole time. She just prayed. She prayed to God.

  “Please, God,” she prayed, slowly caressing her sleeping daughter’s hair, “please let them love her.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Decision

  I’ve never heard no in my life. I’m not gonna take no from you.

  —a prospective parent to a private school director of admissions

  Parents should know this: they are their own worst enemies.

  —a private school director of admissions

  The Four Questions

&n
bsp; Do first-choice letters matter?

  In the corner of Starbucks, seated in a pair of high-backed armchairs, twin thrones, Trina D’Angelo and Katie Miller pass a saucer back and forth containing the crumbled remains of a blueberry muffin and discuss first-choice letters. Trina has just revealed to Katie that she has fallen in love with St. Mary’s Christian, an off-the-radar Catholic school that is half the cost of Meryton. It is also halfway across town. Still, St. Mary’s has now emerged as Trina’s first choice.

  “Are you going to write them a first-choice letter?” Katie asks.

  “I did. But there’s a problem.” Trina wraps her hands around her coffee cup and stares into it. “I also wrote one to Meryton.”

  Katie dips her head and shakes it slowly.

  “I know, I know, I shouldn’t have,” Trina says. “When I wrote the letter to Meryton, I meant it. But that was five months ago. Meryton was my first choice then. Did I do a terrible thing?”

  Of course, there are worse transgressions in life than sending out multiple first-choice letters, although none come to mind. Unfortunately, the kindergarten application process can make our most well-meaning and incorruptible citizens stoop to bizarre (remember the five-foot self-standing photograph?) and even unethical behavior. The first-choice letter, once a reliable addendum to the application, has plummeted in value, correlating to the rise in parents’ stress levels.

  “I used to value first-choice letters,” said Edgar Mantle, head of Evergreen School. “But a few years ago I got a letter that began, ‘Pemberley is far and away our first choice.’ I called Pemberley and found out they got the same letter from the same family that began, ‘Evergreen is far and away our first choice.’ That’s when I stopped taking first-choice letters seriously.”

  “It’s great for a family to write a first-choice letter, but I tend to rely more on the preschool director’s word,” MK, admissions director at New York’s prestigious Longbourne School, said.

  DJ, head of one of the country’s top private schools, said, “We look at first-choice letters with a grain of salt because we’ve been burned. Every school has. Many times we’d get a first- choice letter, we’d say yes, then the family says no. Those stories are kind of legendary. A family wrote six first-choice letters one year and then got nailed on it. It’s to the point that if I get a first- choice letter I’ll always confirm it with the preschool.”

  Still, it doesn’t hurt to write a first-choice letter.

  Unless you write more than one.

  Do admissions directors talk to each other?

  I had always assumed that admissions directors talked, but because of the classified nature of the process—the closed-door secrecy in which decisions were made—I figured that they talked after they’d mailed out their acceptance letters and they’d received all of their replies. I imagined their conversations to be in the nature of postmortems at conferences over coffee: “Yes, this was a tough year, so many girls.” “I know. And we had so many siblings. More tea?” My images were quaint, genteel, formal.

  The thought that admissions directors might speak to each other during the process and engage in conversation that might affect their decision-making didn’t occur to me until I spoke to a couple of prospective parents who asked, “Do you think they compare notes, talk about who’s applying where? Do you think they make deals?”

  I tried to envision admissions directors as backroom wheeler-dealers or baseball general managers: “I’ll trade you the Spielberg kid for the black math genius and a child to be named later.”

  I couldn’t picture it. But I had to ask. And I found out that my crazy scenario wasn’t all that far off.

  “We share information. We do. We talk. All the time.”

  Edgar Mantle squirmed in his chair. His confession had made him uncomfortable, as if he’d just ratted out his friends. It turns out he had plenty of corroboration.

  “Everybody talks to everybody, on every level, all the way up to senior year of high school,” an educational consultant said. “We all know it.”

  MK, Longbourne’s director of admissions, after confirming that all identities in this book would be anonymous, said, “We do talk. Of course, everybody travels in a slightly different circle. For me, I have a couple of people, close friends in the business . . . I call and talk with them. We will talk about certain things, certain families. We’re very honest. We share information. We keep each other in the loop. I’d say we’re collegial.”

  “My attitude is maybe I can help place the families that don’t get in,” Dana Optt said. “I talk with most of the admissions directors. We compare lists. We know who the hot families are and which schools have taken them. It’s just the way it’s done.”

  Nan F., director of admissions at the prestigious Darcy School, openly, but gingerly, described how she shares information.

  “Let me say first that we care about kids, all of us, at least the directors I know and work closely with: Brianna at Hunsford, Elizabeth at Meryton, and Dana at Pemberley. We work hard to make sure that kids don’t get shut out. When we see a wonderful family with a wonderful kid but there is no space at their first-choice school, by God, we will help you. You may not get into the school you wanted, but we’ll find a good place for you. We talk the day before the letters go out, or even before that, to see who we’re all accepting.

  “It’s not like the New York thing that’s, ‘Oh, they’re going to go there so let’s not accept them.’ It’s more like, ‘Oh, you are going to take them? Well, we love them, too, so we’ll take them also and they can choose for themselves.’

  “But cross-acceptances don’t usually turn out that way. I am always relieved when somebody I loved who I couldn’t take ends up getting into Meryton or Pemberley or wherever. There is ongoing chatter about this.

  “We all run our admit list, our waitlist, and the people we’re definitely not going to take by each other. We’re looking for common ground. So we know ahead of time. We call each other. I don’t think it dramatically influences the decisions that we have already made, but psychologically you may be sort of pleased that yes, these people that we really liked are getting in somewhere. You also may be distressed to learn that nobody is taking a particular child and you aren’t either.

  “Here’s an example of how it can work. Two years ago, we happened to have an opening in fourth grade. I called Brianna, Dana, and Elizabeth and I told them, ‘We’ve had all these applications and none of them are going to work.’ Elizabeth said, ‘I have this fabulous family who applied and no room.’ So I took her interview notes, took all her records, everything. I had never met the family. They never applied here. I talked to them on the phone. They came for a visit, I ended up accepting the kid, and it’s been fine. This scenario has happened in every grade, including kindergarten. We have this camaraderie. We help each other.

  “I trust these women and they trust me. They’re absolutely my favorite people in this business. I feel very much on the same wavelength with them. And because we have the kids’ interests at heart, I think it’s valuable to have a collegial relationship with them. Why not? It’s all for the sake of the kids.”

  Do siblings automatically get in?

  According to virtually everyone I spoke to, always. Well, almost always. Being a well-adjusted, reasonably bright younger brother or sister will pretty much guarantee a spot in your older sibling’s school. In fact, my anecdotal research brought me to the conclusion that in most private schools a sib would have to indicate nearly off-the-chart behavioral or learning issues in order not to be admitted.

  “Sometimes we have to turn siblings away,” an admissions director said. “It’s the hardest thing I do. For about two weeks in January I meet with families who have siblings I’m not going to admit. That is the worst. Trying to explain why; trying to be honest and diplomatic at the same time, tiptoeing around some of the most powerful people in town. Not easy.”

  Dana Optt explained her specific approach at Pemberley. “The
first thing I do every year is plug in faculty, alumni kids, and siblings. I see them in January. I have everything in a grid: their birthdays, their personalities, preschools, parents’ occupations, and the overall energy of the class. From there I do a very comprehensive overview. I was talking to our head yesterday, going through this, and I said, ‘I’ve been looking very carefully at the girls who have May and June birthdays. We have to pick a couple of them to mix with these siblings. And I need an artistic boy who’s not athletic. I actually need a couple of those. We’ve got too many jocks.’ It is all about the makeup of the class. You can be the most amazing boy, sitting right on top of the pile, you’re the next mad genius who’s going to come to Pemberley, and I’ll say, ‘Shoot. All the siblings took the July birthdays. I can’t take this kid.’ Social skills and maturity are very key factors here. Then I sit with my committee and we look at all the siblings again. We consider each kid’s energy. You don’t want a class that’s so high-energy they’re impossible to control. And you don’t want a class that’s so laid-back and lethargic that you fall asleep every morning at ten. What I’m getting at is that I try to keep the focus on the kids the whole time.”

  More money than God. That’s the going rate. Less than that may not help.

  —an educational consultant

  Do people buy their way in?

  Invariably, this question turned admissions directors and school heads into a collection of mutes and mimes. The variety of nonverbal responses I received included shrugs, smiles both wide and thin, laughs ranging from cackles to guffaws, deep reddening of cheeks, violent clearing of throats, shaking of heads, impatient and irritated sighs, exhalations of air weak and strong, scratching of chins and scalps, and a symphony of sounds and syllables such as “Hmm,” “Ooh,” and “Argh.” One director of admissions did answer in a complete sentence. She said, “I’m not going to go there.”