November 30th, 2007 - Elementary school for Maggie
I know what school I want to send Maggie to: Appleton Public Montessori where the school motto is “Learn to love to learn.” I love the Montessori methods and every time I read or hear about them, I get excited because it seems so right to me.
However, the school is on the east side of Appleton, 23.4 miles away (about 40 minutes, up near our church). WI requires 175 days of school. That’s 16,380 miles (back and forth twice a day) not counting evening school events. That’s 819 gallons of gas at 20 mpg. $2457 at $3/gallon.
Well, it would certainly be an incentive to buy a hybrid sooner than we planned. (Actually, Maggie won’t go to 1st grade (following Montessori guidelines, they don’t have a kindergarten in the charter school since they would also have to have 3 and 4 year olds and 3 year olds are not provided free public schooling) until 2010. Our CR-V will be 7 years old then; I’d hoped to keep it 10 years. And it surely won’t get 20 mpg nor will gas cost only $3/gal by 2010. That much driving would certainly be an incentive to upgrade our vehicle.
That would more than double our yearly mileage. Right now, even with all the trips out east, we’ve averaged less than 9000 miles per year.
Is a fantastic school program worth the cost–both monetarily and to the environment?
The school encourages carpooling and we would expect that Eric would become the driver as a stay at home parent. Someone else may be in the same position. So the costs could be shared, but they would still be there to one extent or another. I think 3 hours a day of driving would also limit our ability to do foster care.
Neenah also has a charter school with some Montessori influence, Alliance Charter Elementary. From their website, they don’t appear to adhere very strongly, however. For instance, instead of 3-year groupings, they have K, 1-3 and 4-5. They also say something like “the best practices of Montessori and project-based learning” which makes it sounds pretty wishy-washy to me. On the other hand, it’s only 14.6 miles away (about 20 minutes). (Oddly, both of these schools are on Forest Ave, but in different cites.) That is far more palatable time, energy, and money wise, 10220 miles, 511 gallons, $1533.
Maybe we’ll get luck and a Montessori charter school will open in Oshkosh by then. If only we lived in Milwaukee; they even have a new Montessori International Baccalaureate High School. I’m also intrigues by IB schools; there was a small one in Appleton I heard about a few years ago but I can’t find it back so I guess it closed. And Green Lake is turning their entire school district to IB. They are 45 minutes away, however.