Watching your child leave the security of your vehicle, walk under the hump of her backpack to the schoolhouse doors, and disappear inside is a leap of faith. I sat watching her form disappear behind the darkened glass of the closed door as antsy drop-off parents along the curb behind me impatiently inched forward. Every morning without exception, I silently wished my child a good and safe day of learning and mouthed “See you after school.”
Inside the doors, my daughter walks to her locker and along the way meets up with her friends, the girls who find each other every morning before their first class to talk about what they have done since last seeing each other the day before. In her first class, she is surrounded at her desk by classmates she has known since starting school in Kindergarten and friends she just met this year. Smiles and “Hi’s” are exchanged per usual, last minute gossip is passed, and schooling for my daughter begins again.
School is a good and safe place for my daughter. I know it. She will be instructed today by capable teachers and she will advance her learning. I know it. She is among friends who care about her and who she cares about. I know it. Yet, watching her leave my care every morning and enter into the maw of school gives me pause. Then I make the leap, resolving that the adults in her school will take care of my little girl today.
There are more than 800 children in my daughter’s school. I make the assumption that other parents share my morning feelings and that they, like me, accept in good faith the compact parents make with their school. I enroll my child in your school and in the aggregate of all enrollments, the school is funded and salaries and benefits are paid to all school staff. In exchange for your livelihood, you will educate and safeguard my child. Perhaps, the concept of safeguard is a more recent addition to this compact given events of violence in disparate locales across our nation. Some years ago, the compact was livelihood in exchange for education. Today, safeguarding is added without a second thought.
Even with my trepidations, I am not a lawnmower parent who wants every bump my daughter may experience in her childhood at school to be eased, if not eliminated. Life in school will reflect much of life out of school. She will scrape her knees on the playground at recess. She will spill her lunch into her lap in the cafeteria. She will receive less than an “A+” on some assignments. She will be emotionally wracked by unkind words and her words will wound others, unintentionally I hope. She will enjoy the quality work of most teachers and fret through a school year with a “Captain Homework” or a “shrew who must hate all children.” Life presents these and my little girl will make the most of her school life.
And, so the years of school go until the day of her high school graduation and she and I acknowledge that never again will my daughter enter a K-12 schoolhouse door. She will go to college in some distant state and all my worrying will be conducted from afar. The leap of faith underlying the compact between parent and educators extends even through post-secondary education.
Years, no decades, have passed since I last watched my daughter enter her school as a student. Today, it is my granddaughter I watch. She seems younger than my daughter could have been at the same grade level. And, I worry more than I used to worry. It is not my compact with the school, but my daughter who is the parent in this arrangement. A grandfather is just a sometimes driver delivering his granddaughter to the schoolhouse door. Yet, I still wait unmoving in my car as my daughter’s daughter walks under an even larger backpack and disappears behind the closing glass door. I wait even after I no longer can see her knowing that younger parents inching along the curb behind me urge the “geezer” to get moving. And, I silently wish my granddaughter a good and safe day of learning and mouth “See you after school.”