Last night I arrived for a school board meeting to see a crowd of families gathered. We have several hundred families on our waiting list, and a portion of them had arrived for a tour hoping their names would be chosen off of the lottery in a few days. I shared a video of this later on social media saying, this is what parent agency looks like… we must be doing something right. Enrollment in public schools across the country are declining, and a lot of it has to do with the trends that accelerated during the pandemic of families choosing alternative models of education. Locally, my own school district has seen a 7% decline in enrollment and expects to continue to lose students over the next several years. What gives? And, how is it that our school is seeing the opposite trend?

There’s plenty of factors impacting enrollment, but my guess about the driving factor is that families are starting to awaken to this conversation about what they want most out of educational environments in the first place. I personally believe that where a parent sends their child to school, how we choose to engage in the schooling process is a reflection of what we most value.

There’s an activity that I still love to do with parents from back when I was a school leader and worked with parent advocacy groups. It’s called Take a Stand, and it’s adapted from a leadership exercise that I also used to use with teachers and other leaders. I’d read off a series of statements, and then folks would have to choose a side. Sometimes it was an either/or proposition. For example, I’d always begin with a warm up like, Coke vs Pepsi, Monica vs Brandy, Martin and Gina vs. Dwayne and Whitley. You get the point. Individuals pick a side based on whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement I read. Sometimes I’d provide more choices to divide the room, and instead of picking sides, you would choose a corner. The only “rule” was that you always had to choose. Every single time we always had someone who broke that rule, but that wasn’t really the point. The goal was to get us talking to each other, specifically about what we believed to be true about leadership, parenting, and education. Most times we walked away learning something new about ourselves, each other, and uncovering a set of shared values. In order to do an exercise like this though, we’ve got to share space and actually talk to one another.

For the take a stand exercise, here’s a few of the statements that I ask parents to reflect on:

• I was a “good” student in school.
• I did “well” in school. 
• I feel like I had a good educational experience
• Education is more about growth than mastery
• I would consider myself to be a rule follower
• Education is more about understanding how to think vs gaining knowledge
• School and education are the same thing
• There are a lot of things that I don’t understand these days when it comes to how we’re educating students
• I have an archetype of what a great school looks like in my head
• My child’s school fits that archetype

A lot of these statements are false binaries (and that’s kind of the point). In choosing a side, what you’re really revealing for yourself is the internal tension between these choices. I also adapt these questions to students, offering them the same opportunity to reflect on their schooling experience thus far. The older the students are, the more meaningful the reflections and I often encourage families to lean into what comes up for them.

Ultimately, we use the discussion from these statements to lead us into a healthy dialogue about what we each view as the purpose of education. Education choices are a mirror of family values, priorities, and aspirations—whether it’s academic rigor, a sense of community, cultural alignment, or flexibility in learning approaches. The sooner we connect the dots for ourselves and our kids, the more intentional we can all be about pursuing what matters most.

A few weeks ago I joined a podcast with a few other educators and parent advocates discussing our approach to raising children and choosing environments for them to thrive in. I shared how for Samantha and I, our approach has been about relinquishing control over time. Our goal when they were young was to put them in environments that fostered their agency, natural curiosity about life, and allowed them to continue to grow at their own pace. As they progressed we became more intentional about helping them learn how they learn and ensuring they were growing in culturally affirming spaces. Now as we parent teenagers and rising teenagers, our focus has shifted again toward helping them make decisions for themselves, providing them the space to practice autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This approach has worked for humans since our beginning. Our job as parents is simply to help foster the right conditions for growth. In the end, though we can’t control the seed or the fruit, we can tend to it with care, and hopefully we can enjoy the blossoming process. That’s the magic of knowing what you want and getting to see it unfold right before your eyes (even if it’s different than what you expected).

SDW3