How fun! And we wouldn’t even have known about it except that our dear friends the Schwartz’s were notified because their youngest is entering Kindergarten next fall (but not attending the local elementary school). Even though we have tried to alert the county to the presence of our prospective students in their cachement area, we were overlooked.

We’ve been mulling over where to send our kids to school since before we got them, and have swung from one extreme to another and back again. The choices are:

1. The local public elementary school, Flower Valley, in our case
2. The Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, where many of our friends send their kids, and many of our own friends teach or have taught.
3. The Hebrew Day Institute, which is located in the educational wing of our synagogue, which the kids are familiar with, since they’ve been going to the Early Childhood Center there ( and we could continue with one commute for both boys for the next two years until J’s ready for kindergarten himself.

So, we’ve been weighing options – great public schools in our county vs. larger class sizes; Jewish identity and automatically have all the Jewish holidays off but a less diverse student body.

At the end of the day, we figure we’ll do kindergarten at the local public school, and then reassess next year.  S came away from his orientation psyched about kindergarten!! It might have been the cookies and the balloon he came home with!