Community Essay : A Parent’s Dilemma: How Can We Take a Chance? : Education: It’s hard to trust the public schools, but if middle-class kids don’t attend them, think of the consequences for society.

In our affluent Westside community, the elementary school is composed of 30% community kids and 70% “traveling” kids, primarily Latino children who are bused in because their neighborhood schools are crowded. Two of our children attend this school.

There are plenty of children in our community, but most of them go to private schools. Out of seven families with children on our block, only two attend public schools. Directly across the street from the public elementary school is a private one that has recently been so inundated with applications that they have applied to double their capacity.

On school days, I pick up my children on a corner that provides a view of both schools. The public school children are let out at 2:45; they come streaming out a side gate and onto three large yellow buses. The private school lets out at 3. As the buses depart with their loads of little brown faces, a long line of Mercedeses waits to pick up a crowd of little white faces on the same spot. It’s difficult to watch this and not come to some pretty depressing conclusions.

I’m not being accusatory or self-righteous in this. Our family is caught in what we feel is a moral dilemma. When our eldest daughter completed elementary school last year, we chose to send her to a private school rather than to the public middle school. It’s very hard to read in the newspaper, day after day, stories about the troubles with the school district, how kids don’t have supplies and books and how the teachers feel undervalued and underpaid. And most disturbing of all, we read about the violence. How can I trust having one of my three dearest treasures in a place like that? How can I even take a chance that she might be hurt?

But then I think about the fact that all prejudice against other people is the result of fear, and that fear can so easily feed upon itself. Is that what I am reacting to, an unconscious prejudice? Did we take our girl out of the public school because we wanted her to be with “better” kids? Am I more comfortable with the almost all-white private school because it is more predictable, more like what I know?

I have become aware of a mentality in our community that frightens me. It is not a conservative community by any means, but a group of parents has banded together to fight to keep an unsavory element off our local streets. They see this element as being the “traveling” kids who attend the local high school. They look scary, these adolescents with baggy clothes and sullen attitudes. But aren’t they just kids? And they haven’t done anything. What small vandalism has occurred in our community has been committed by the rich and bored local kids.

I feel that I have been falling into a trap. I have been thinking that I must protect myself and mine without thinking of what the consequences might be. Isn’t this destructive thinking? If we really want to do something about the underlying causes of the Los Angeles unrest, don’t we all have to make some sort of sacrifice? Doesn’t it have to start somewhere?

But my mind goes back and forth. Education is important. If we can afford to spend money to ensure a better-quality education for our children, shouldn’t we do it? Is it truly a better education? Nothing is more important to me than the welfare of my children, but am I creating a good world for them if I show them that I want to keep them separate from people who are different from them? Didn’t my daughter get a loud and clear message when we chose the all-white school? And how can I separate my own children’s welfare from that of the other children? It is all of them who will make up the future world.

I don’t want to sacrifice my children for a principle, but I do want us to live in a world where there are principles that are adhered to. What is the right thing to do? I wish I knew.