Community Essay : ‘Suellen Just Wants to Learn to Read’ : The public kindergarten will only teach 19 letters of the alphabet--no reading allowed. A mother, angry but resigned, opts for private school.

Last fall, Suellen was 5 years old and starting kindergarten. She looked forward to learning to read, but when I, her mother, took her to our local public school, we discovered that her teacher had no intention of teaching reading. Instead, the 30 students in her class would be working on the alphabet, even though almost every 5-year-old I’ve ever met already knows it. The school wanted to give detailed attention to each letter, so they would cover only 19 of them; there just wasn’t time, they said, to cover all 26. Her teacher assured me that “the letters we don’t do are the least important ones.”

Poor Suellen! How could she read with only 19 letters?

After two weeks at this school, when I went to pick her up she would come out of the class looking around in anxiety, then run up to me. When I asked her what she did each day in school, she covered her face with her hands in frustration. “Oh!” She would say. “My teacher keeps telling me to sit still, and then she tells us things I already know!”

One might think that such a slow-starting school would be in a district with low achievement scores. Not so; this is the prestigious Irvine school district. Turtle Rock Elementary serves a neighborhood populated by professionals and university families. Why the school’s parents did not rebel is a mystery.

Suellen just wanted to learn to read! Was this too much to ask? With her complaints, my own public school history came back to me: the crowded classrooms, the teacher lecturing about rote matters, and no one really caring whether you learned quickly as long as you didn’t fall behind. When you’re a bright child in a public school, you learn early that school is a place where you draw pictures on your desk and watch the clock.

Last fall at our local public elementary school, I saw this history re-enacted: a powerless child, consigned to sitting still and pretending to listen, reciting things she’d known a long time as if they were new. I spoke to her teacher, who informed me that most of the other parents didn’t want their children to read in kindergarten, that there was no support for a change in curriculum and that if we didn’t like this school’s method, we could leave. So we did. I found a small private school where the teacher planned for her kindergartners to read, and enrolled Suellen.

It was a pinch for us financially, and I’m irritated at having to pay twice--once through taxes, once through tuition--for Suellen’s school. But at the new school, Suellen is in a small class where each child gets individual attention. Her teacher is concerned about her development and anxious that all the children in the class are intellectually engaged by the school’s program.

And Suellen is reading now, just a few months later. What a joy it is to see her, quietly sitting in her bedroom, sounding out the words in a simple Dr. Seuss book. She loves school now. I guess it’s a success story.

Yet in the back of my mind, there’s still anger. I’m angry at the public school administrators who wreck our school system by taking away the intellectual challenge. I’m angry with Bill Clinton. It’s bad enough that he’s against school choice, but Clinton’s placement of his daughter in private school appalls me. Now my tax dollars go not only to support Suellen’s vacant berth at the local public school, but are supporting Chelsea’s chance to go the Sidwell Friends prep school. Is this justice?

While bureaucrats and politicians fritter away time and money on “solutions” that amount to nothing more than reaffirming the status quo, Suellen is maturing. I cannot put her growth on hold until they come up with an answer.

School choice through a voucher system would do more than give parents who put their children in private school a cost break. It would force the public schools to concern themselves with results, to listen to parents and to teach children. These are three things they no longer adequately do; and three things that encompass almost their entire original job description.