Reading this story makes me proud to have made the same decision, and tells me I need to do more for my sons school
Kevin and Nancy Peter. Ben was in preschool when the Peters faced the question that bedevils middle-class city-dwellers: public school or private?
Many in their Mount Airy circle had chosen private, and probably assumed the Peters would, too. But Nancy had attended the neighborhood school, C.W. Henry, as a child - before transferring to private school - and decided to check it out.
"My big 'Aha!' was that it was a great school," she said. "The only thing wrong with it was perception: Middle-class families didn't consider it, so it became less of a viable option for other middle-class families."
The school was largely African American in a largely white neighborhood.
To encourage others like them - people with resources and contacts - to look at Henry, Nancy and Kevin began hosting monthly meetings in their living room. Four years later, Ben, 8, is a trumpet-playing, sports-loving Henry third-grader and the Peters are slowly winning converts at their gatherings.
"We want to help them make informed choices," said Nancy, 50. "We also want to make the school better for people who don't have a choice."
One family that switched to Henry took their private-school tuition money and bought sports equipment for the school. Other parents landed grants for a music program and a lunchroom overhaul.
Such involvement, said Kevin, 42, "is going to strengthen the school for all the kids."
Nancy, a doctoral student at Penn and director of the university's Out-of-School Time Resource Center, and Kevin, who helps under- and unemployed Philadelphians at the Metropolitan Career Center in Germantown, have been accused of putting their politics ahead of their son's education.
"People say to us, 'You're sending your kid to public school? How could you?' " Nancy said. "We couldn't be happier at Henry."
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