I Paid For Both Private Online And Brick-And-Mortar This Past Two Years—Here’s What No One Tells You
My kid Jax just finished 8th grade, which means I’ve spent the last 24 months stress-testing the whole “which school is worth it” question. Two years ago, we moved across the state for my husband’s job, and the local public middle school was so overcrowded that his homeroom had 38 kids. We had two options: drain our savings a little to send him to the small private physical school 20 minutes from our house, or go with the well-regarded online private academy that cost half as much, with all the same accreditations for high school down the line. We picked online first, because we were still paying off moving costs and I kept seeing all these takes saying online school had closed the gap forever. So I get to weigh in from actual experience, not what some education influencer rambles about on Instagram.
It wasn’t the disaster people make it out to be, honestly. Jax has always gotten anxious when teachers call on him out of the blue, and online he could turn his camera off if he was having a bad day, take 10 minutes to type a response instead of freezing up in front of the whole class. When he had a bad sinus infection that kept him down for two weeks, he didn’t get swamped with a pile of missing homework marked zero—he just worked at his own pace when he felt up to it, no notes to the office, no rushed after-school catch-up required. His history teacher did a virtual field trip to Pompeii that was way cooler than any field trip I ever went on; Jax got to walk inside the preserved houses, zoom in on the actual ancient graffiti on the walls, even see a 3D scan of the plaster casts of the people who didn’t make it out. The private physical school’s big annual field trip is to the local county history museum, which is fine, but it doesn’t have that kind of access. The curriculum was harder, in some ways, than what they do at the brick-and-mortar now. Online definitely caught up on the actual “learning stuff” part, no question.
But what no one talks about is the messy small bits that no one can code into a learning platform. Jax started staying up till 3am playing Minecraft, because no one was making him go to bed, and his first class didn’t start till 9am. He wore the same pair of gray sweatpants for three days once, and I only noticed when I went in his room to take out the trash and smelled it. There was that awkward presentation incident, where he stepped out to get a root beer from the fridge mid-class and forgot his mic was on, so everyone heard him burp really loud, and then the teacher called his name five times and he didn’t answer, and all the kids were typing “Jax is dead” in the chat. He was so embarrassed he didn’t turn his camera on for two weeks after that, and none of the teachers checked in one-on-one beyond a generic automated email. By the end of the first semester, he was barely talking to us at dinner, just holed up in his room with the door closed. We’d ask how school was, and he’d just say “fine.” That’s when we decided we’d suck it up and pay for the physical private.
Let me tell you, it’s not all fancy science labs and perfect test scores over here. I forgot to buy the required PE uniform the first week, so Jax had to wear his old soccer shirt and got sent to the front office to get a detention slip. I had to bake two dozen cookies for the fall bake sale, burned half of them at 9pm the night before, and ended up running to Walmart to buy pre-made cookie dough that I baked and stuck in my own tupperware to pretend I made them. Tuition is so expensive that we cut our weekly date night to once a month, I stopped buying my $5 oat milk latte on the way to work, and we still haven’t replaced the broken microwave in our guest room because we don’t have the extra cash. There are still annoying things, stupid rules that don’t make any sense, like no phone in class even if you finish your work 20 minutes early.
But here’s the thing I didn’t expect. Jax started getting up at 7:30 on his own after the first month, because he wanted to meet his friend at the bus stop. He comes home every day and rants about how the lunch pizza is garbage, or how his math teacher wears the same weird Christmas socks every Friday. Last month, his science teacher noticed he was falling behind on algebra, pulled him aside after class, and stayed 20 minutes late every day for a week to help him—no extra tutoring fee, no request for a parent meeting, just noticed he was quiet and his grades were slipping and did it. Jax made a friend who likes the same terrible 90s pop-punk he’s obsessed with, and they walk to the gas station after school to buy slushies once a week. We get more conversation at dinner now than we got in a whole semester of online school.
I don’t think there’s a clean one-size-fits-all answer. My cousin’s kid has severe social anxiety and can’t handle crowded hallways, and online school has been life-changing for him—he’s getting straight A’s now when he was skipping every other day at his old physical school. Online caught up on the curriculum, the testing, all the official stuff a long time ago. It’s a totally valid option, and way better than a bad physical school, public or private.
Is the physical private worth it? For us, right now, yeah. But I still sit in the car line waiting to pick Jax up some days, staring at the tuition bill reminder in my email, and wonder if we’re being stupid throwing all this money away. Then Jax gets in the car, grinning, and shows me a dumb doodle his friend drew of the principal with a mullet, and I remember that the stuff that matters most isn’t in the lesson plan. It’s the awkward burps in the hallway, the bad cookies at the bake sale, the teacher who stays late just because she cares. I don’t think online’s caught up to that part yet. Maybe it never will. (1182 words)
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