Is Switching Schools the Right Choice for My Child? What I Learned From Two Transfers
7:12 a.m., wheat toast burning in the toaster, Lila’s math textbook hidden behind the Cheerios box, and she’s twisting the hem of her too-small unicorn sweatshirt telling me her stomach hurts. It’s the third time this month, and the school bus is idling at the end of our driveway, its brakes hissing like it’s waiting for me to make a choice I’ve been putting off for three months. We’ve been here before, with my older son Javi, four years ago when he was 14 and stopped answering texts from his friends and wouldn’t get off the couch on weekends. Back then, we chose to switch. This time, I’m not so sure.
Javi was at a small private middle school, the one all the ambitious parents in our neighborhood sent their kids. He got straight A’s every semester, the principal knew his name, we got glowing notes home twice a year. But by 9th grade, he quit the soccer team he’d played on since he was 6, and he’d come home every day and go straight to his room, not even coming down for dinner half the time. When I finally pried it out of him, he said every conversation felt like a competition—who had the best college prep class, who got the highest AP score, who was friends with the most popular kids. “I can’t breathe in that building,” he said. We talked to his counselor, we arranged for him to meet a therapist, we even asked for a schedule change to get a different teacher for homeroom. Nothing shifted. So we pulled him out halfway through 9th grade and enrolled him in the large public high school 10 minutes away. It was messy at first: he forgot his locker combination three times the first week, he got lost on the way to chemistry and walked in 20 minutes late, he went the first two weeks without sitting with anyone at lunch. But by month two, he wandered into the robotics club room after school because he saw a poster for a Minecraft build competition, and he found a group of kids who stayed after school every day working on their rover, just like he liked to do. Today he’s a junior, leads the build team, still meets his best friend from the private school for burgers every Friday. It worked, but it wasn’t the magic fix I’d hoped for—he still hates end-of-semester testing, still forgets to turn in homework half the time, and still gets anxious around people who brag about their grades. It just fit him better.
After that morning with the stomach ache, I didn’t fill out transfer paperwork that afternoon. I did three concrete things first, that I wish I’d done a little earlier with Javi. First, I emailed Lila’s teacher and asked if I could sit in the back of the classroom for three half-days, no interrupting, just observe. I wanted to see what she was talking about when she said “no one notices me there.” What I saw was that Lila, who always takes 10 extra seconds to think through an answer before she raises her hand, never got called on. The teacher worked through the curriculum fast, called on the kids who shot their hands up immediately, and Lila just shrank further into her seat every day. By the end of the third day, I counted she’d spoken once in four hours of class. Second, I checked in with her pediatrician to rule out any other causes for the frequent stomach aches, and got her a quick 15-minute social-emotional check-in through our local children’s behavioral health clinic, which confirmed it was situational anxiety, not something that would resolve with just more time. Third, I sat down with Lila and asked her to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how much she liked school, and how happy she was after school every day. She said 2 for both. That was when I knew switching wasn’t running from a problem—it was getting her out of a place that wasn’t working.
We didn’t just show up on the first day of the new school. We did three small things that made the transition way smoother than Javi’s was. First, we visited three times before the first day. The first time, we just went to the playground after school got out, got ice cream from the truck down the street, and met up with a friend’s daughter who went there. No tour, no meeting the principal, just Lila getting a feel for the place with no pressure. The second time, we met her new teacher after school for an hour, and I let Lila lead the conversation—she showed the teacher her sketchbook full of dragon drawings, and the teacher told her she could set up a small sketching corner by her desk for when she finished work early. The third time, we walked her full schedule, practiced opening her locker three times, and let her pick a pack of gummy bears from the vending machine by the library. Small stuff, but it took the edge off the unknown.
A lot of the parents I talk to act like switching schools is either a failure—you couldn’t handle the problem at the old school, you’re coddling your kid—or a magic fix that will erase all their unhappiness. From what I’ve seen, it’s neither. Lila still had stomach aches the first two weeks at the new school. She called me from the nurse’s office once asking to come home, because she couldn’t remember where her science class was. Six weeks in, though, she started coming home and talking about her pollinator project, how she got to plant milkweed in the school garden with two other girls who liked drawing as much as she did. She started pulling out her sketchbook again after dinner, something she hadn’t done in almost a year.
Last weekend, we went to Javi’s robotics competition down at the state fairgrounds, and Lila struck up a conversation with another 10-year-old waiting for her sibling, who said she hated her school and was scared to ask her parents to switch. Lila told her “It’s okay to need a new place. Some shoes don’t fit, you don’t have to keep wearing them just because they look good on paper.” I stood there holding a lukewarm hot dog, and I thought that’s the best answer I’ve ever gotten to the question of whether switching is the right choice. We don’t have all the answers. Lila still complains about rainy day recess, Javi still fights with his AP bio teacher about late work. Switching doesn’t fix every problem, and it’s not the right choice for every kid who has a bad semester. But if your kid can’t breathe where they are, it’s okay to try something different. There’s no prize for toughing it out in a place that doesn’t fit.
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