The Making of an Outraged Mom

I'm lucky to live in Concord. My husband and I moved here three years ago, with a toddler possum-swinging on my leg and child number two karate-kicking in my belly. It's a great area for young families—wonderful parks, museums, and play groups (though the real estate listings never seem to mention the two Superfund sites or the state prison). Like a lot of our neighbors, we picked the town in large part for the schools. My boys will go to an elementary school named after Henry David Thoreau. It reopened recently following a major rebuilding/expansion, and there's talk of redoing the middle and high schools, too.

Yet as I sat with my butt planted in a cushy folding chair on a frigid winter evening, I wasn't feeling so lucky. More than a hundred other parents had joined me in the Alcott School auditorium, all of us clutching our packets of PowerPoint printouts. Microphones stood at attention for questions and comments. This was a forum and there was blood in the water.

The school committee members sat tensely in the audience, notebooks and Montblancs at the ready, while teachers braced themselves behind a long conference table at the front. This wasn't going to be a typical board meeting, with empty-nesters battling families with young kids who want an override to build a billion-dollar high school. No, this was about the evil plan our school leaders had come up with to subject our children to that horror of horrors—full-day kindergarten. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday the kids would sit in class an extra three hours, rotting away till 3:10 p.m.; the other days they'd be released at 12:10, as they are now. The school committee was going to vote in a month whether to implement this abomination. We'd all heard about the last time the administration floated full-day K, back in 2000. Plenty of residents didn't like it then, either, and a vocal parents group had been taking credit ever since for killing the plan.

As the forum got under way, a lot of us parents were pretty sure this whole hearing was just smoke and mirrors, a little hocus-pocus to give us the impression we had some say in the schooling of our children. The mom I'd come with wrote in my notebook: "Who cares what we think? They're doing it."

Meanwhile, a group calling itself Concord Parents for Kindergarten Options had turned out with 100-plus signatures on a petition for an "optional" full-day plan. If some parents wanted full-day, fine, let them have it. But the CPKO was going to make damn sure a half-day program was offered, too.

The main presentation came to an end, and it was finally time to hear from the moms and dads. Lines formed behind the mikes. The first few comments were thoughtful enough, but the reasoned debate soon gave way to tears, rants, and conspiracy theories. "I don't feel the public school should tell me I can't have that time with my child!" a mother howled. I half-expected someone to get up and shout, "This is an outrage. I'm going to home-school my daughter, naked, in the woods!"

Afterward, grownups clustered in cliques outside the school, their breath puffing out in clouds in the cool night air, and stamped Uggs and wingtips to keep the feeling in their toes. There was gossiping, backward glances, and eye rolls. Total middle school, without the zits, but it was understandable in a way. We make great sacrifices for our children—getting knee-deep in the Diaper Genie, for instance, and trying not to keel over from the smell while marveling at how those two master's degrees are being put to such great use. We sacrifice because we love our kids—and no teacher or public official is going to come in and start telling us what's best for them.

That's how I felt back then, anyway.