Note to readers: my July 29 posting, "Transplanting Your Teen into a California High School, Part One" is on the recommended summer reading list for this class, er.... posting.
I was having a staff off-site meeting on my front porch today. (I love California.) Around 3 p.m., what sounded like fourteen tubas and an off-key trombone filled the air, warming up with what Third Child informs me are arpeggios. This reminded me that we have entered "Band Camp" season, and I owed PFIFB Lesson #2 in the "Transplanting Your Teen" series.
Lesson #2: Public schools in California are heavily subsidized from the parental coffers. This reality dwarfed by an order of magnitude my previous experience of “Waddya mean, you need $7.00 and a dozen cupcakes for the field trip to the National Art Gallery tomorrow?!” That had been chicken feed, compared to the experience that awaited us here.
Two weeks after school began, TC came home with a note saying that his marching band fees of $650.00 were due the next day (surprise!) , and could he go to Italy in March with the band? If so, he would need to take in his $1300 deposit for that tomorrow, too. Apparently, the first school-to-parent missive on the subject had come during--you guessed it--band camp.
Morale of the story: When deciding between alternatives presented in the syllabus, create an excel spreadsheet. Create a column embedded with the off-planet math formula that will be necessary to determine whether, in addition to the transfer credits from your previous school system, the class under scrutiny will eventually map to the prerequisites for the eventual courses that will suffice to get the kid a diploma. Then (and here's the part they don't tell you) add a column that tallies the eventual layout that will be necessary for each option. Book an appointment with the guidance counselor, your accountant and estate lawyers, your kid and that really scary smart guy down the hall from you at work who gets the math to hammer out your options, and voila! BTW: it helps to make it to band camp.
These extra costs don’t seem to surprise or disturb the natives. I’m not sure if all American parents share this unspoken “no sacrifice is too high to gild Johnnie’s high school experience,” or if this is a localized cultural phenomenon. However, if you come from the land of socialized (free) almost everything except beer and other "sin taxable" consumables, I can tell you this: public school fees significantly add to an immigrant's first year "sticker shock" experience of living in, and loving, Silicon Valley.
