Fearless Money

During tax time, I become extra aware of just how much money it costs my family to live in Portland. Not only are state taxes high, unfairly burdensome for small business owners, but there is also a county tax to pay on top of all that. But I now have a reason to mind that last tax much less.

You see, I’ve discovered Portland’s Charter Schools. For a fair background about our Charter schools, refer to this Portland Mercury article, and for an overview of the charter movement, see The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Awareness Dawns

A couple weeks ago, we got the fateful phone call. It was the middle school guidance counselor, "I___ will not be successful if he goes to Wilson High School. He’ll inevitably drop or fail out. You should consider alternative schooling." His poor performance was no surprise to us, but we were very interested to hear her ideas, since we were completely exhausted by trying to force the kid to succeed.

One of the alternatives she proposed was sending him to a charter school, specifically Trillium. I don’t know how I’d missed it up until then. I suppose I thought that I thought most or all so-called alternative schools were gang schools or lightly veiled schools-for-the-slow.

The Visit

We visited last week and we were simply blown away. Yes yes YES, we want our son to go to Trillium. Yes, we want him to experience a school where we counted no more than ten students in any one class. Yes, we want him to go to a place where we witnessed a physical altercation being resolved by peer mediation. Yes, we want him to have a chance to take African Drumming class alongside Japanese. Yes, we want to give him a chance to replace apathy and failure with engaged interest.

In fact, we were so impressed that we applied for admission for our daughter who’ll be entering first grade next year. We want all that for her as well, even though she’s very much her brother’s opposite when it comes to school. Frankly, my wife and I both wished we could have gone to a school like that.

Taxes and staying put

Dustin and I have been considering moving to Mexico for a long while now. But if this works out, and it is what we believe it could be, we’ll stay put while our children receive a truly outstanding education. I don’t even mind the high taxes we’ll have to pay to do that.

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