There Goes the Neighborhood School
March 16, 2021
I’ve always been a sucker for the romance of the neighborhood school. When I was a child, I walked by myself to the old stone building in suburban Philadelphia that housed the nearest elementary school. I memorized multiplication tables and traced cursive letters in classes filled with kids who lived within a mile or so of me; I ate after-school snacks in their kitchens, and on snow days, met up with them for sledding on a hill that our older brothers and sisters had told us about before they started acting cool. This all sounds like cornball nostalgia, I know, but a neighborhood school really does have the potential to turn strangers into neighbors and friends.
So when I moved to Brooklyn with my husband and our young children in the early 1980s, I didn’t hesitate to register at the local elementary school. The school looked like a jail, with its severe brick facade and barred windows, but it was known as a star in a struggling education system that had few of them. People paid heart-pounding sums of money to live in the catchment area; those who couldn’t afford it tried using an aunt’s or a friend’s address. In some respects, and despite its appearance, the school delivered on my hopes. I waited outside at the 3 PM pickup time and shared local gossip with other parents; on the way home, we stopped at the supermarket, where we sometimes ran into teachers grabbing groceries; my kids went for playdates to classmates’ homes, all within walking distance of our house. My husband and I still get together for every Super Bowl with a couple we met when our sons were in kindergarten together. Those sons are now 42.
