Twinkle: School Daze

So last night we had dinner with my in-laws, and Mr. Twinkle brought up the whole school choice controversy that is going down right now. I guess he's seen a lot of people on Facebook who haven't gotten the elementary schools they wanted, so he brought it up to ask his mom about it. Of course she had lots of opinions.

First she said this: "Save your shekels for Gon Torah, or else I'm just going to have to home-school her myself."

I said, "Yeah...or we could just send her to a different private school."

MIL said, "Oh, I could do it."

I said, "Oh, I'm sure you could." (But you're not gonna, I wanted to tack on to the end.)

Later I asked Mr. Twinkle WTF Gon Torah is. Apparently it is a Jewish Orthodox school for those who thought the now-defunct Eliahu Academy was somwhow too liberal...I informed him that that is so not happening, for so many reasons. He just laughed. Even he does not want that to happen.

Later in the conversation MIL said that you just need to learn to work the system, so if you apply for a certain school, you also need to apply for a hardship case at the same time. The hardship case is just used if you get assigned to a bad school. "For instance," my MIL said, "If she got some horrible school, you could just say I babysit her every day after school and then she could go to [school where my MIL taught for 40 years]."

I questioned the liklihood that JCPS was going to grant us a hardship anything. I mean, let's face the facts: Mr. Twinkle is gainfully employed, and my Lilly shift and penchant for charity work hardly scream "indigent." MIL insisted that it would be fine, and if we played our cards right we, too, could trick the school system into letting our daughter go to the school of MIL's choice. Fat chance, biatch. At this point I would not send Twinklette to Wilder if it were the last, best, and most prestigious school on the face of the earth (and MIL thinks it is).