So we moved here to Sheffield for a year in part because being awarded a Fulbright is a great honor and conducting the research and teaching as part of the award should be very rewarding. But we also decided to make this trip as a family for the experiences of our three children (ages 7, 10, 11). So, getting them into a local school was an important part of this international experience for them.
We wanted our kids to go to a “state” (or public school) so we naturally found a house a short walk from both a senior school (for Tala) and a Junior School (Noah and Nissa). We think being close to school and having our kids walk there is important on a lot of levels, from making friends, to the physical activity, to the fact that I do some research on children walking to school.
When I went to figure out how to enroll them, this is what I found out. For the Junior school, the staff at the school were on holiday (through most of August) and weren't scheduled to return until September 7th, the first day of school. The school, I was told, was full, but likely there would be some vacancies if I just brought them to school on the first day. I was then to fill out an application and hope they could start that day or the next. Most people said this should work out, but we wouldn't know until the first day of school so we couldn't even tell the kids if they had a school to go to.
For the senior school, all senior schools in this area were currently full. There are catchment areas like in Eugene and all residents that pay a council tax (kind of a residential head tax that we pay as well) are legally entitled to a public education, but you are not guaranteed to get that education in your catchment area. The policy has nothing to do with equity and trying to offer school choice through a lottery like system. Even if your child was in a feeder school for a certain Senior school, if that school was oversubscribed, then the child would have to go elsewhere.
The process for enrolling Tala in a school in an area where all schools are full was extremely stressful. I had to formally submit an application to a central city department of education. Because I knew her application would be rejected outright (the schools in walking distance were full) I simultaneously submitted my appeal of the rejection.
On the Thursday before school started, we received word that Tala's appeal hearing would be on October 1, three weeks after school started. In the interim period, she would have no place to go to school. Actually that's not true; she was offered to go to a failing school on the other side of the City that we couldn't get to and had no interest in sending her to (Sheffield is the size of Portland). If her appeal were denied, we could do a secondary appeal, but that wouldn’t happen until November, meaning she would be out of school the entire first term.
Imagine your two stresses of being in grade school – showing up at school naked and being walked into class for your first day, after the term has already started, as the new kid. Needless to say, this was stressful for the kids even though we were trying to be as optimistic as possible with them. We tried to channel all of our Fijian lessons of relaxing and letting things work out.
We were also trying to use all the resources at our disposal to get around this silly bureaucratic situation. Imagine the shame to be felt locally when an American Fulbright Scholar who specializes in children walking to school can’t get their child in a school within walking distance of their home?
When we found out two days before the start of the term that Tala's appeal wouldn't be until October 1, we ramped things up because we would seriously have considered leaving the UK if the kids could not get into school. We did not come here to home school them, and while we were open minded to the opportunity for all of us to travel, we also quickly rejected that idea. Our kids want a life here and that is dependent on them making friends, which is highly correlated to them being in school. When we spent three months in Greece two years ago, they were not in school, and while we all had a great time exploring the country, the kids didn't make any friends and get the cultural learning that comes from the normal day to day things of living somewhere.
On that Thursday morning (two work days before school started), we went back to the Junior school to see if any staff had arrived, and indeed they had that day. We filled out an application for Noah and Nissa, but left the office not knowing if there were places for them. Thankfully, late in the day we learned that the two younger kids were indeed going to be admitted.
But there was no place for Tala and we wouldn't know about her for three more weeks. That night, we decided to put out an appeal for help and sent an email to as many people we had made contact with in our short stay in Sheffield. The contacts included the school departments, the Vice Chancellor and the head of my department at the University of Sheffield, a Governess of the University, three local city councilors, the local Member of Parliment, and the Fulbright Commission, and a variety of people back home at all levels of the University of Oregon and Congressman DeFazio's office.
I'm not sure we will ever know what happened between 11pm Thursday night and 9am Friday morning, but first thing Friday morning we received a phone call that there existed a clause in the school admissions policies that allowed for Tala to be admitted to school given her special circumstances in the country. So we went from seriously considering leaving to rushing out to buy school uniforms (well, first, figuring out what the uniforms were, which is not as straight forward as you would think).
I can't explain the admissions fiasco. While everyone we spoke with in trying to work this out was extremely friendly and sympathetic, no one could provide any help. And while I hate to generalize, many people gave us the explanation for our situation that there is a strong adherence to both bureaucracy and queues in England and that we were just stuck in a school admissions process that we couldn't get around. How did we get around it then? The best explanation for that is that as much as bureaucracy and queues are important, so is being perceived as rude hosts. Perhaps our final plea for help made clear that a door was being potentially shut on a visiting family and that ultimately, that was too rude to bear. At this point, I'm not sure I'll ever know what happened, but I'm glad that things worked out.
