As I have had opportunity to meet with school administrators
from across the nation over the past fifteen years I have become much more in
tune with issues related to education where there is a significant difference
between various regions of our country.
I have had a chance to get into a lot of different schools and see
students from many of our fifty states.
One of my takeaways is that for the most part, kids are kids. There really isn’t much difference between
those kids who attend a school from a wealthy suburb near San Diego to those
from an inner-city school in Philadelphia.
They may have a little different fashion sense from one place to
another, but other than that, you could pick a young lady up from
Celebration High School near Orlando and put her into Centennial High School in
Nebraska and you would have a hard time picking her out. This may be a little bit of a simplification
because there are in fact some regional differences, but not as much as some
people may think. This said, I am still
very happy being in the Midwest where it seems that our perspective has a
little more balance. Yes, there are
folks out there on the extreme in every community, but overall, I believe that
the Midwest is the best place to raise a family. That is why I have included this article from
the Washington Post. I have bumped into a few of these kinds of
folks even here in Iowa, yet I am glad I do not work in a school where the
perspective mirrors this. However, while
the “status seeking on steroids” you will read about is at times mind-blowing,
there is a degree of it in our own community, certainly not on this level, but
it is here. The bottom line is that we
want to do what is best for our kids, and we need to have a perspective that is
reasonable and in their best interest.
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