by Gail Z.

I was wrong.

In my last post, I explained that I thought that we could pretty much choose where to send our son for kindergarten next year, within the Prince George’s County Public School system. 

Not quite.

I got clarity from my friend who had been through this process. You must first register your child at their neighborhood school. Once your child is enrolled and assigned a student ID, you may then submit a transfer request.

We’re not interested in an immersion program or charter school at the moment (but could be–more on that later). So we’re planning to send him to our neighborhood school. But we want to check it out first.

Here’s the plan:

• In the coming weeks, we plan to drop in at our neighborhood elementary school one morning after school has already started for the day and request a date to formally visit the school and meet with an administrator.

• During our scheduled visit, we will plan to peek in on the kindergarten classes, to get a feel for what a typical day is like.

• I’m very curious to know what the daily schedule is–how much actual time is devoted to things like science, art, music, and PE.

This will be fun. I’m looking forward to it. And if it goes terribly wrong, and we decide that we need to reconsider our neighborhood school, perhaps we can try to enter our boy into the upcoming lottery for PGCPS’s specialty programs.

More to come as we continue this process . . .

Read Part 3 of the series here.