Goodbye, Johnson Elementary
Your humble PTO news correspondent signs off.
I went to my first Johnson Elementary PTO meeting in September of 2018, at the beginning of my son’s kindergarten year. Toward the end of the meeting, during the “does anyone have any comments or questions” portion of the evening, I asked something like: what would you say you do here?
This wasn’t a very fair question, perhaps, but I really didn’t know, and I wanted to get some idea of what the folks at the front of the room thought it was they were trying to do. I honestly don’t remember their answer. I floated in the general vicinity of PTO stuff for the next few years, attending at least a couple of meetings a year, always helping out as best I could with the silent auction night, feeling generally appreciative feelings towards the people making the real effort but largely staying aloof to their mission and various tasks. Whatever, exactly, that was.
And then, a couple of years ago, Laura Jordan asked me if I was willing to maybe write some emails for the PTO. Being constitutionally incapable of saying “no” when someone asks me if I’m willing to write something for others to read, especially with a built-in captive audience, I agreed to help out. Then, rather suddenly, I found myself on the PTO board with Laura and Jill McKinley—long may she reign—and needing to figure out for myself what exactly it was that I could say we do around here, should I be asked.
Speaking of September 2018: I still remember the dread of dropping off Calvin for his first day of kindergarten. He’d been excited for weeks, poring over the daily schedule we’d received ahead of time, thrilled by the way his time was about to be ordered and regimented and organized after a summer of doing whatever we wanted to do. He vibrated at a frequency high enough to levitate along the sidewalk up the hill to Johnson that first day, a whole world about to open up to him, the edges of his explorable map suddenly expanding and filling in with possibility. I knew with certainty that he’d come home later that afternoon and be overwhelmed by it all, that the adrenaline and excitement would fill him up past overflowing and that he’d need me when the tide went back out. This proved correct—he was hollowed out and needed a cry and a hug (and a snack)—but, also, it was a great first day. He was excited for the next.
I, meanwhile, still had the dread. There was something that felt wholly unnatural about this process—about giving up some measure of control, mostly an illusion, of no longer always being there, of not being the one making it and keeping it just so, anymore. The world didn’t deserve him—this perfect and curious and happy boy of ours—but neither had I. In time, the dread eased. Knowing that his wonderful teachers loved him helped. The joy-filled and obviously hyper-competent Summer Thompson helped. Even the PTO people—who perhaps could not quite satisfactorily answer a pointed and obnoxious question—helped. Johnson Elementary was a building filled with people just trying to help. Help my kid grow up, and help me get a little bit closer to being okay with my kid growing up.
A couple of years later, when Katie started kindergarten in 2020, I had a good bit less of the dread. This was not because I had acquired an inner peace about my children going away for the day, but because a global pandemic meant that she was going to be attending Johnson Elementary via Zoom in our basement, along with her brother and two neighbor kids. It was a weird and wonderful year. There was t-ball and badminton in the backyard during lunch. A couple of extracurricular philosophy classes. Friday afternoon dance parties. Wyatt occasionally curling up under the table for thirty minutes. Weird. Wonderful.
By the time late August 2021 rolled around and it was time for her to actually attend school in person, a whole new sort of apprehension had formed—how would Katie react to in-person school? This was a person who had not, according to her pre-school teachers, ever really spoken to anyone at school. A person who cried quietly for thirty minutes when she found out she would be attending in-person, because she “really liked Zoom-school.”
I needn’t have worried, nor should she have. Her teachers at Johnson—as they had with Calvin—brought out the best in her. She was a helper and a leader in the classroom and I’m not sure she has gone more than three waking minutes in her life without talking since.
And now they are done. Seven years spent just up the hill at our friendly neighborhood elementary school, but just one more half-day to go. It is so easy—with the dread of uncontrol and not knowing sanded down by habit and routine, with the problems of the world and our politics always vibrating discordantly in my pocket, with distance and context collapsing around us all the time—it is so easy to forget the small miracle of mostly peaceful civic life. But here—amidst the dull roar of daily life and the chaos seemingly always threatening to crash down upon us—here I was able to walk my children up the hill for seven years, where I left them in the care of strangers who chose to love and care for them, strangers who educated them and kept them safe, strangers who became people my children trusted and loved and who never let them down.
My favorite writer, Kurt Vonnegut, talked about volunteer fire departments as “the most stirring example of man’s humanity toward man.” I know what he was getting at, but I prefer the public elementary school for my symbol of man’s humanity to man. Here is a building. The people who live nearby send their very young and vulnerable children to be educated and kept safe and loved there. It doesn’t cost any one individual anything, exactly, because the community has decided that educating and keeping safe and loving the children of the community is a worthwhile endeavor on which to spend its collective wealth. If that’s not nice—if that’s not all of us at our absolute best—I don’t know what is.
Gratitude is not enough, for this workaday miracle, performed over and over again.
But gratitude is all I have to offer. Gratitude to the teachers and administrators and the staff. Gratitude to all the other parents who took the same leap of faith that I did, filling Johnson’s halls with your smiling and laughing children. And gratitude especially to Laura and Jill, who invited a PTO skeptic to write the emails. No zealot like a convert.
So Katie moves on. Another year older, another year closer to leaving childhood behind. It is only tolerable because there is no thinkable or acceptable alternative. She grows up, and she moves on. To the next school. To the next building across town in which another series of impossible and beautiful workaday miracles will be accomplished by the rote, daily efforts of people who might yet be strangers to her. Strangers I will trust with her education and her safety because despite all the dissonant buzzing from the supercomputer in my pocket, our community rewards trust.
What would I say it is we do here? The PTO is just one small, complementary part of a public school system that builds and rewards trust. One link in a chain that makes our community just a little bit stronger, knits it tighter and a bit smaller and more approachable and more personal. A simple hand raised in defiance of cynicism and indifference. What do we do here? We provide an outlet for people to care. Thank you for that.