Article February 19, 2001 Issue

A mom finds the right school for her son and loses her anxiety

Gail Menschel

IT can start in preschool and continue through college and beyond—the quest to find just the right school and get into it, or find just the right career opportunity. Attaining this goal can seem so crucial that anxiety seems unavoidable.

For me, the moment of reckoning came last year, while I was sitting in the admissions office of a private school, where my son was being interviewed. Our efforts to get him the right education had begun when he was three. He'd switched nursery schools twice. His public school years had been punctuated by brief stints at a Montessori school and later a charter school. But in all my efforts to forward his education, including making requests for certain teachers, I'd never felt certain that he was exactly where he should be, or getting all he could out of school.

Now he was entering the important high school years, and this interview with one of the two local private schools that had previously declined him admission, seemed pivotal. I'd prayed for God's guidance. But without realizing it, I was still looking at getting a good education for him as a strategy we had to follow—a series of steps taken separate from God.

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