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[quote=Anonymous]I would love to hear the stories where the work of one dedicated parent working full-time outside the home, not self-employed, took on administrators, teachers, county board, etc. to improve the educational outcome of their child and other children in a similar situation, while not sacrificing their own child (I.e. meeting the gaps of the public school while advocating for change) without additional money (not losing income or spending money) to do so.

We are the children of public school teachers and we have every reason to believe in the system. However, I have found reality to be far different from my liberal fantasies of educational utopia.  If you are looking to change things one parent is often written off.  You have to organize a mass movement with racial and socio-economic diversity to get the attention of school administrators. Even then, you have to deal with important Board of Ed meetings on your issue scheduled at 2pm, which makes it difficult to show the mass community support.  Meanwhile, you have to be at the school during the work day for IEP meetings for your own child.  If you don't have the money to hire an advocate or possible lawyer, you need to have the time to become a special education advocate yourself and to go to the school often if needed to fight for services.  Oh and if you are not hiring outside tutors, for your child, you are home schooling at night.

I weighed all of this before going the private school route and realized I would have to either not work (don't think we could afford this unless DH changed jobs) or change careers to a far flexible job that still allowed us to be able to pay our bills (not sure what job meets that criteria) AND get my own undiagnosed ADHD under control to have the time and organizational skills needed to become leader of social change able to rally the people across all socio-economic/racial groups and publicize the cause/special education expert/special education tutor/ while not sacrificing my marriage or children.  The other option was to spend lots of money to hire people to do those roles with the hopes it would change something for my kids and other children in a similar situation.  Either way I was paying taxes to the school system and staying in the public school system could cost me more than moving to an affordable private school that would meet more of our needs without changing anything.

I would agree though that it isn't an all or nothing.  I still plan to vote, I still may write letters to the Board of Education, and I will still donate money to community causes.  We may be back in the public school system at some point and we are a part of the community whether our kids attend the school or not.

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