The following is an excerpt from our book, LIVING THE DREAM ON A BOX WINE BUDGET. I was inspired to print it after hearing an interview on the radio this morning with an outraged mother of a student enrolled in a Chicago college prep charter school. She was angry with the school’s disciplinary policies. Her son had racked up dozens of detentions for what she called “benign infractions” (sleeping in class, talking in class, etc) and had to repeat his freshman year. She claimed it is the school’s way of trying to get rid of poorly performing students in an effort to keep its test scores high. Wow, seriously? Read on…
WE’RE PROUD OF 95% OF OUR GRADUATES
AND WHEN THE OTHER 5% GET OUT OF JAIL,
WE’LL BE PROUD OF THEM TOO
My BWB partner and I both sent our sons to a Catholic and Benedictine, all-boy, military academy. Once, when my son, Brian, described his school in that way, the response was “Wow, that’s a lot of discipline.” Precisely. For my family, it was something we’d planned even before the boys were born. My husband graduated from the same school, as did his older brothers and his father. Sending sons to this school is a tradition in many families.
In fact, when we were expecting our first baby, we did what all expectant parents do – we thought about names. Only in our house, I was told that, for boys names, initials had to be considered. Perplexed, it was explained to me that if we had a boy, once he reached high school, he would be required to wear a name tag with his first and middle initial and that some initials invited merciless teasing. So, in my attempt to name our son something he could proudly display on his name tag, which would not result in lifetime of therapy, I had to keep initials in mind. We finally gave up and concluded that boys can be quite creative in the art of nicknames and decided to go with “Michael Patrick” (initials: MP – which, actually, may have helped a little in a military environment).
Life on a Box Wine Budget 