Before we moved to Texas, Lorne and I scoped out possible high schools for Lucy. We had been looking for homes, in the country, away from the city of Dallas. One area we fell in love with was the Red Oak area. On our visit, Red Oak High School was performing the musical Little Shop of Horrors, so we bought tickets and took Lucy—the students did a fabulous job.
During our stay, we looked at five houses in this area, and the last house we looked at--on the morning we were to fly back to California--was on the outskirts of the City of Lancaster.
From our home Lancaster High School is 8.2 miles away, while the town of Red Oak’s High School is 6.3 miles away. Red Oak's test scores rank much higher than Lancaster’s. However, when we looked into an enter-district transfer we found out that Lancaster no longer approves transfers to the Red Oak Public School District.
Our next course of action was charter schools, and there was one, Life School, founded twenty years ago by an Assembly of God minister, 9.1 miles away in a town called Waxahachie (pronounced woks-a-hacth-e.) While in California I filed out the application and mailed it at the beginning of April.
In July, I followed up with the school, and found out that she was twenty-second on the waiting list. So we prayed, asked our friends and family to pray, did good deeds in hopes karma would lend a hand, and crossed our fingers.
Low and behold, we got a call two weeks after school began, stating she had been accepted to Life School, Secondary. Immediately, Lorne started doing the happy dance, and took off work to buy her uniforms—which, by the way, cost half of our house payment.
The school sent over a list of classes to choose from, which included one elective. She, following in her brother’s footsteps, chose ART 1.
Lucy’s first day at Life School was Monday, September 26th, but to her dismay, ART 1 was not available so she was put in SPANISH 1. I left her waiting in the office for a student to show her around campus, with a frown on her face and a look that said, "I'm not going to like it here."
Since there was nothing I could do for her class situation, I figured the frown on her frown would still be there when I picked her up from school.
To my surprise, the first words that Lucy said as she was climbing in to the front seat was, “Best school day ever!” She babbled about her day, her new friends, a boy in several of her classes who looks like Peter Parker from Spiderman, and an incredibly interesting ten minute event which took place back in May…
How’s that for a HOOK?
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