The Kindergarten Wars

by Alan Eisenstock

  They are at war.

  The Darcy School is a city school, vertical in design, layered like a massive concrete wedding cake. Entering the school through twin metal gates, you walk through a lush courtyard resembling the lobby of a Vegas hotel, which leads into a combination theater and gymnasium with a freshly burnished hardwood floor. The gym sits below two levels of classrooms, an art studio and music room, computer and science labs, capped by an enclosed rooftop playground.

  But one night each April, the Darcy School gymnasium morphs from an elite private elementary school into a mini-convention center and host of “Private School Expo” or “Kindergarten Presentation Night,” as the heading reads on the half-inch-thick handout each attendee receives. Below the heading, the handout announces a list of more than forty participating schools. Each school fills a full page, its vital information clumped in dense, size-ten-font paragraphs: address, telephone, e-mail, Web site, contact person, year founded, religious affiliation, dress code, mission statement, ethnic diversity, and under separate headings, description of the application/enrollment process, including but not limited to projected openings for kindergarten. Three words in bold black letters top the final paragraph—Tuition and Fees—followed by ominous, insistent, and ludicrous numbers, resulting in sticker shock for even the most well-heeled in attendance.

  Flipping through the school descriptions, the shock evolves into a sense of dread. Paying for school is one thing; being admitted is quite another. Skimming the breakdown of the applications to Meryton, among the most difficult schools in the city to get into, you read, “Projected openings for kindergarten: 26.”

  Meryton typically receives three to four hundred kindergarten applications. Of the twenty-six projected openings, siblings, legacies, and children of faculty will, in a conservative estimate, nab the first ten, reducing the available openings to sixteen. If Meryton hits its high-end projection of four hundred applications, the odds of being accepted are a daunting twenty-five to one.

  Tonight, school heads and admissions directors representing the forty private schools stand at card tables that rim the perimeter of the gym. The schools are arranged in alphabetical order beginning on the left side. Each table is covered with brochures and application packets piled high in front of a sign announcing the name of the school in green cursive handwriting. The Expo has not yet begun but there are already two hundred parents massed outside the gymnasium doors. Once the doors open, a steady flow of incoming traffic promises to double that number within the half hour.

  Dana Optt, director of admissions at Pemberley School, mid-forties, a shade under six feet tall, her hair snowball white and spectacularly large, prepares for the siege. Her first hint of the upcoming onslaught begins while she is arranging brochures in four neat rows on her table. As she finishes laying out the first row, two handsome men in their thirties appear. One is African American, the other Asian. They wear matching charcoal gray suits. To Dana’s trained eye, they look as if they work out.

  “Excuse us,” the Asian man says. “I’m Howard and this is Lionel.”

  Lionel smiles. “We don’t mean to bother you, but we knew if we didn’t catch you now, we’d probably never get a chance to talk to you.”

  Dana returns his smile. “You guys are good. They haven’t opened the doors yet. How’d you get in here?”

  “We’re very convincing,” Howard says.

  “So you want your kid to go to Pemberley,” Dana says. “Okay. Convince me.”

  That’s all it takes—Dana’s razor sharpness and her absolute intolerance for bullshit—and the three of them lose it.

  “Hurry up now,” Dana says through her laugh. “I’m gonna be swamped by a million people in two minutes.”

  “Well, admitting us helps us and you,” Lionel says.

  “How so?”

  “Pemberley is the best school in the city and same-sex couples are in.”

  “Look at us,” Howard says. “You’ve got all your diversity covered in one family.”

  “Honey, we are dripping in diversity,” Lionel says.

  Dana laughs again. “You guys are a trip.”

  “I don’t care what they’re selling in the red states,” Howard says. “We are the wave of the future.”

  “We’re the perfect couple,” Lionel says, dipping his head onto Howard’s shoulder. “We have money. We will be involved in our child’s education, in every way. We’re very generous with our time and our resources.”

  “You’re ringing every bell,” Dana says. “I’m taking a guess. Who’s the lawyer in the family?”

  “You’re good,” Howard says. “I am. Real estate. Big button-down firm downtown. I’m the token goy.”

  “I’m a recovering investment banker,” Lionel says. “I stay at home with the kid.”

  “Tell me about the kid.”

  Ridiculously, spontaneously, Lionel and Howard gush.

  “Where do we start?” Howard says. “Justin is beautiful, curious, funny, sweet . . . did I say beautiful?”

  Dana winks at them. “You forgot to tell me how smart he is. He’s gifted, right?”

  “God, I hope not,” Howard says. “I just hope he’s normal.”

  “Like us,” says Lionel.

  Dana roars. “You guys are too much.”

  “Oh, just wait, honey,” Lionel says. “If there’s an issue at school, I can get as bitchy as any country club princess.”

  The doors to the gymnasium open with a rumble and the floor literally begins to shake. Within ten seconds, a throng of humanity stampedes inside, thirty parents on a torpedo line, headed right for Dana.

  “We won’t take up any more of your time,” Howard says. “We just wanted to introduce ourselves.”

  “What Howard means is that we wanted to fawn all over you, make an indelible impression, bond, and tell you that you’re even more fabulous than your reputation.”

  “And that’s the truth. We’re not just sucking up,” Howard says.

  “You’re too funny,” Dana says. “Listen, I’m dying to meet Justin. Call my office, come to the open house, and we’ll go from there.”

  “So when we say Howard and Lionel are calling, you’ll remember?”

  “I think I will,” Dana says.

  Lauren and Craig Pernice live in a cavernous two-story Tudor built into the base of a hill in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city. The rooms in their house are vast and open. They own few pieces of furniture but what they do have is overstuffed and oversized: an enormous L-shaped couch planted in front of a mammoth plasma-screen TV in a family room dotted with DVDs, kids’ toys, art projects, and sporting equipment; a walk-in refrigerator dominated by a wall of diet peach Snapple in a football field of a kitchen; expansive children’s bedrooms with built-in desks along entire walls, framed by jumbo bunk beds; and a master bedroom with a super-size canopy bed, a multiplex movie theater-size screen across the way, floor to ceiling. The Pernice house feels, in the best sense, lived in, especially by their two sons, Killian, four, and Joseph, two. Craig, steady, calm, tall, guarded, is a partner in an investment banking firm that specializes in deals relating to the environment. In the business world, he is known as a player, a role model for newly matriculated MBAs. Lauren, she is fond of saying, is Craig’s flip side: excitable, passionate, petite, formerly a graduate student in Russian literature at Harvard, currently a stay-at-home mom. Lauren is between careers, grappling with life choices now that she has some time on her hands. She is open about discussing this but wonders if she is saying too much. She laughs nervously and admits that she just can’t censor herself. Lauren speaks machine-gun fast in a soft Virginia drawl, the result of her Charlottesville childhood; if you don’t home in, you can easily miss the heart of her conversation.

  “Killian’s got tremendously strong academics but some social needs,” she says one afternoon curled up on the couch in the family room. “Going into kindergarten he’ll be reading chapter books. And his math is very developed.�
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  She combs her fingers through her jet black hair, cut short with tight bangs, resembling a stylish helmet. Lauren wears glasses, black wraparound Calvin Kleins, tapered so that they obscure her eyes. “Frankly, I have some concerns that there is so much money in the secular private schools in this city. I am not as comfortable in that medium as Craig is. Obviously we do very well. Craig makes a good living. We’re very lucky. But it’s not the background I came from. Everything’s a trade-off, I recognize that. You can’t have it all. It’s just that at these schools there’s the Prada vibe floating around and it’s kind of a sticking point for me.”

  She peers at the ceiling as if checking for leaks.

  “Maybe that’s hypocritical, I don’t know. Whatever the setting, we want strong academics side by side with true emotional and social development. At least that’s our ideal.”

  Lauren changes position, pretzels herself so that she can see her yard through the family room window. “We’ve decided to apply to Pemberley School. That’s really our one and only choice. And I can say how we became interested in Pemberley in two words: Dana Optt.”

  Lauren shakes her short hair as if it’s still wet from a shower.

  “Amazing lady. She is so physically imposing. Plus I would not want to play Scrabble against her. She’s very sharp. And she gets right to it. Pemberley wasn’t on our radar until we went to the Private School Expo thing. There were a ton of people crowding around the Pemberley table. Dana was describing the school, the curriculum, the philosophy, and it sounded like the best of all possible worlds. We kind of hung back, waited until we saw an opening, and then squeezed our way up to her. We introduced ourselves and I described Killian. I said, ‘He’s very bright, academically quite advanced, but socially could really benefit by working with his peers.’”

  Lauren pokes a finger into the air as if testing the wind. “Actually the specific question we asked was, ‘What are the opportunities for collaborative learning? We think Killian would get a lot out of doing group projects. I think that’s an important skill for him to develop.’

  “And Dana said, ‘We do a lot of that at Pemberley. We choose the kids carefully for the collaborative projects. We’ll put one of the kids who’s very bright with one of the kids who’s maybe more social. It drives the bright kids nuts because they want to do it all themselves.’ That spoke to us. Craig said, ‘So, our kid, like the kid you described, he’s not that unusual.’ And Dana looked at him and she said, rather gently, ‘No. He’s not unusual at all.’

  “It was Dana’s response,” Lauren says softly. “Her sensitivity. The way she described it, like they’ve been there. I’m definitely going to their open house, to really look at Pemberley. It sounds like they’ve had kids like Killian. Because she said he’s, I mean . . .”

  Ambushed by a surprise catch in her throat, she swallows, and says, quietly, “She said . . . he’s not so unusual.”

  New York Mom

  Jennifer Shea Cohen, thirty-three, lives on the twenty-first floor of a prewar building just off Park Avenue. She wears her red hair shoulder-length and straight and is dressed in black jeans and a black sweater. Her eyes form steel blue pools, and when she smiles her upper lip curls to the left as though she’s not sure she should go all the way with it. In the fifth grade, friends started calling her Shea to distinguish her from the two other Jennifers in her class. Now few people outside of her family know her as anything but Shea.

  Shea steps into her living room and flashes the turned-up smile. She has furnished the room in art deco, including a neon green couch and two matching green chairs. A large plasma TV is mounted on a wall next to a picture window that overlooks Park Avenue.

  “We love it here,” Shea says. “I can’t imagine raising our kids anywhere but in the city.”

  Shea and her husband, Donald, are lifelong New Yorkers. Shea grew up on the Upper West Side, her dad a Columbia professor, her mom a freelance editor. Donald grew up in Greenwich Village, the son of a banker and a stay-at-home mom who gave piano lessons on the side. Donald inherited both of his parents’ professions: he works full-time as a financial analyst and moonlights as the piano player in a jazz trio. Recently, the trio recorded a CD, which they sell over the Internet. Shea works part-time in marketing for a well-known national charity.

  “Donald and I met at the University of Michigan. There we were, these two New Yorkers, away at school, meeting at a fraternity party. It was funny. We both wanted to move back to New York, find good jobs, raise a family, and live on the Upper East Side. Probably doesn’t sound very romantic but that’s what we wanted. We went for it. Here we are.”

  Below on Park Avenue, a car horn blares. It is the last week of April and Shea has already begun the application process for private school, sixteen months before her son, Liam, will begin kindergarten.

  “I want to get all this stuff in early. I work, I have two kids. I have a lot on my plate. I’m going to write the essay over the summer and have it ready to go. The first step, really, is you have to know your kid. There are a lot of people who know the schools better than they know their own children. They don’t consider the fit. In New York, you start by asking, coed or single-sex? Now, for Liam, who is a bright kid but also a very creative spirit, I’m looking for a school that will foster creativity within a structured environment. Most single-sex schools tend to be a bit more formal, which sometimes goes against the idea of being creative. Not always. For me, it’s about finding that right school and going for it. I’m the type of person who gets focused on one or two places rather than, ‘Oh my God, I’d be so happy if he got into any one of six schools.’”

  Shea flicks on a chrome floor lamp standing in the corner. “We went on a tour of Longbourne earlier this week. That’s all boys but we absolutely loved it. Very into the arts, music, theater. The kids wear uniforms and it’s very academic but you get a real nurturing feel in the classroom. A lot of shared tables, not desks in rows. Young teachers really engaging with the kids. Tons of art on the walls. Outside the classroom there isn’t such an emphasis on athletics, the way it is at a lot of other boys’ schools. I could really see Liam there. We’d be thrilled if he got in. But altogether we’re applying to, let’s see—”

  Shea ticks the numbers off on her fingers. “Seven total. This is New York. That’s a reasonable number.” She stands. “Let me get my chart.” She heads out of the room, tosses over her shoulder, “I’m very organized.”

  A sound of a drawer opening and closing in the kitchen and Shea is back, holding a computer printout. She settles onto the couch. “I made a chart that lists the schools. I have a little column that says application.”

  She points to a header on the page. The chart is color-coded, pale neon hues matching her living room decor: lime green, soft pink, pale blue.

  “Then I have a column here that I will update when I call the school, and when I receive the application. I mark it received. Then when I finish writing it, I mark it finished, and then finally I mark it mailed and the date. I have this in my computer at work so I can update it as the process goes along. Here I have marked these called and so on. And then I have a column for tour, our interview, and Liam’s interview, and on that I put the date and the person who gives us the tour. That way I’m all set when I write the thank-you note. Got the person’s name. Voilà.”

  She tosses herself backward into the couch. “Donald’s a little intimidated by my chart.” Shea shrugs. “I can’t help it.” She leans forward abruptly, points at the chart. “I’d love to be able to strategize a little when it comes to Liam’s interviews but we may not have a choice. Our thought is to try to hedge, if we can. In other words, we’re going to try not to make Longbourne his first interview. A lot of people say, ‘Don’t have what you think is your favorite school be his first one.’ I don’t think it’ll matter to Liam. Unless he’s having some meltdown day, but that’s not even in his personality. And the interviews vary. Some of them are little group interviews. Some are o
ne-on-one. I know at this one school the woman who interviews the kids has a reputation of being kind of out there. We hear she does odd things. I heard from a friend that she made her son jump up and down on one foot. Not sure what she was going for. Maybe looking to see if the kid had physical issues.”

  Shea leans forward, steeples her fingers on her knees. “I know it’s a crazy thing, this process. The competition is terrible. In our small corner of the world there are not only all these smart kids, there is this concentration of well-educated, successful, competitive parents who are pushing, really pushing. I am trying not to get caught up in all this. But it’s hard. A lot of these ultra-competitive parents start by pushing their kids into these feeder nursery schools where the directors are connected to the ongoing schools. Liam’s school is a little off the radar. Our director is kind of connected, but the school is not known as a feeder. That’s okay. You have to draw the line somewhere. You start thinking, is it really worth it to pay $15,000 for nursery school where your kid is basically playing in the sand all day? I guess the argument is that the feeder schools spend more time preparing the kids for the ERB tests. That’s a whole other issue. But you can do that at home. Read to your kid, play Candyland, play Mighty Mind games or things like that. It’s a vicious cycle.”

  Falling in Love

  Katie Miller is about to fall in love.

  Deeply, madly, desperately in love.

  The emotion hits her without warning, a sneak attack. The wave of feeling begins suddenly in the Hunsford School park-ing lot.

  “Look at this,” Katie says, indicating the clock on the dashboard in her SUV. “From my driveway to the school, seven minutes. For someone who lives in her car, that is a major plus. Now, where do I park?”

  On cue, a uniformed security guard appears at Katie’s driver-side window. He holds a clipboard. He beams. “Good morning.”