What's good enough for my children

I am pissed off today. So if you plan to read this entry, I suggest you put on your helmet.

We received our "letter of assignment" on Saturday, telling us which public school Booper has been assigned to for kindergarten. We received exactly NONE of our choices. (The process involves listing up to 7 schools that you would consider, then they assign you to one of them based on their fucked up "diversity" selection system.) Instead, he was assigned to some for-shit public school, nowhere near our house, where the mother of one of the students was shot a couple years ago by her estranged husband. We are not sending our child there. I am not sending my precious son to kindergarten in some concrete dump with inferior facilities, mediocre academics, and underfunded extracurriculars, that cannot guarantee basic safety in their own parking lot. Needless to say, we are not accepting this "assignment."

Our options, at this point, are the following.

1) We can "select" a few other schools that we would consider and hope a space opens up for him in one of those. Of course, these are the schools that still have openings, meaning no one else wanted to go to them either.

2) We can put him on the waiting list for ONE school only, and hope he gets a spot.

3) We can keep him in pre-K for a year and then try this process again next year, including private schools in the mix. Because of his birthdate, he did not make the cut off for a lot of the private schools this year so we didn't go that route at all. Not that we really want private school, but if our choice is private school or some bullshit like this, then we'll take private, thank you very much.

Our top choice school for him is the Korean Immersion program at one of the popular public schools. Thirty-eight other families made this their top choice. A total of 130 families had it somewhere on their list. And this is for less than 20 spaces. (We don't know how many exactly because the class size is 20 but some spots are taken by siblings. Maybe all of them were!) I think some families say they want their children in this program just as a way of getting them into the school in general. It's one of the most desirable public elementary schools in the city. Then they ask to switch out later, to the general education track. But in the meantime, they take a spot that could go to a child with a genuine interest in learning to read and write and speak in Korean. Like Booper. We did not get offered one of these very few spots, unfortunately. But my inclination at this point is to put this program down for our one waiting list choice. I've heard this can work, if you're tenacious. One thing I am is fucking tenacious. I applied to UC Berkeley 3 times before I got it, and then I was the valedictorian of my class. So the fucking joke was on them, those assholes.

I guess it could be worse. We do have the option of having him go through one year of pre-K at his current school, which we like a lot. Of course, this costs about $16K a year. A steal compared to the expected $20K a year for private school. Some families have to put their children in kindergarten next year no matter what. But I still feel angry that, after paying property taxes in this city for 5 years, we still can't get our son a seat in even the public elementary school that is 3 blocks from our house. No shit. We put that down as one of our choices, and we didn't even get that. This drives me ape shit. Makes me want to do something crazy, like move to Marin.

I am so frustrated. What kind of system is this? What the flying fuck is this? And what's the best thing to do now?