Adrian and Erin Rioux are saying YES to our new elementary school because they don’t want other families to have to make the difficult choice they and many Swampscott families have to make.
….As a family we are coming up on 5 years of being residents of Swampscott. We moved here for so many reasons, one of them being the education. My son, Adrian, is entering the 3rd grade at the Clarke Elementary School. Adrain originally attended Stanley Elementary school from kindergarten until March of his 2nd grade year before having to move across town to the Clarke School to access all the services he needed to support him and his dyslexia.
While I know some parents have turned down moves because it would be too disruptive to their child and siblings, we chose the other hard decision – to move our son so he could readily access all the support services he needed to thrive.
While we loved Stanley and the community there, we felt it was too big of a risk not to access the correct resources. We were incredibly lucky that my son was able to quickly make friends and settle in at Clarke. Once there his worries around going to school that he had when he attended Stanley completely resolved and he changed from counting days until the weekend to counting days until he went back to school!
As I said previously, we chose one hard decision but in the end the kid suffers either way and we are lucky our son settled so quickly. It could have gone completely differently.
This experience is why we support one centralized elementary school for all our children. Every kid deserves to have the resources they need available to them at their current school. No parent should have to make this decision and then wonder if it really was the correct choice for their family.
We were lucky and a child’s education should not be successful based on luck. A child’s education should be equitable to all children, but our current set up with three elementary schools with each school designated for a specific need does not support equity.
My son still misses his Stanley friends, and if you ask him, he would want both his friends and to have the language based support classroom that teaches him the way his brain needs to be taught.
Our children CAN and SHOULD have both – that is why our family is supporting the new centralized K-4 school in Swampscott.
We ask that you consider getting behind it as well so that our children’s education is not based on luck but on equity! Please join us in voting YES on October 19th for ALL of our children.