This week my household attended an open house event for the French public elementary school we are considering enrolling our child in to start Junior Kindergarten next fall.

Ottawa has four separate school boards covering the same geographic area, that are each managed entirely separately: French secular, English secular, French Catholic, and English Catholic. In the French boards, all communication from the school happens in French, and so does all the teaching and activities day-to-day (outside English classes, of course). In the English boards, communication at school is primarily in English, but French-as-an-additional-language classes are part of the curriculum for all students.

Ottawa is predominantly English-speaking, but it's one of the most francophone parts of Ontario. Since it's home to the Canadian federal government, French language ability is a highly sought after skill for employers here. My own ability to speak French started as a random childhood interest, lead me to spending ten months in France living with a host family at 16, and ultimately had a huge impact on my life that teenage me had never dreamed of: it gave me the ability to immigrate as an adult to Canada. Not French-speaking Europe as I dreamed of as a kid, and certainly not under the carefree circumstances kid-me imagined I'd make such a move under. Still though, the impact on my life of speaking French has been truly énorme.

The English schools here offer French Immersion programs all throughout, but I've heard that for kids who speak English at home who do French Immersion all through K-12, it's still somewhat hit or miss if they will be actually functionally bilingual as adults. Whereas, if a kid does their education fully in the French board, they will leave school 100% able to communicate in French and also 100% fine in English too.

I speak French; my partner does not. My wife's been feeling nervous about having our kid do school in a language one of the parents doesn't speak— both as a cultural thing (our kid's experience will be even more different from our own as kids, and even more incomprehensible to our loved ones back in the US than they already are), and not being able to fully participate in things like homework help or conversations with teachers. The benefits of our kids becoming bilingual feel so huge for me, though, and French schooling seems the most reliable path to that outcome.

We arrived the other night at the "portes ouvertes" at the elementary school about 20 minutes after it started. This had seemed totally reasonable to me— my wife had been trying to get us out the door quicker and I kept saying 'it's an open house, it lasts an hour, we've got time to finish dinner.' It turned out to be a sit-down presentation that had started 20 minutes before, and clearly most of the other parents had known that, turning their heads to look at us awkwardly shuffle in. That felt bad! My first test at having full responsibility for handling details with the French school, and I lead us astray.

Later that evening I was reading online and came across Garrett Bucks's potluck manifesto, about the vital importance of potlucks and watching each others' kids, and scooping each other's sidewalks, and all that messy, joyous, sometimes annoying interpersonal stuff that makes up what we call "community". Community, that thing so many people are realizing they lack, yet aren't sure how to make it happen in their own lives.

And I realized that in addition to the logistical worries, and the concern with dramatically leaning back towards "mental load all on me" instead of sharing parental decision-making, knowledge, and power between both parents as we generally do pretty well with kid stuff— French school would mean locking my wife out of a lot of the community aspect of having a young kid in school, and joining the parents' association and volunteering for the after school clubs and making coherent small talk with the other parents at drop off & pick up.

Garrett's essay reminded me, as Garrett's essays often do, that a primary value in our family is community. We make decisions large and small based on what helps us be good community members. Community is the number one thing we want to be able to pass on to our kids as a skill and value. Not French, and really not even anything academic at all.

We'll be enrolling our kid in our neighbo(u)rhood English public school for junior kindergarten next fall. When I think about the pros & cons of each choice, and think about our family values, there's really no question.

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As I think about wrapping up this post on a high note, patting myself on the back for remembering a deeply held value and actually thinking about how it applies to a decision in my life (wow, so wise), another truth of this story feels a bit more uncomfortable. I've been thinking for years about the misfires that happens from well-meaning parents "wanting what's best." That's often a very narrow lens that only prioritizes a certain kind of "best"— making sure kids maintain or exceed their parents' social and economic class status in adulthood, perhaps.

I've done the reading, so to speak— though there's always more to do. I can throw around terms like intensive parenting and I've fretted a lot about how to avoid the trap of modern kids' sports culture. "White Kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided America" by Margaret A. Hagerman was one of the first books I read during my first pregnancy. (Sarah Jaffe's book "Wanting What's Best" is still on my to-read list, though it's perhaps most directly "the book" for this question.) I read and think about "doing community" nonstop, and I've been trying my dangedest to put it into practice, though the whole international move from my beloved prior community while pregnant and then parenting two young kids while working full time has made the last year harder on the practice front than I'd like.

And yet. All that, and I can imagine how easy it would be to have arrived at a different conclusion. All the times my partner & I had talked before about the choice we are faced with about what school board to enter, and we almost missed this really huge aspect of what that decision could mean for us for the next decade-plus.

I think that's why I wanted to write this and share it, actually. Not just to say "community is important to me" once again, though I am saying that. Not only to say you should read Garrett's manifesto about potlucks, or host a proverbial potluck yourself, though I am also saying that, too. (Here it is again.)

It's maybe to remind myself, and maybe you, too, that your values, even the ones you know you hold most strongly, are never a set-it-and-forget-it kind of deal. You have to keep choosing to prioritize the things you care about. You have to keep remembering those higher principles in new situations, new decision points, and figure out how they factor in. You have to be constantly on guard against cultural messaging that tells you you should value something else. Especially when you do value that something else! There are always tradeoffs. It is better to choose between them with intention, and with attention always to what you are truly seeking to prioritize.