Hard decisions.

I have been meaning to write about this for a week now but haven't had time yet. I know this won't be of great interest to many people but I wanted to write down our experience. It all began in January when we received notice that the school district would be testing second graders for the Accelerated Learning Lab program. His teacher recommended that we have him tested and I jumped at the opportunity. He took the test in early February--it was a four hour test on a Saturday afternoon. The test had four sections, verbal, nonverbal, quantitative and writing. The district only has room in the class for 28 students and there are almost 20 elementary students feeding into the class. So, you can imagine how pleased we were when he was accepted. We went to the student/parent orientation about three weeks ago. I was thrilled with the academic opportunities this class would offer. They take all of the "normal" third grade curriculum at an accelerated rate and then keep moving forward. Ethan is a very bright kid and has been a bit bored with the pace of his classroom learning this year. I thought for sure that this program was the answer for him.
We left the orientation and the only thought I had at that point was how to make this happen for him. The class meets at an elementary school about 15 minutes away and parents are in charge of getting the kids there. I spoke with one of the other mom's and had a carpool started up. But, for whatever reason I just couldn't bring myself to sign the placement acceptance form. Tim and I talked about it. We went through the logistics of getting him to and from school and talked about the expense of it all. When we started talking about uprooting him from his school environment for the second year in a row it just didn't feel like the right thing. It was something I (and Tim too) couldn't quite reconcile. Of course, we had a discussion about the whole thing with Ethan too. He looked quite devastated when he realized that he would be going to a different school than Zach. He loved the idea of learning new things, like adding and subtracting fractions (yes--he is extremely excited about things like that). But, he didn't want to leave his brother or his friends. We knew he could make friends easily at a new school. We could sacrifice time and money to get him there. The academic environment would be fabulous. But, was it the right thing? I kept asking myself--why is this such a hard decision? Is my indecision a 'stupor of thought'? What is the best thing for Ethan??
In the end we decided not to send him to the A.L.L. program. And we feel good about that. I never thought that I would pass up an academic opportunity for one of my kids. We may never know why this was the right decision but we have to trust our feelings.