Three Kids, Three Schools (and Why That's the Best Decision We Ever Made)

My three kids have never really been on the same school schedule. The age gaps meant it was always some version of a split, my youngest two in preschool while my oldest was already in elementary, or my older two together while my youngest was still finger painting somewhere. So the idea of separate schools was never new to us. What's new is doing it on purpose.

How we ended up here

After COVID we made the decision to move south of Atlanta, into a community in the woods we had loved and visited for years. We wanted more freedom for our kids. More nature. More time outside instead of more time in a car. My husband no longer had to commute into the city, so we finally had the flexibility to go for it.

The neighborhood school served every age, which felt like an actual gift. Our rising kindergartener, rising third grader, and rising fifth grader could all be together, in a progressive school that leaned heavily into real-life skills, group projects, presentations, and a ton of time outside. For a while, it worked beautifully for all three.

And then it didn't, for one of them

My middle son was thriving there in almost every way. Curious, loved science, loved being outside, the kind of kid who lights up when a school actually gives him room to explore the things he's into. But we started to see his math drop off. Not a slow slide, a cliff.

He'd never been the strongest in math, but it hadn't been a real concern, that's usually how it goes unless a kid is actually failing, the in-between struggle just gets absorbed into the system. This wasn't that anymore. So we pursued a psych/ed evaluation, and got a diagnosis of dyscalculia along with inattentive ADHD. I've written about this part elsewhere, but the short version is that the diagnosis finally gave us a real path forward instead of just a feeling that something was off.

We tried hard to make it work where he was. Specialized tutoring. A summer intervention camp. Everything we could throw at it, because we wanted him to stay at the school he loved, with his siblings, in our own neighborhood. But the way the school taught just wasn't built for the way his brain needed to learn, and eventually we made the call to move him.

The school that changed everything

He's now at a school that specifically works with kids who have learning differences, many of them dyslexic, and the way they teach has been nothing short of life changing for him. Everything there is intentional. They build executive function skills directly into the day, not as an afterthought, so kids can manage their own workload and actually feel confident doing it. Math and reading happen twice a day, so the content gets reinforced instead of taught once and hoped for. Homework is targeted, never overwhelming, built specifically around retention for kids whose working memory works differently.

I could talk about this school for an hour. Watching your kid go from struggling to actually thriving, in a place built for exactly how his brain works, is one of the best things I've witnessed as a parent. If you want to know more about what we found there, or what to look for in a school like it, reach out. Email me, find me on Facebook or Instagram, I'm always happy to talk through it.

Meanwhile, my youngest found his own place too

My youngest has since moved schools as well, and landed somewhere just as unique, a school run out of a barn with a teacher who has fully cultivated a love of learning, nature, and the arts. It's a classical, liberal arts style education, which turns out to be exactly right for a kid who loves reading the classics, playing piano, and a good comic book in the same afternoon. He came home recently and told me all about the Fertile Crescent, unprompted, correctly placing it between the Tigris and Euphrates. I knew right then he was exactly where he needed to be.

And my daughter, at the other end of the spectrum entirely

My daughter is at a very traditional private school with a college prep curriculum. She's a motivated, dedicated learner, and she's doing great there, though moving from a more learner-led environment to a traditional one came with its own adjustment, figuring out new study skills and a different kind of organization than she'd needed before. Different challenge, same outcome. She's thriving in the structure that fits her.

The part nobody tells you

Three kids, three schools, is a lot. I joke about it, but it's genuinely three different communication apps, three different school calendars, three different dismissal times, three different piles of forms. It is a logistical circus some weeks.

But watching each of them actually love where they are, feel confident, feel excited to learn, is worth every bit of the juggling. That's the whole takeaway, honestly. Keep looking. You will find the right fit for your child, and when you do, you'll know it. You'll also know when something isn't working, when it feels off, when the struggle stops being normal-kid-struggle and starts being something else. Listen to that. Pay attention to it.

Every kid deserves to spend their school days somewhere they actually love. They spend so much of their lives there. They should get to be excited about it.

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If this resonated with you: if you're in the middle of wondering whether your child's struggle is normal or something worth looking into further, the psych/ed evaluation post is a good next read. And if dyscalculia is part of your own story, I'm slowly building out a dyscalculia resource hub with what we've learned along the way.