My husband was a Chief Master Sergeant in the US Air Force, so for many years our family moved around quite a bit. Since 2020 we have lived in Italy, North Dakota, Texas and now Oklahoma. Our son, Essam, is now in 9th grade; our daughter, Isabella, is in fifth.
When we moved to Oklahoma in 2023, we sought out an area in Enid where we had heard good things about the local public school. We’ve had a mostly good experience for Essam, who is in high school. However, we noticed some issues with the elementary school that Isabella was attending almost immediately.
Isabella had always liked school, and she did well in the Texas public school district where we had just moved from. However, when I dropped her off at school in Oklahoma, she would often cry because she didn’t want to go. That’s when I started to look more into what they were doing at school and how they were teaching her.
A huge amount of the work she was doing in elementary school was done online through Google classroom. It reminded me of the COVID-era style of remote learning, except in school. There were large class sizes and Isabella was not comfortable approaching the teacher with her many questions, which was not a model that Isabella was thriving in. They also used PCs (we have Macs at home) and the transition to the new operating system and, in general, being on the computer so often was hard for her, especially since no one was helping her much.
One of the breaking points for us was when Isabella came home very upset because she felt she had spent all day trying to engage with a digital lesson and was unable to understand what was happening on her screen. My husband went to the school the next day to look at the program, and the volume was turned all the way down (which the teacher would not have addressed unless we had pointed out). That’s when we decided to explore other options.
We quickly found St. Joseph Catholic School. At first, Isabella was reluctant to consider transferring and leaving friends behind and – gasp! – wearing a school uniform. After touring the school with a friendly teacher, she changed her mind … even about the uniform.
Now Isabella is starting her second year at “St. Joe’s,” the longest she has ever been in one school, and she likes to tell us that it “feels like a family.” Classes are much smaller, and she gets a lot of one-on-one instruction from her teachers, all of whom are very good and very accessible. The school does not rely on digital tools as much as her public school. And, importantly for us, she can be part of a community where she is comfortable discussing her Catholic faith. We understand some students may adjust well and prefer the learning environment of our local public school; however, St. Joseph’s is a perfect fit for our daughter, and we are thrilled to have found a place where she is thriving.
St. Joseph’s tuition is around $7,000, and the bulk of that is paid for through the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit program. The tax credit has made it much easier to choose a private school option, and the way we look at it is these are our tax dollars anyway. I hope lawmakers can support and expand this program so more children can attend a school that’s the right fit for them, just like Isabella.
