Why We Gave up on One of the Top Public School Districts in The Nation

By the beginning of our son’s Kindergarten year, we’d moved an hour away, left our family and friends behind, and holed up in a tiny apartment to wait out construction on our new home, all to put him in one of the highest-rated school districts in the nation. In the middle of the summer that followed, we hit the reset button and decided to do the job ourselves.

A version of this article serves as the introduction to our new education blog, Very Private School.

It matters where you live

Missouri’s famously pathetic struggle against Covid-19 started right here in our county, and the story of how it happened perfectly set the tone for the rest of the pandemic.

As the world watched the virus rampage through Italy, local press seems to suggest Indiana University worked to help coordinate exits for students studying abroad in the Lombardy region ahead of impending travel bans. This may be why one young St. Louisan caught a flight from Milan eventually landing in Chicago where she took an Amtrak train home to Ladue — one of St. Louis’ wealthiest suburbs — days later.

While the family and the county maintain different stories about what happened next, no one seems to dispute that family members watched her health…