Apply Anyway.

For Dylan’s whole life, there was one private school that grasped and held our attention.

When Dylan was a toddler, we walked him to the school campus and fed their horses, letting him carefully touch their noses with his little hand. When Shane was born, we took him “to the horses,” too.

I met the headmaster one day, on our walk, and told them that we were just too poor to go to that school. She encouraged us to apply anyway, since financial aid was available. I loved the idea – but didn’t know how eligible we would be.

So when 6th grade was rolling around, and against my better judgment, I wandered into the school’s Open House. I listened to the teachers talking about their openness with students. I listened to the students talking about how much freedom they had, and how they were encouraged to do more, and be more, than they’d been encouraged in public school.

By the time the Open House was over, I was in tears. I knew we couldn’t afford the school – it cost more than $25,000/year – and I literally cried to the admissions staff person at the desk. Tears were pouring out of my eyes. I felt like a total idiot, but the school seemed so perfect for Dylan.

“Apply anyway,” she told me. “We do have financial aid. And we’ll wave the application fee, so you really have nothing to lose.”

And then Dylan attended the school for a “shadow” day, and loved it so much, he said he wanted to go there more than anything in the world. He was even willing to spend the extra hour per day there – and happy about it. He loved being in this school.

So we applied. We went through the laborious process of begging for money through an online application system that practically guaranteed that we wouldn’t get any aid. We make enough money that people think we have money. But we spend it all on vacations and extracurriculars and restaurants, so we don’t actually have any money.

My application included a detailed exploration of Shane’s vision therapy ($24,000 not covered by insurance) and Dylan’s ADHD testing ($2200 not covered by insurance) and all the many, many reasons we really couldn’t afford the school.

Then we waited. And waited. We needed to know if we were getting any financial aid – and how much – to see if we would be able to afford to give Dylan the quality education he deserved, instead of sending him to public middle school.

We waited a few weeks, and finally, the letter came. It said (more or less), “Thank you for applying, but we don’t have a space for your son here.”

In other words, they didn’t have a space for someone who couldn’t afford to pay full tuition. My husband later ran into someone on the private school’s board who told him that the school was in deep financial trouble, and that they couldn’t afford to take on students who couldn’t pay full tuition.

To say that I was angry about wasting four months of my time and dreams on this school, based on a false promise of possible financial aid, would be an understatement of tremendous proportions.

I stayed up nights, screaming at that admissions woman in my head: “APPLY ANYWAY! you said! WHY would you SAY THAT when I was standing there IN TEARS, telling you that I had NO MONEY?!”

After weeks of agonizing over the injustice of it all, I finally wrote her a letter, putting my sentiments in much clearer and kinder terms.

Then I printed out the letter, burned it, and sent Dylan to public middle school.

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