Dearest Marcy;
I do understand the quandry you are facing. Yet I also have a question which has been raised by others in articles I have read and I have written.
Why is it up to the school to teach discipline and good training? Why have the parents ceded this aspect of child rearing to the school? I might also mention this as well as sex education being taught in schools and other social issues and so on. What ever happened to the three R's - reading riting and rithmetic?
Why are schools taking over the other aspects of being the parents?
Answer - It's all part of a long term scheme to supplant educated people with not to educated people and people who will follow orders and not be to bright. People who will not know their constitutional rights because they were not taught them. Peoiple who will not have good reading or writing skills. It's all part of a dumbed down education to separate the Elite form the workers.
Why do you think Nancy Pelosi sent her three daughters to Sacred Heart and not a single one of the SF public schools. Pelosi could have had her kids in Lowell with a snap of ter fingers and no one would have said boo about it.
Alexander De Tocquille in his survey of America talked about how bright and smart the kids were in those days where there wasn't a formal state sponsored education. Then came the Prussian standard and Horace Mann and down the tubes went the education of America's children. Then the fdereal Department of Education came along thank you Jimmy Cartre and the NEA and Nickle B - No Child Left Behind and more dumbing down to make the test scores look good.
The one and only way we can start to recover the lost educational opportunities is to dismantle the state boards of education and all the local boards of education and permanently shut down the federal Dept. of Education.
See the LPSF web site for a couple article I wrote about the school system and what could be done to start anew.
http://www.lpsf.org/Issues/Public_Schools.html
http://www.lpsf.org/Issues/Our_Schools.html
BTW: Despite all of that I still plan to vote yes on the JROTC - why - beats the heck out of me!!! 
I will also propose to the School Board replacing JROTC with a Jr-NERT program as better suited to providing ways for teenagers to really help their community to learn discpline and get good training.
Anybody else with me on that???
Ron Getty - SF Libertarian
Hostis res Publica
Morte ai Tiranni
To answer your questions, you should live for a year in Hunter's Point or
another lower- or lower-middle class neighborhood. Walk around and
observe the community and the families who live there. I don't think
there's any "scheme" going on here; it's just hard to teach "family
values" without any family unit to speak of.
Jeremy