Did you ever move schools in the middle of the school year? Or come to school one day to find out your best classmate was changing schools? If you did, you know how hard it is to be the new kid or to lose a classmate. Maintaining school systems after divorce will help your children keep the familiarity of their school and their classmates.
Maintaining School Systems: Avoiding Disruption
Why is this important?
Maintaining school systems post-divorce is important for your children and their education. A switch in school systems can cause a disruption in friendships and in educational focus. While divorce will certainly change a child’s life, it will help to keep their school and social life as similar as possible. Changing these can disturb any progress a child has already made in school and send them back to the beginning.
Friendship, no matter the age, is important for children, especially for those whose parents are divorcing. Maintaining school systems will help them keep their friends. They may be able to help the child grieve and cope or simply keep their mind off of it.
How can we achieve this?
The birds nest agreement is great for maintaining school systems. While not feasible for every family, the children will definitely remain in the same school system in a familiar neighborhood.
There can also be an agreement for parents to not move out of an area. By doing this, children can still take the bus and both homes will be relatively close in case of emergency. Maintaining school systems goes beyond just the system sometimes. Some school systems have several elementary schools, for example. This agreement would need to specify that the parents are both zoned for the same elementary school. The same middle and high school would be an important thing to check, too.
Couples get divorced for a lot of reasons. Children are better off with two happy, but separate, parents, than they are with two unhappy, but together, parents. There are a lot of moving parts to divorce and it is not always easy to agree with an ex-spouse. Maintaining school systems is a small effort to make towards ensuring a child’s overall happiness and wellness.