When Private School Parents Go Public

What happens when children whose parents have sent them to private schools during elementary school apply -- and get into -- elite public high schools in CPS? 

You can imagine.  Find out the dynamics from both sides of the issue by reading this interesting piece in Crain's (High-school competition irks parents of 'lifers').

And, if you've had your own experiences with this -- as a teacher, parent, or nearby observer -- feel free to let us know what you think.

Comments

That is really interesting- I do think that students who have been in CPS all along should get preferential treatment for the spots in selective enrollment but who can that be justified if all (even those at Latin, Parker etc.) are taxpayers?

As a public school teacher and a parent of a child who went to a private k-8 and then to LPHS, I can say that we really tried to get her into a public elementary school. We were not able to get her in on a lottery or the selective enrollment schools until late she was in a middle school grade. At that time, she was established in a private school and, the principal at Hawthorne was not willing to answer some of our questions so we kept her in private. She was able to get into all the selective enrollment H.S.'s and chose LPHS. For some people, private schools are the only choice when nothing else works out.

Is it the case that 2/3 of the students attending Payton come from private schools?

If you live in the city it you right to apply for and attend these schools.

If your kid in in private, you are paying pubic taxes but getting less for them, so when your kid goes public, you should have more of a right to send them to school of your choice.

Lalley said it best..."I appreciate that families choose Chicago public schools for elementary and stay for high school, but it's free public education for everyone. The fact that a person has gone to a private school shouldn't be an impediment to having access to free public education," he says. "If you have a successful school system, it should attract people. If you have rigorous and challenging programs that are effective, if you have facilities that are clean and safe, you should attract people."

Maybe the issue is that there needs to be more high school slots for selective enrollment- bigger schools, more schools?

[George Schmidt]

"'Because competition for admission is "exceedingly intense,' says Jeffrey S. Gray, CPS' selective-enrollment program manager, CPS uses strict criteria based on seventh-grade standardized test scores, final grades, attendance and race."

Can't resist.

The story is fascinating, even in its a-historical context. One of the reasons is in part because so many more affluent white people in this town (and of a certain generation) have a greatly inflated sense of personal entitlement -- as opposed to an equal or greater sense of social responsibility. This story could be used for any number of interesting class discussions from Chiapas to Bangalore, but not in a way that would make many Americans proud.

Bluntly: As long as your kid gets in the lifeboat, there is virtually no interest in what's happened to the majority. Nobody is demanding to know why there aren't enough lifeboats. The Darwinian part is a given, unexamined and smugly assumed.

The USA wasn't always this way. The poison in that attitude will take a long time to leech out of our collective communal body -- if there is even the possibility that some people want to. This is a level of corruption that will take at least a generation to repair. It's not even possible to have a conversation with many of these people because they've insulated themselves so smugly -- and arrogantly -- in their privileges.

A few observations:

One: This article explains why so many of the poorest children are "left behind" despite all the corporate rhetoric to the contrary. It's built into the deadlines and other hurdles.

The sad thing is that without intense family planning (or pre-school and then sixth grade counselors), many kids simply don't get all the paperwork in on deadline for these slots. This can apply to families where three or four adult incomes are required to support the household or families that have been shredded by any number of problems. The result is the same. The little ones don't get real "choice."

I doubt that many of the children in foster care, for example, had anyone helping them meet the pre-Christmas deadlines for "admission" to the selective enrollment schools (elementary or high school). That's the first sorting that leaves so many children in the general high schools with the fewest resources."Choice" becomes unfair to the poorest of the poor from Day One and gets moreso. The system expects that a four-year-old from the West Side is going to take the initiative to "apply" to Decatur or Disney. Or that the 12-year-old struggling to survive will know at the end of sixth grade that he should really be careful not to miss too many days in seventh grade so that by eighth grade he can fill out all the paperwork (before Christmas) to "choose" the right high school for ninth grade.

This kind of "choice" is a cruel joke against the poorest and most vulnerable children and their families. The game is rigged; the deck is stacked; and getting worse.

Two: Specialized selective enrollment schools might be necessary in a few cases (despite the corporate fantasies, not every child needs, say, advanced math courses to navigate to adulthood, let alone calculus), although the option should be there, in reality and not just in the rhetoric.

The challenge is to provide really good (and safe) high schools for every community.

This is the scandalous reality that CPS has created in the past 15 years. A two-tiered system the likes of which few in the USA have ever seen in "public" education.

The general high schools have been stripped, their teachers and kids slandered, and then four of them were closed (along with a few others, on pretexts) after Duncan and Daley orchestrated a media lynch mob against all of them. And I witnessed each of those first hand, as I have attended the "hearings" (actually, the equaivalent of Jim Crow courts, where the black defendants -- yes, all of them were black -- were guilty before they walked into the courtroom) for all of them since 2004: Austin, Calumet, Englewood, Collins.

It was a lynching. The fact that Arne had a few Hosannas and Fred Bateses around to help doesn't change what happened. And it flowed from the context established by the draining and scapegoating of Chicago's general high schools.

Three: If CPS were providing really good programs across the spectrum (curricular and extra-curricular) at all Chicago high schools, plus security, then this article and the intensity of the feelings in it would be a laugh. Most children would go to the high school in their community, providing the kinds of stability that makes civic life possible. These programs, in some real ways, sabotage and atomize citizenship.

Every suburban high school I visited a year ago (when I was applying for suburban teaching jobs until I realized that Chicago blacklist I'm on extended to suburban public schools) had a full range of programs, from morning until late at night in many cases. Every one of them knew its importance to its community.

I only went north, northwest and west, since I live on the northwest side. Even the "lower" class high schools (Proviso Township in Maywood; Morton in Cicero) to the west had enough to make anyone who knew Chicago's general high schools cry.

And the "top" suburban public high schools (New Trier; Glenbard West; the Maines; Stevenson; Oak Park River Forest, to name a few I spent some time in) were on another planet in terms of the vast gap between what their children got and what Chicago offered to its general highs school students (who constitute the majority).

Chicago is triaging its children, and then blaming the children and the teachers who stay "behind" to try and teach them. All public schools are not equal. One of the best way to see today's savage inequalities is to cross the border and visit public schools like Evanston Township (less than three miles from Chicago's Senn and Mather) or Oak Park-River Forest (less than three miles from Chicago's Austin or the Orrs). Even a more working class suburban high school like Ridgewood (at Montrose, just west of Harlem, which is actually surrounded by Chicago, but located in Norridge) is a contrast to Taft and Steinmetz, the two city public high schools within two miles. Inside and out. Contrast the Ridgewood baseball facilities with those east of Steinmetz and ask yourself whether our mayor really cares about his favorite sport, or the children who play it in this town.

Any of these schools shows what Chicago should be offering (with adequate staffing and security) in every high school in every community from Edison Park to Hegewisch -- not just in the selective enrollment ones.

Were this the case, communities wouldn't be disrupted and this toxic Darwinian competition reported (with all those Yuppie quotes) would be unnecessary.

Four: The facts in this article contradict one of the many myths upon which CPS's current administrators rest. How can CPS's official propanda have it both ways. Either there was and is a "brain drain" or there hasn't been and wasn't. I say there never was. Like so many things, the claim, in the early years of the Daley dictatorship at CPS, was based on white supremacist propaganda, cherry picking data, and "analysis" by anecdote (as opposed to evidence).

As I noted before, there never was an eight grade "brain drain".

There were places in the city where certain white people didn't want their adolescent children in the same public schools with the kinds of diversity we actually have in the world, but not a "brain drain." The most stark example of this problem in Chicago has for more than ten years been the aversion of certain people to admitting that Whitney Young has now, for a quarter century, been one of the best high schools in the USA. Because white people have always been in the minority at Whitney Young, there is a certain world view that can't see Whitney Young and had to replace it with less diverse others.

The middle class (by 20 years ago in Chicago, equally black and white, with a growing group that was "Asian" and "Hispanic") was going to public schools. When "middle class" is a code word for "white" our ability to understand complex reality (very relevant to the world we're facing) becomes hopelessly addled. I hope I wasn't the only reader who noticed this about the story we're discussing here.

But back to current reality:

More children go to CPS high schools from parochial (the majority of privates) schools than go in the opposite direction. This has been the case for a couple of generations, and the reason why CPS has escalated its subsidies to the Catholic schools. It used to be CPS would buy the old ones, after they were crumbling, like St. Rita's. No it's the charter thing. One way or the other, the deal's been around since the sixties. An unequestioned part of the gestalt of Chicago.

One of the main reasons children move from parochial to public after eighth grade is the price. Parochial elementary schools in Chicago are somewhat affordable. Parochial high schools require a lot more money. That's why the parents at Good Counsel quietly got their school flipped into charterland five years ago (the girls and the staff all stayed, but there was no tuition and as a bonus, Arne Duncan helped Good Counsel -- er, Chicago International Northtown Campus -- get cited as an urban "model" by the Gates Foundation even before it had graduated its first full class of children who hadn't been parochial.

Five. There is a big story in (Inspector General) Sullivan's comments about suburban children -- children from some of the more affluent suburbs, by the way -- attending Chicago's best public high schools, while living in districts that supposedly have the "best" high schools in Illinois.

There is also probably a bit of a racial tinge to it. Here's how that would work. A black family that registers its children in some of the adjacent suburban public schools is almost certain to have residency checked and double checked. A white family, with way, less so.

Although many citizens would prefer that I.G. Sullivan was doing more investigations of some of the serious corruption under the Daley administration -- triple dipping contractors, clout heavy no-bid deals, phony credentials at both public and charter schools, favoring the four families, pedophiles -- if he's going to be chasing around families who live in the suburbs but send their kids to Chicago high schools, CPS should share the information.

And the fact that it's been true for decades.

[Curious]

George,
Do you have -- or did you ever have -- children in the CPS high school system?
If so, which high school did they attend?
Full disclosure might be important in this conversation.

I suspect that this article is missing the big picture. The reason parents of students who were in the private sector at very good schools such as Latin, has tested the waters at Payton, Northside etc. is CPS has created some very good schools.

Moreover, parents have also discovered that having a Payton degree is as good as a Latin degree for getting into Yale assuming your SAT scores are the same. Given the fact that those of us who have family incomes over 100k will have to pick up almost all of the bill for college getting the 4 year break from tution at Latin helps pay for college. I think that is what the Crains story missed, it is really very simple.

As for George's great project of lifting children from poverty, I have to agree with what another poster on this site said the other day. Education will not end poverty.

It might if he hadn't already addressed it several times, unless you are a stalker and want to know his children's current whereabouts, in which case, where are YOUR children (and what model car did you say you drive?)

Alexander, in tech forums we refer newbies to the a special forum to get their FAQs answered; perhaps such a thread should be started, complete with the Soap Opera weekly recap of such pertinent 'news'.....

I'm curious about a number of things:
For those of you who have been around before 1995 and since the explosion of Selective Enrollment & IB school, are the neighborhood schools better or worse? Do you see an effect of the local high schools? Do you think they are "better" or "worse", however you define that.

George keeps saying that there was not a "brain drain", does anyone have the data on that or do we just believe unsupported statements on both sides?

While it would seem that the loss of Catholic schools has some connection to the growth of magnet schools, I don't know that to be true. Maybe there are just fewer students in Chicago?

George has answered the question of where his child/children went: Whitney Young & Beaubien, I think. Is that right, George?

Ladies and gentleman:
This is why it is called selective enrollment--it is selective. There are parents who send their children to elite preschools so that their children will test well for these elementary schools. You pay tax--you can apply as well.
IG office does need more help because out-of-city students should not be taking these elite spaces.
Remember, it used to be the other way around--suburbs used to have police/employees stationed at the last city stop on the L to see which students were coming from Chicago. Now, this has changed. Which is good. The middle and upper class were leaving the city after 8th grade--now they have good reason to stay and suburbanites have good reason to move into the city. This is about the tax payer babies.

Be careful with what the OIG office quotes when it comes to their investigations of residency. They too twist things to fit their agenda. I was found guilty of residency fraud by the OIG's office by virtue of the fact that my husband owned a condo in the suburbs that he bought over 3 years before I met him and he sold it after our first year of marriage. It is a known fact that whenever one spouse sells property that they owned before marriage the other spouse has to sign the warranty deed on the house as to never lay claim to the house, even though one never was a true owner. Otherwise, in my case I could sue my husband anytime down the road for selling a property behind my back. It protects the buyer of the home. The OIG office took this info as proof that I lived in the suburbs, although there were no recordings of my ever being seen at this condo. They even tried to say that the electricity bill for the condo was in my husband's name when it was indeed in his brother's name as he was the one living in that condo after we married and were living in the city. They then tried to say that a home that my parents bought in the suburbs was my residence because they saw me there(somehow I do not think a CPS teacher can afford a million dollar home on her salary when her husband is unemployed as was the case with me). Ironically they left out the part that I was spending time with my parents because my father's vision is failing (severe macular degeneration)and we drive him to any events or doctor's appointments he must attend. He also had major surgery and I agree that I was spending quite a bit of time at their suburban home to care for my dad as both of my parents are in their mid to late 70's. But my residence is in the city and there is no documentation that CPS provides you with when you must be away from your home for a short period due to family emergencies. So according to the records with OIG I was found guilty and they chalked one up in their list of investigations. The sad part is most people get very panicked when it comes to an OIG investigation and they just give in or do not have the resources to fight CPS. When you hire a lawyer, that is when CPS starts to admit that they have made mistakes, interesting how that works!

I think George said his kids went to Whitney Young so I guess the neighborhood school was not good enough for his family.

I send my kids to catholic elementary school and hope that they will attend one of the selective high schools. I send my children to the current school because I wanted a faith based school and the church/school community is very tight and very close geographically. Also, I was turned off by the overtesting at the elementary schools.

I hope my children attend a public high school because I can't afford a private high school and know they can get a good education at a public school.

I adopted 2 orphans, 8 and 9 years old. They didn't speak English and the private school that my other children attended wouldn't accept them because they didn't have any programs for non speaking English children. I sent the two to the local public school and they had a wonderful program to learn English.

One day when I picked up the girl her hair had been chopped up by a student sitting behind her with a pair of scissors. The school didn't do anything, not even a call to the parents. Some days later her new dress was cut up by the student sitting behind her, this time the teacher told me that she would buy a new dress, but the parents weren't called in for a conference. I was told that they were attorneys.

The boy had his hat stolen and thrown into the open window of a departing school bus as I watched. He was frequently shoved and hit by other students. His head was scratched up by students with push pins when changing classes. The school didn't do anything.

After their first month in school, I took the children out and homeschooled them.

That local public school was low performing and 80% of the students were bused in from other neighborhoods. Eventually with a lot of effort from the community the busing stopped and the school was filled up with neighborhood children and is now one of the leading elementary schools in test scores in Chicago.

Years later, I became a certified teacher and got a position in one of the reformed school. If something wasn't bolted down in my classroom, it was stolen. The new tables were quickly carved up with gang symbols and profanity. The children who did their work often got it stolen by other non working students who would sign their names to the work and claim as their own. Often the work was crumpled or torn up by other students to intimidate the working students. The students and I were shot at with rubber bands, broken pencil tips, and other small objects. When classes were changing, many students arrived as much as twenty minutes late. It was a small group of students, but the same students, and they wrecked havoc in all their classes. Fights after school were common. The small group of disruptive students turned into a large group of disruptive students. It was contagious. The students quickly learned that their behavior didn't matter.

The school didn't do anything about the reports I made and I was told not to make any more reports, it was apparent that I had class management problems and to fix it.

It was a clash between the rights of the working students and they were the majority, and the disruptive students, and the disruptive students' rights proved to be more important. I'm not talking about children with learning disorders, they worked hard and progressed. These were children with behavior disorders and their parents were well informed about their rights.

Parents that are concerned about their childrens' education should do whatever it takes: get them into the small haven of good public schools, private schools, move to the suburbs, or homeschool.

Or send them to charter schools!

The charter schools are the reformed schools.

[Rod Estvan]

The poster 3:29 makes the following statement “It was a clash between the rights of the working students and they were the majority, and the disruptive students, and the disruptive students' rights proved to be more important. I'm not talking about children with learning disorders, they worked hard and progressed. These were children with behavior disorders and their parents were well informed about their rights.”

The poster then indicates that parents should do whatever is necessary to get their, presumably non-emotionally disturbed children an education: Including moving to other schools, the suburbs, home schooling, or private schools to get a more orderly environment to be educated in.

I would say that if these emotionally disturbed students were as disruptive and apparently learning very little that their parents were in fact completely uninformed about their rights. Because the most fundamental right for a student with a disability is to a Free Appropriate Public Education, FAPE. If these students were not learning as your post indicates due to your inability to contain the situation you were faced with then it very unlikely based on legal precedent they were receiving FAPE.

As a teacher of these students even a regular education teacher you could have requested an IEP meeting to address the situation you found yourself in relation to specific students. Clearly a number of things could have been attempted including additional supports for the student or a change of placement to a more appropriate setting if necessary. If the school refused to have an IEP meeting in relation to this issue, instead of issuing more disciplinary referrals that were apparently not adding up to much you could have talked to the parent and told them their child was not learning because they were not being given enough support to survive in your classroom and that they needed to fight for their own child’s rights via the due process system. By doing this you are without question putting yourself at risk of being fired for insubordination because you are inviting legal action against your own employer.

I am the parent of an emotionally disturbed student who has now graduated from CPS and is currently struggling her way through junior college. During the course of her 14 years in the system more than once as a parent I had to deal with disciplinary referrals for my own child. Most often I would try to be supportive of the teacher and the school by attempting to follow through with consequences at home when my child got in trouble. There were two times where I believed the teacher simply was not going to be able to control my child due to lack of training or support and I asked the teacher to help me in attempting to get more support for my child up to the point of going to due process and being used as a witness in order to obtain these supports. In both of these situations the teachers appeared to be completely terrified of being called as witnesses and wanted nothing to do with litigation.

So in short students with emotional disturbance have a right to an education, there is no legal right for students with emotional disturbance to disrupt classrooms to the point of stoping the educaitonal progress of other students. But if a child is that disruptive they more than likely they are not recieving appropriate services.

Rod Estvan
Access Living

I was in a school and didn't have any IEPs for any of my students. After a short while, I recognized children who should have had IEPs and inquired about them. I was told that the IEP's for the children with IEP's were being gathered. Eventually I got some IEP's and they were very helpful, at least I knew which children had them and what they needed for assistance, however few I received. Many of the children did not have IEP's and should have. I asked to have an aid because I had so many children with IEP's and was denied. The students who disrupted my class routinely did not have IEPs. I was called to testify in a hearing and let me tell you I will never do it again. It was very intimidating for the teacher and the parent. My heart went out to her and her child. I am no stranger to IEPs and the work required of a parent to advocate for their child, as I have one in a junior college.

The administration was simply inexperienced in administration and made a big mess everywhere. They didn't want to hear about problems in classrooms, treated the teachers badly and used intimidation. I suspect that the appointment of this administration was about patronage. Yes, many of these children were not getting appropriate services. As a teacher I had very little to say about this.

I was at another school where the administration let me know which of my children had IEPs and as IEPs were made, I was notified. Some of the children came with aids. There were very little problems at this school in this regard and the school was successful.

Some administrations are better than others.

[Collin Hitt]

There seems to be the feeling, among some, that the moral scales become imbalanced when a parent freely moves her child in and out of public schools in order for that child to make the strongest possible academic gains.

This feeling is fueled by one of two beliefs: Either, parents are wrong to send their kids to private school; or, it's wrong that some parents can afford to purchase academic gains while others cannot.

Those who possess the former belief - that for some reason parents are morally obligated to send their children to public schools - are rarely reasonable.

Those who possess the latter belief - that it is unfair that parents of means are able to better position their children for later success in public schools - might have a point. And there are many ways to right those scales, if in fact they have become unbalanced. Either we give some students greater opportunities than we are willing to give their supposedly more affluent counterparts; or we admit that the pure public schoolers should all along have had the opportunities enjoyed by their private school counterparts. The former conclusion leads directly to pure, utter, and ugly Discrimination. The latter conclusion causes us to correct the moral scales by eliminating the 'problem' at its source - by giving parents vouchers.

I had some moments reading the Crain piece. The mom who has children at Decatur complaining that private school kids did not help make the public high schools better? Give me a break--her child has a coveted place based on kindergarten test scores. And Jennifer Geleerd complaining about not having options??? She's from a very wealthy Highland Park family with an attorney husband and nice digs in Bucktown, last I heard. Bizarre. As Lalley says, get over it.

[George Schmidt]

I hate to answer anonymous blogvations with facts, but some are worth benchmarking.

First of all, I don't think attendance in public schools is much of a criterion for anything. I opposed the sliming of Chicago teachers after that bogus Chicago Reporter study claimed we didn't send our kids to public schools. I still think every parent has the right to send his or her children to where he or she worships or believes the child will get the best education. A devoit Zoroastrian teacher shouldn't be forced to send her children to a CPS school. Frankly, where you send your children to school is nobody's business, although it's obvious that those who choose other than public schools are going to be asked some questions if they then dive into public school policy. ("Mayor Daley. Where did you get all those social promotions that brought you to where you are today?... That kind of thing...).

Second, when people here ask questions -- rhetorical or otherwise -- from behind the screen of anonymous and pseudonymous, it's cute, but no prizes. Change requires more than one liners. Courage helps, and the kind of cowardice that's encouraged in the Blogosphere doesn't breed good policy discussions. Money and mouth eventually have to meet at some place in real time. Cowards deserve a closer look.

Imagine how the Declaration of Independence would have read in history if everyone had signed "Name Withheld by Request".

But just to duck back in here for a moment.

In the case of the two of my three sons who are presently attending CPS schools (the other will be here soon), a major criterion was (and is) diversity.

Back in the old (pre-Daley) days, the eight regional gifted centers were by definition diverse. That was one of the prides of the system, as many here will recall. It was done by taking the most highly "qualified" children from each of the main racial groups. It worked, but given the geography it required buses.

When my eldest qualified (for Burbank, whose program was placed inside Beaubein when Burbank became overcrowded), that's what was appropriate.

Richard M. Daley and his minions (first Vallas and Chico; now Duncan and Scott and Williams) went on a ten-year crusade against what minimal measure of desgregation we had in Chicago. The smokescreen was the cost of busing. Michael Scott rarely let a chance pass to remind people about what he viewed as the high cost of busing (while conveniently leaving out the high cost of patronage executive positions for his buddies and contracts to entities he was monitoring, to take examples on the other side).

The resuult of the attack on the "cost" of busing was to wipe out the mechanisms that made such diversity possible in many of the regional gifted centers (the old name for the gifted schools, as opposed to schools that had gifted classrooms inside them). The high cost of segregation (and raising a generation perversely unable to know much about others) was never factored in. All that Ayn Rand generation efficience eugenics nonsense. Dominated public discourse for a time.

By eighth grade (2003), there were almost no black children at Beaubien -- gifted and regular. Across the city a similar rollback was going on. It was a nasty white supremacist thing, and it deprived many white families of the right to send children to diverse schools. The fact that the apologists for it were Michael Scott and Rufus Williams doesn't change that. Michael's made a great career for himself doing such work for those in power. His antecedents go way back in the history of the community that gave him his start.

Anyway, that's why Whitney Young was the choice for high school. Never looked back.

As part of his project to increase segregation and to ethnically cleanse the lakefront as much as possible, however, Daley (and especially Paul Vallas) did spend some time attacking Whitney Young. Eventually he stopped (at least in his public screechings).

You can get a great education in Chicago's public schools. The tragedy of the past 15 years has been the attack on the general high schools and the restructuring of much of the school system into generic schools (the majority) starved of resources and an elite minority.

The city is dying because of those policies, even if they are invisible to many of the people who consider the city their playground.

when I went to high school, we ALL just walked across the street to the high school. This puts too much pressure on these kids. And, I wonder what kind of life experience you get when you are just with the top 1%. I went to a white suburban school in another state and I think only 40% went to college at the time. At the last reunion, we had many college professors, lawyers, doctors as well as plumbers and skilled workers.

[T1line]

I am a Payton student. I went to Newberry school. Many of the kids I go to school with did not come from public schools, I really do not see them as being better than the rest of us. Some are my friends others are not.

I guess Payton is a hard school, but I have never gone anywhere else so it is not easy to tell. I have friends who go to Lane and Lakeview, we seem to get more homework than they do and for sure the science classes seem harder than what my friends tell me. I heard Northside gives even more homework, is that for real?

I do not feel under pressure, but i know some kids are under pressure big time. They are super competitive. These kids make our school look really good, yknow national merit and all that. Payton is really a good school but we are well not really all together, we are sort of socially divided by race or neigborhoods maybe in who are our friends. But i think all the preps are like that, LPHS is really in different worlds, more than Payton.

It is not like we all wake up everyday thinking I must be really smart to go to Payton, its a school. what is nice is that we don't have gangs all over. That is really nice, people do not fight and get in your face like at other high schools from what I hear. So I am glad I got in.