Tots offtoa tearful start
First day of pre-K brings myriad emotions for children, parents
For Joey Lee, the tears started in the playground minutes before his first day of school even started. Joey, whose fourth birthday is Tuesday, Aug. 21, hadn’t yet set foot in Tesuque Elementary School, where his pre-K class was to begin at 8 a.m. Monday, when he began clinging to his mother’s pants like a man flailing in water and desperately trying to hold on to a deflating rubber life raft.
For many of the 16 prekindergarteners at Tesuque, Monday was the first time they would have to say goodbye to mommy and daddy — at least for the day.
“This day means independence for them,” said Joey’s teacher, Jean Monahan, as her pint-sized charges began exploring their new habitat, replete with a play kitchen, loft, reading center, stuffed animals, plastic dinosaurs and puzzles. “It’s the first time away from their parents, and maybe they’ll make decisions that they never made before.”
Joey wasn’t the only one having a problem with the situation. Little Matthew Aparicio stayed close to his parents’ side as well, bursting into tears a few minutes after class began as they indicated they were going to leave.
Another boy, temporarily unaware that his mom had quietly slipped out of the classroom to go to work, suddenly stood up and asked, “Where’s my mommy?”
The other children, perhaps equally caught off guard by disappearing parents, expressed a collective look of panic as they looked around.
Fortunately, Monahan and her adult helpers — educational assistant Julie Castañeda and the district’s early childhood coordinator, Patricia Azuara — kept the children busy with an array of activities from singing, reading, exploring shapes, sizes and forms, and eating breakfast, allaying potential fears of abandonment.
And Joey’s twin sister, Lorelei, was handling the transition very well. Within seconds of entering Monahan’s class, she was sitting off by herself, looking through books and creating starfish-like shapes with some Play-Doh.
Joey and Lorelei’s mom, Alicia Sanchez, a former high school teacher, admitted she was feeling separation anxiety too. And she worried she hadn’t prepared the twins for what was in store.
“I’ve been with them all the time, every day,” she said as she encouraged Joey to use some building blocks to create a tower. Recalling her own first day in school back in Kansas City, Mo., some years ago, she said, “I was really shy, like him. I didn’t want to ask where the bathroom was. I cried the entire day.”
Complicating matters for the family is that the school has a slot for Joey but his sister is on a waiting list and won’t know until Friday if she’ll remain a student at the school, which serves 103 children from pre-K to sixth grade. So Sanchez plans to bring both of her kids for part of the day through Friday until she finds out whether Lorelei will get in.
Many parents managed to say a healthy goodbye to their children and leave them at the playground before school began. Others did sort of sneak away without fanfare, many leaving to attend a breakfast for parents in the cafeteria.
In fact, moments after Matthew Aparicio’s parents left, he was happily chatting about dinosaurs and performing a little dance.
“It’s like magic,” Casteñeda said.
But parents can help spark that magic, said John Evaldson, a Santa Fe child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist. Because, he said, “A lot of parents aren’t ready [for the first day of school] and children pick up on those signals.”
He recommends parents introduce the teacher to the kids in advance of the first day of school, if possible, and even tour the school and play on its playground beforehand. “Tell the kid about how it’s a safe environment, that it’s fun and stimulating to be there,” he said, “and that there are other kids to make friends with.”
Leaving the child at the playground before school starts, as many parents did at Tesuque on Monday, is also a good idea, he said.
“Stay until the kid is lined up with classmates to walk into the school,” he said. “That way the kid is going into the line and they are moving away from the parent under their own choice, and you’ve stayed close enough to them on the playground before the bell rings to give them some time to make that transition.”
He said adults should understand that asking a 5-year-old to separate from “an attachment figure and go into a big box with a bunch of strangers and be left there is unnatural.”
Sanchez agreed. Having sat and played with her children — particularly Joey — for almost two hours before departing with them early Monday, she said the time she spent there reassuring Joey what it was all about made a difference.
“They did not want to go home,” she said later in the day. “In fact, I had to bribe them with pastries at Tesuque Village Market to get them to leave.”