My daughter was 5 years old when I enrolled her in kindergarten at a Houston ISD elementary school across town, in a majority white community.

At the time, I was a licensed foster parent with the goal of adopting, which meant I had become a mother almost overnight. I was learning to do everything at once, including finding a school for a child who had become my daughter. A few colleagues recommended this one.

The school had a strong music and fine arts program with everything you could want for a child. It was located in a brand new building with a grand piano in the foyer, where a teacher would play as students arrived in the morning. There was a large library, a music studio and a new auditorium with a booming sound system that was funded by the PTO.

I had attended a wonderful public elementary school that was centered on music and arts. It didn’t have the impressive amenities of this school, but it gave me something I believe many schools are missing: a place to express yourself, to create and to learn.

I wanted my daughter to have that too.

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But I couldn’t ignore something else. Only about 10% of the students were Black. I worried she might be the only one, or one of few, in her class. There is a particular type of isolation that comes with being the only one. It can chip away at a child’s sense of belonging and their sense of self.

And when you’re Black, you don’t simply notice it. You feel it.

I told myself I was giving my daughter an opportunity – a beautiful school in an arts environment with resources I knew mattered. I told myself the quality of the school outweighed everything else.

I began to regret my decision within a few months.

This is one of the reasons Nikole Hannah-Jones’ recent New York Times essay, in which she reckons with the choices she has made about her daughter’s education, has resonated with me and with so many other Black parents.

Hannah-Jones, the journalist who led “The 1619 Project,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning reexamination of American history through the lens of slavery, writes about regretting the decision she and her husband made a decade ago to put their daughter into a low-income, under-resourced New York public school.

They could afford to choose a different school, even a private one. Instead, they believed they could help change the system of education inequities from within.

Her essay has prompted fierce criticism. Some accused her of sacrificing her daughter’s education and well-being for her own self-interest. Others dismissed the essay as performative.

But what struck me was something simpler.

There is no perfect answer for Black parents trying to educate their children. There are only choices and sacrifices that come with them.

For generations, schools in Black communities have faced disparities in resources and funding compared with schools in wealthier, predominantly white communities. So Black parents are often forced to weigh two competing needs: Do we send our children somewhere they will see themselves reflected – even if the school has fewer resources? Or do we send them somewhere with more resources and opportunities knowing they may be singled out and possibly face racial bias in the classroom?

If you have options, you can find yourself driving past the predominantly Black school in our own neighborhood to the majority white school across town. I did it at first.

Many Black parents don’t have options. They must rely on the underfunded, under-resourced public school in their community and hope their kids get what they need.

At the school across town, I watched my daughter disappearing inside the choice I had made.

The problems seemed to begin when the staff learned that she was in foster care. Almost weekly, I received reports from teachers about something she had done: taking another child’s snacks, using the wrong-colored pencil, standing when she needed to be sitting.

I am not a teacher, but I’ve been around a lot of 5-year-olds. Most of them are slightly unruly. That’s why we send them to kindergarten – to teach them structure, rules, manners and how to function in a classroom with two dozen kids.

My daughter’s ordinary 5-year-old behavior seemed to become evidence of something more.

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The final incident came when an assistant principal called to tell me that she had taken a chicken nugget off a child’s plate. Then he implied that she cut another child’s hair.

I asked for details. He said he would call me back with specifics.

An hour later, he called.

He laughed. He had made a mistake. Another child had done it.

I felt my jaws clench so tight I could hardly swallow. The callousness of his assumption made me sick.

Then I received a message on the school’s app from the gym teacher, demanding that I speak with my daughter about respect because she wasn’t following instructions. The teacher wrote that my daughter had “a joyous smile on her face as she looks me in the eye and completely ignores what I am saying.”

We lasted exactly one semester. I requested an immediate transfer to another school.

Singled out

I remembered Hannah-Jones’ 2016 essay about the decision to enroll her daughter in a New York public school in a Black neighborhood, and it inspired me to do the same.

Change doesn’t happen unless you are vested in the process.

I grew up in Riverside Terrace, a middle- and upper-class community of Black families. Many enrolled their children in majority white private schools across town where they often were the only Black students in the classroom.

Still, today, Black families are faced with the same decision about their children’s education, often sacrificing representation, belonging and identity to send them to predominantly white private schools. I’ve talked with many Black parents who want their kids to attend white or diverse classrooms so they will know how to assimilate in the world. I think there is a time for that.

I want my children, first, to be confident in their Black identity, to know they are beautiful, smart and good, so that if the world tries to diminish them with hate, they have an armor of self-love to protect them.

My daughter’s new public school had a strong music magnet program, but the landscape was much different. The student body was 70% Black, and the 1930s building looked like it had never been renovated.

There was no grand piano. No studio or fancy auditorium.  The gymnasium doubled as a cafeteria and performance space. On some winter days, there was no heat.

There also was no PTO to provide financial support.

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But what it lacked in amenities it made up for with veteran teachers who were rooted in education and invested in the welfare of the children. I felt my daughter was safe, nurtured and, most importantly, excited about learning.

She did an entire presentation about China for a social studies project and dressed up like ballerina Misty Copeland for Black History Month.

Then came 2023. The state takeover of HISD changed the landscape almost immediately. By December, many of the teachers we had come to rely on for support, communication and advocacy left.

My son’s kindergarten teacher was new to the classroom, had no teaching certificate and was responsible for 26 kindergartners. She labeled him as “bad,” telling me, “That’s just who he is.”

My children also were placed in special education with an autism diagnosis. They were not autistic.

Suddenly, the question wasn’t simply which school had the better building or the better resources. It was whether the adults entrusted with my children’s education actually saw them.

A few months after our adoption was finalized in 2023, we moved to a small, mostly Black private school in the neighborhood. Both children began to thrive.

The choices we make: Resources or representation. Opportunity or belonging.

As parents, we hope we get it right.

We hope that if we think carefully enough, sacrifice enough and love our children enough, we’ll make the choices that send them down the right path.

We hope we’ll recognize the difference between an opportunity and a trade-off.

We hope our children will grow up knowing they were seen, protected and loved.

And, most of all, we hope we won’t look back with regret.