My youngest is sixteen. Today, I dropped her off at her enrichment school, that she attends only one day per week, and then went on to work where I spent a couple of hours wrangling a large document into shape. It’s what I do for a living: make things look and sound better than they originally did. I was only there a couple of hours before my phone started ringing and blinging off the hook. My daughter was in the school office having a panic attack over an announcement regarding a crack down on vaping. The school has issued a zero-tolerance policy on vaping, and in order to adequately enforce the rule, they have enacted a policy in which students are no longer allowed to leave class to use the bathroom. Bathroom breaks will be permitted during the change of classrooms, but teachers will now be stationed outside the bathroom doors (or inside them? I’m not quite clear on that) to monitor the room to prevent students from vaping. They also reserve the right to search anyone’s backpack at any time if vaping is suspected.

My daughter finds this incredibly invasive. Because it is incredibly invasive. That’s the nature of schools I try to explain to her. School is invasive. By nature. And no, you don’t have rights there. The minute you step over the threshold, you relinquish a good many of your rights as a regular U.S. citizen.

It’s like a prison, she said, on the way home.

Exactly.

We’re a homeschooling family to the very end it seems. Even when I think I’m done with it, I find myself accidentally falling into these teachable moments. She’d like nothing more than to just walk out and leave that weird little enrichment school behind her, but there are still good aspects to it, and she gets free college course enrollment, so we’re having her stick it out for these last two years. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be taking off the more-than-occasional Friday to go up to the mountains and do a little skiing this winter. Because I much prefer to see her looking like this:

instead of how she looked when I picked her up early today and let her vent in the car on the way to pick up a pepperoni pizza and some canollis. We drove home and ate pizza with Dad and hashed it all out.

Sometimes I wonder and worry if I did the right thing by homeschooling my girls all the way through. And then days like today happen and I remember what school was like even for me all the way back when, and I’m reminded once more how dysfunctional schools are. And weird as it was, I’m still glad we stayed away from schools as much as we could.