Moving by Patricia Riley
"Hey kids were moving" were words I hated hearing my parents say. In 16 years I
have lived in 2 states, 4 houses and gone to school in 3 different school districts. I
knew how lousy moving and changing schools is, but it does help you in the long run.
My family first from moved Rochester, New York to LeRoy, New York when I was about 3 and my sister was about a year old. We moved from a small run down 2 family house to a huge house that needed some work. The morning that we moved, a bee stung my dad. Severely allergic you can just watch him turn red. I remember being told to sit by my dad and stay out of the way while my mom and some family friends helped load everything in to the trunk.
In LeRoy we lived out in the country on a busy road. We had an old house that needed work. My parents did a lot of work making the house better. I went to preschool in LeRoy, and my mom was involved with the preschool. My friends in school were kids I met in preschool. We had been going to school together for 2-4 years it was hard to just move away from all of them. When your only 8 it’s hard to write a letter to someone you don’t see. Eight year olds don’t know what to write and the letters don’t have any organization. In second grade your not the best writer so being pen pals didn’t really work.
During my second grade year my dad decided to give up teaching and go to law school. He applied to many schools and my mom read papers from different states to see what jobs were open. My dad decided to go the University of Toledo. We moved to Bellevue, Ohio during the summer between 2nd and 3rd grade. We moved to Bellevue because that was where my mom’s parents lived and where my mom had grown up. We lived across the street from my grandparents next to my granddad’s pig farm. The house we moved into was smaller and dark. My room was half the size of what it had been. The floor in the kitchen slopped and there were bugs everywhere from the farm. I hated to move away from all my friends, but switching schools was the hardest part. At my new school York Elementary the class I was put in was the one that had a lot of the special needs kids in it. The class was slow to me because a lot of the stuff that the class was just learning I had already learned the year before. They were just learning how to write in cursive I already knew how I had learned in second grade so I was bored and mad at my parents for making me come here. It did get better in 4th grade because we had different teachers for different subjects. I knew it was only going to be a short time period so I didn’t really try and make friends outside of school. The last year I lived in Bellevue was 5th grade that was the first year that I actually liked living there. That year my dad graduated from the University of Toledo and got a job in a law firm in Cleveland.
We moved to Westlake the beginning of my 6th grade year. I was glad that we were moving because I liked the house and the fact that it was not out in the middle of no where, but I was not thrilled about changing schools again. We were sitting in my grandparents’ family room when my parents came back from registering us for classes. I remember them telling me that I was going to be taking French as a language and that band, and choir, which at York was after school, activates were classes with time during the day for them. I remember that at orientation every parent I talked to said how lucky I was to be moving in at 6th grade when all the elementary schools came together for middle school. On the first day I thought the exact opposite almost every kid in my homeroom came from Dover and it seemed that everyone already knew each other.
Moving from Bellevue to Westlake was a huge change. Bellevue is a small town made up of a lot of farms and families that have lived there for years the nearest mall is in Sandusky a ½ hour away. In Westlake kids go to the mall every week and go shopping. In sixth grade you’re cool if you have the right name brand of clothes not if you’re a nice person. The first months of 6th grade were terrible. I was behind in almost every class and I was with a bunch of stuck up snobby kids. It got better slowly I made some friends, but I still never liked my teachers and they didn’t like me so my grades were terrible. The next year was better when Parkside and Burneson were joined together.
Moving and switching schools was not how I wanted to spend my early childhood but I had no choice. I look back at in now and in a way I’m kind of gland that my parents did move us and made me switch schools. In my opinion the diversity of people I met as a kid taught me tolerance, how to get along with different people and how to adapt to different situations. I may not have liked it at the time but I am glad that I did get the chance to see different cities and ways of living.
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