Cheating the System

The boy's school is "Natural Science Magnet", which means two things. First (and most obviously) it specialises in natural sciences. It has more qualified teachers than most schools, most have master's degrees, and it's supposed to be better at teaching natural sciences (as opposed to artificial ones). But this also means that it doesn't have a catchment area - this means that anyone within the city of Los Angeles (or strictly, within the LA Unified School District) can apply to have their child enter, with an equal chance of getting in - it's done by lottery.

The boys are currently in kindergarten, which doesn't follow those rules, for kindergarten you have to live in the area. So there is no guarantee of a place next year, in grade 1.

However, the lottery is not quite random, because they say that they tweak the results to ensure that there is an appropriate range of groups and backgrounds - they don't say what they mean by background (one imagines race and class), and this might mean that there is flexibility in the description. In which case it's possible to cheat.

Outside each classroom, and sent home with the children on the first day, is a'wishlist' - things that the teacher would like for the classroom. These range from the mundane (pack of crayons, white photocopying paper of the kind you can steal from work if you were so minded), to the less mundane (what's the opposite of mundane?) - a teaching easel for 100 dollars, an equipment cart for 160 dollars, a subscription to a book thing for 125 dollars. For many of these, the gave an order number and a description, but nothing else (so it said 'teaching easel - pj342, or something like that).

Bearing in mind that first impressions count, I scratched the most expensive item in each classroom off the list, and ran home to hit Google. Typing in the description and order number gives one web page, which I guessed was the place to order it from.

I should make it clear that if this was you attempting to cheat the system by increasing the chances of getting your kids in to a better school by throwing money at it (money that other parents, whose children are just as deserving as a place in that school as ours, and may even be more so), I would disapprove. I would even vote for laws that made it illegal. But they're not your offspring, they're ours, and it's not illegal, so it's OK.