Just Another New School

Category C: Highly Commended (2025) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Edita Mujkic

I am running late. One quick question at work turned into a long discussion and now I’m too late to reach my daughter’s school by 6pm. Driving fast, oblivious to the possibility of police speed checks, not to mention the danger, I change lanes to take over slower drivers. The image of after-school care staff dragging my six-year-old to the nearest police station flashes in my head. They threatened to do that if the parents were late.

But they’re still at school. My daughter is the only child left. The two of them on low chairs, chatting. Gemma, the young woman from the after-school care team, turns towards me as I open the door. ‘There is your mum,’ she says. ‘I told you she wouldn’t be too long.’ I can’t read my daughter’s facial expression—her lips are stretched into a little smile, but her blue eyes sparkle like tears are gathered in the corners and are about to start rolling down. I hope she is just tired; fatigue makes her eyes look shiny. Everything is packed up; the room is tidy.

Trying to catch my breath after running across the school yard, I mumble, ‘So sorry, there is always one last question at work …’

‘No stress,’ Gemma replies. ‘Sometimes we just can’t do things as we plan them.’

Something in me flops on hearing her words. So much in our lives didn’t go as we planned. Does anyone ever plan to leave their war-torn hometown on short notice and consequently lose everything they own? I refuse to think about it again and shift my thoughts back to the room. I’m thankful I made it on time and don’t want to mention my fear about the police station; better not to reiterate the possibility.

‘We had a nice little chat, Anita and I’, Gemma says. ‘She spoke so lovingly of her big brother, but I don’t know him. Is he at this school?’

‘He was, but now he’s in high school. Milan is seven years older.’

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Which high school?’

I mention the name of a prestigious boys’ school in our area.

She looks at me in surprise and stops in place—a little chair she picked up to carry to the side of the room hangs in her hand. My daughter and I don’t appear like we can afford the exorbitant fees of a private school. But then, who knows, rich people usually don’t demonstrate their wealth.

‘He’s on a scholarship,’ I quickly clarify. I feel I need to justify what may seem strange. And not just to Gemma, to anyone who asks about Milan’s high school. As if we’re pretending to belong somewhere where we don’t.

‘Oh, that must’ve been very challenging and required lots of tutoring.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘We learned so late about the scholarships, there was no time for any extra training. He knew what he knew. Plus, we couldn’t really afford the tutoring.’

‘But, yes, it was challenging,’ I continue. ‘In a way we didn’t expect.’

‘I’m sure’, she says and nods knowingly. But she has no idea. She can’t. A young Anglo-Australian woman, born and raised in this country, who speaks English as her first language and is familiar with the culture, could not even imagine the challenges we’ve faced.

I thank Gemma for staying a bit longer, apologise again for being late, and Anita and I walk out into a balmy March evening. While I drive us home, I struggle to listen to Anita talking about her day, I struggle to think about what to cook for dinner—my head can’t free itself of the sudden wave of anxiety caused by remembering the process of selecting Milan’s high school.

~~~

Faced with the fast-approaching decision about where to send Milan to high school, and having no idea how that process worked, I went to his primary school class teacher to ask for advice. The teacher listed the nearby high schools and briefly described each one. Then she said, ‘That’s public schools, but I think he has a chance of winning a scholarship for a private school.’ My brain searched in circles for any known information about the words she said but nothing could be found. What scholarships? For which schools? Too embarrassed to always ask weird questions about what seemed obvious to everyone else, I nodded, and thanked her.

At home, my husband and I phoned a few of our friends, all migrants, and learned a little about the scholarships for private schools. And about schools in Melbourne in general. It seemed complicated—boys only, co-ed, public, private. In Sarajevo, where we were born and grew up, all children went to the nearest school, primary and secondary. All schools were public and co-ed and all offered the same level of education. Too confused to discard any options, we decided to follow the teacher’s suggestion and send Milan to tests for private schools, even though we could hardly understand what this meant, except for it being ‘very expensive’, which everyone kept repeating to us. On advice from a friend of a friend whose daughter was already in a private school on a scholarship, and despite what seemed to us the astronomical cost of each test, we registered Milan for multiple tests. Each one was supposed to bring him valuable experience and make the subsequent one a little easier. We agreed on five private schools: two had individual tests, the third test covered three others. And to make it seem fairer in our own heads, we added a test for a prestigious public school with an accelerated program.

The first test day—an overwhelming sea of boys in front of the school—was a massive shock. What was I thinking? What was I expecting? Certainly not to see hundreds of boys trying for the one school. In my head, only the best kids would be sent to try their luck with a scholarship test, and based on the size of my high school, that would be three to four students per class, making it no more than fifty in a year level. What I failed to add to my calculations was that the distances to school meant much less in Melbourne than in Sarajevo, and that Melbourne was at least ten times bigger than my place of birth. While I tried to order my thoughts, Milan walked into the school, and I missed my chance to take him back home and abandon this foolish idea. Three hours later, Milan came out pale. I didn’t ask him anything—I guessed that it was not easy to focus for hours on maths and literacy tests in a language he had started speaking only two years earlier, when we were relocated to England, after escaping the war in Bosnia. My head whirled with questions. Were we doing the right thing? Was the benefit of a good school worth this effort?

The following Saturday morning—the day of the second test—our only car, a thirteen-year-old Honda, refused to start. No matter how many times I tried, the engine would not budge. We quickly called a taxi and made it on time. Again, the school yard was flooded with boys, but this time we expected it.

Completely disorientated after being dropped off by the taxi in an area I didn’t know, I faced the challenge of returning home. I asked one of the parents where to go to hail a taxi. This was way before we had smartphones with street maps on them. She told me to walk along one of the side streets that led to the main street. I did as she said and shortly after arrived at the main street whose name I read on the sign: Whitehorse Road. ‘Great, I know where I am,’ I thought. I walked to a phone booth and called the taxi company.

‘Where are you?’ the operator asked.

‘Whitehorse Road,’ I replied, proud that I knew where I was in this huge place.

‘Which suburb?’

       I repeated, ‘On Whitehorse Road.’

She said, ‘Yes, I got that, but Whitehorse Road is over a hundred kilometres long, you need to tell me the name of the suburb.’

       ‘I, I don’t know,’ I stuttered.

She asked me to read the number engraved at the bottom of the phone box. I did, and she located me. Three hours later I picked up Milan, less pale than the first time, maybe even with a little smile.

The third test day felt significantly calmer—we must’ve had our required dose of stress by then. Resilience took over. Milan came out from the test with a big smile, and said, ‘I think I did well’.

A few weeks later, an invitation arrived for an interview at the third-test school. The principal wanted to personally see this boy whose maths results were above everyone else’s, but his English was average. At the interview, this clever man quickly realised that it would’ve been impossible to do better after speaking English for such a short time. A full scholarship offer followed, including music lessons, and an instrument on loan. Shortly after, a place in the public school with an accelerated program was offered too. And, of course, there was the option of going to the nearest high school, closest to our home address.

How do you decide something so essential for the development of a child in an education system that you’re so completely unfamiliar with? You can’t go through the pros and cons as you don’t know any. We asked around and received conflicting advice. A friend who worked for lawyers she held in high esteem, graduates of that very school, suddenly changed her tune and said to me, ’You’re not going to send him to an all-boys’ school?’ Even our GP, a kind-hearted man who understood what we went through better than many as his parents came to Melbourne after a similar experience in World War II, expressed his concerns by saying, ‘It will not be easy. Rich boys could be mean to him, he might be bullied.’ At the same time, most people we shared the news with were genuinely impressed and said that going to such a school would be an exceptional experience. So, how to decide? Despite our perplexity with the high school system and our uncertainty about doing the right thing, wishing in our hearts that the nearest co-ed public school could offer an equal quality of education—we accepted the scholarship. For Milan, who changed five primary schools in three countries before we settled in Melbourne, this was just another new school.

~~~

Milan is already home when we walk in. ‘How was school?’ I ask. ‘Good,’ he replies. I watch his face looking for signs of anything, hoping for more words, but that’s it. Would he say if anything happened? He did tell us recently one of the boys made fun of him at school about mispronouncing ‘Leicester’. Who would ever be able to pronounce this unless they knew, unless they had heard it before? How could anyone on seeing it for the first time guess how to pronounce it correctly? ‘The English pronunciation inspector’ must’ve been quiet today. ‘Good’ is good enough.

My anxious thoughts settle down as I cook dinner, as we eat together, chat and laugh, as we go through the evening routine and prepare for the next day.

There will not be many incidents with mispronunciation, or anything else, over the next six years, and Milan will finish his Year 12 exams with a perfect 50/50 score for English—better than ‘the English pronunciation inspector’—but I don’t know it yet.