Streeter: I moved my son to Baltimore for school. I hope I did the right thing.

There is no greater guilt than the parental variety. There’s the constant fear, like a drumbeat in your ear, that some crucial decision will ruin your child’s future forever.

I felt this when picking a school for my son when we left Florida in 2020. I wanted good academics and a place where he’d have students and teachers who looked like him. The obvious choice was to move back to my native Baltimore.

The cold prickles of recognition ran up my neck as I read journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ now-viral New York Times essay about the repercussions of enrolling her then-kindergarten daughter in an impoverished and predominantly Black Brooklyn school, rather than a “wealthy white” one. She wrote that she and her husband “felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage.”

That’s a noble intention, but her daughter now believes that was a mistake. It’s a revelation that made Hannah-Jones reconsider her choices and which resonated with every parent I know who has read it. And it’s so complicated. Beloved “The Wire” actress Sonja Sohn posted a video complimenting Hannah-Jones for deciding as a “bougie-ite” to come home to the community and lift it up rather than running to affluence.

Is that best for the kids, though? I fervently think I did the right thing by my child. I hope I feel that way in five years, and that, if he disagrees, I am willing to listen. But right now? It’s hard to know. I asked several Maryland parents about their own decisions weighing school choice for their kids in a still-segregated state. What makes a school “good”?

Julian Fuller, a Baltimore-raised father and educator, sent his kids to religious private schools and eventually Baltimore County public schools. He likened Hannah-Jones’ decision to not joining the gentrification of a neighborhood until seeing how it goes for others. “Catch me when the last house on the block is for sale,” he said. “When I’m not the first.”

Sometimes you make what seems to be the best decision at the time, and then time proves otherwise. Imanii Woodard was raised in York County, Pennsylvania, where there are underserved, mostly Black York City schools. Or there are schools in parts of the county where, as a young reporter in the 1990s, I was warned against living or visiting after dark. That’s partly why I don’t live there now as a parent.

Those tensions are why Woodard moved her children from York to Harford County, and why now she is strongly considering moving to Baltimore. She wants her daughter to attend a school that is both predominantly Black and academically well-regarded.

“Sometimes, as Black people, you can’t win either way,” she said. “I’m at the point where I’m listening to my children about school. These are the most important years of their lives, what they’re going to remember the most.”

That’s the crux of the choice, right?

Olney resident Donald Earl Collins grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, in an underserved, 99% Black school, and was raised by parents who were not relatively well-educated.

When he had the chance to move to a mostly white school on a gifted-and-talented track, he jumped at it, despite his mother’s misgivings. And he doesn’t regret it, despite how different an experience it was.

“It was a massive culture shock. That was part of the program,” he said. ”As someone who has been in the nonprofit world, you can change things, or dismantle things, but when you get right down to it, our job as parents is to provide the best education you can.”

But what does “best” mean? Is that, say, Baltimore City’s complicated school choice program which many parents hope culminates in attendance at city-wide schools like Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Western High School or my alma mater, Baltimore City College High School?

Or is it one of the prestigious expensive and mostly white private schools that have yielded stories like the ones in Baltimore Brew’s 2020 article about a series of Instagram posts by Black student and faculty confirming upper-class schools still produce garden-variety racism? Do strong academics become more important than that?

Fuller spent a solitary year at the prestigious McDonogh School in seventh grade because his parents thought private school was better than West Baltimore Middle, where his friends were.

“I look at the grounds of the schools and they’ve got horse barns. They’ve got everything. I was thinking to myself that I would hate for any of these guys in my class to see where my aunt lived on Stricker Street,” he said.

He eventually went back to West Baltimore, a choice he stands by. What’s different about our city is that our Blackness makes it possible to access that no matter where your kids study.

“My aunt would have taken a bullet for me just for the fun of it,” Fuller said. “And I decided I didn’t want to be anywhere that made me feel that way about someone who would do anything for me.”

Kaye Wise Whitehead, a Baltimore-based academic, writer and radio host on WEAA, whose sons went to private school Gilman, said Black parents need to make sure their kids have connections to the Black community outside of school.

“People have joked that Baltimore is like baby Wakanda, but you can have a cultural base that extends beyond school,” she said.

All of the parents I spoke to are happy, in retrospect, about the decisions they made. “I would do it the same way, no regrets,” Whitehead said. But the trick is that you just don’t know until your kid is older and telling you that you messed up.

Hannah-Jones is living that reality in real time. She tried to do the right thing, whatever that means. Time will tell if I did.

You have no idea how many of my relatives told me I was wrong to move here, that it wasn’t safe or academically sound for my son. But I’m holding onto my belief that I did it right. It’s all I have.