Parent and Lakeview resident Jacqueline Edelberg had a problem. She loved living in her urban neighborhood, but she had a young daughter about to reach school-age. Most moms in her shoes, convinced all city public schools were awful, chose at this point either to move to the suburbs, or resign themselves to a life of long, stressful car drives to distant private or magnet schools. Jacqueline tells the story of how she fought against this fate by working to transform the public school down the street into a school the neighborhood would notice – and how she became what felt like a freak in the process.