When Sadie Gurfinkel, 17, entered the final semester of her senior year at Denver East High School, she expected she would be celebrating her “early decision” college admission acceptance and excitedly preparing for her graduation. Instead, she found herself attending a funeral. The funeral of a 16-year-old schoolmate who also happened to be the younger brother of her former boyfriend.

Jessica and Mikhail Gurfinkel moved their family from New York City to Denver seven years earlier. They enrolled their daughters, Sadie and Raea (ages 9 and 5), in what Jessica, their mother, describes as “highly ranked, low admissions rate, private family school.” She went on to say that the student demographic of that Denver school was “mostly children who came from generational wealth and whose families had a history there.”

According to Jessica, the environment at the school was mostly “homogeneous in race, ideology and socio-economic class.”

Admittedly this was not unlike the private pre-school the girls attended in New York City. At the private Denver school, both the sisters thrived academically — though Sadie struggled with the social characteristics of the student body.

When it was time for her to enroll in high school, it was expected that she would continue in an academically rigorous and competitive private school. She had excellent grades and would have been an ideal candidate for admission at any of Denver’s elite prep schools. Her parents, both affluent professionals and financially comfortable, were stunned when Sadie insisted that she wanted to attend public high school.

“She had experienced too many negative experiences resulting from an insular, privileged student body at her middle school,” Jessica said.

They supported her decision. None of them could have predicted what the next four years of Sadie’s high school career held for her.

Public v. private

One of the main reasons Sadie chose to attend Denver East was because of the diversity of the student body. The private school her parents had in mind for her has a white population of approximately 68 percent. The Denver public schools demographic at the time was 25 percent white. Sadie explained that she wanted to escape the “privileged bubble” that she grew up in, even if that meant she may be sacrificing the academic intensity and other opportunities that private schools offer.

At the same time Sadie entered Denver East High School, her younger sister Raea was entering her first year of middle school at the private Denver middle school — the same school Sadie graduated from a year prior. Their experiences from the fall of 2019 to spring 2023 were vastly different.

As Sadie and Raea were midway through their freshman years of high school and middle school, they found themselves in lockdown. This is when they first noticed the glaring contrasts between the two schools.

At Denver East, Sadie said she would have “less than 30 minutes of school a day” on Zoom. On the other hand, Raea said she had virtual school from “8:00 a.m. to 3:00 pm.” According to their parents, Raea had “constant check-ins via smaller Zoom meetings, letters and small tokens of love and care were mailed or dropped off at the house to remind Raea she was seen and a part of a community and was important.”

On the other hand, Sadie said she had “check-ins once a week” just to make sure she was able to teach herself the content correctly.

Due to the lack of instruction, The National Center for Education has shown that since COVID-19, public school education has had a 56 percent increase in misbehavior and interruptions, hindering the education of all public school students. The same study showed that 79 percent of public schools need more support for mental health, something that the private Denver middle school had no trouble providing.

Violence in school

It was Feb. 13 when all the students of Denver East High School were impacted by a life altering tragedy. Luis Garcia, a sophomore at Denver East and a rising soccer star, was killed by gunfire close to the school. Posing no threat to anyone, he was killed after being shot in the head just sitting in his car. Ten days after the shooting — while Sadie’s sister was on a school-funded island scuba diving trip — Sadie was thinking about attending a funeral for Garcia.

Looking back, Sadie felt that her education was always by the book and often her class sizes were too large. She felt that Denver East did not have the right facilities during a pandemic and a rise in youth violence to give the students an adequate and meaningful education.

After all the experiences Sadie had at Denver East, she said that through the good and bad she is happy she attended public school.

Through the frequent SWAT team sweeps nd lockdowns, her life changed. Even though she lost a friend and at times felt her life was put in danger, her school community and social education are something she is very grateful for. Her mother, however, would not let her make the same choice again.

“I would have sent Sadie to private school because her physical and emotional safety matters more than anything else,”  Jessica Gurfinkel said. “It sounds ridiculous, but it’s the truth when I say I worried too often if my daughter was going to stay alive while attending East High School.”

Sadie now attends American University in Washington D.C. for its prestigious International Service and Public Policy program. Academically, she felt like she wasn’t prepared.

“I feel as if I am not on the same level as my peers academically in college,” she said, adding: “how they take notes, how they study, how they accomplish tasks, is just another level.”

Sadie is not discouraged as she knows there is going to be a learning curve, she is just frustrated. She made it clear that there will be plenty of advantages due to her public school experiences.

“When I start working in the real world, I think it’s going to be very helpful,” she said.

Less than 30 minutes away from Denver East, Sadie’s sister, Raea is currently a high school freshman at the elite private school Kent Denver. Her classes are academically rigorous, and the sports and extracurricular activities are top-tier. According to USA Today, Kent Denver is the number one ranked private school in Denver with an annual tuition cost of approximately $38,000.

Raea is dropped off at school every morning by one of her parents, sometimes as early as 7 a.m. for lacrosse practice. She has yet to experience anything close to the dysfunction that her sister Sadie encountered, but that doesn’t mean she has not been disadvantaged by going to private school.

Even though Raea is academically prepared, “she is not comfortable in spaces with trauma or stress” her parents said. They fear that, unlike Sadie, Raea is “afraid to face some of our society’s most uncomfortable truths”.

The Gurfinkel family understands that it is unfair to compare Raea’s school experience at Kent to the average public-school students’ because they have the financial backing outside of school. Despite a death, lingering danger and curriculum struggles, Sadie was able to persevere and graduate along with 93 percent of her Denver East classmates of 2023.

The question is, for the two sisters, which experience will better serve better their future? A public school with far superior real life social education but weaker academic education, or a private school with the opposite?

Kai Ruff is a freshman at Colorado College. This article was written for a political journalism class.