Private vs. Public Schools

I mentioned before about trying to get my son into a new school for next year. I'm going to expand on that today and tell you why I decided not to do it.

What originally happened was that I wanted my son in another school district. That's why we had to

look into alternative schools. We looked at a charter school and a private school.

Now, I went to a charter middle school, which was the best school out of all 4 I'd been to (until college), so I really thought it would be a great environment for my son. Yes, the school was a good size, and that have great projects for the kids to do. Then I started realizing that I didn't want to be just project based, I wanted it to also be based on the fundamentals that you would get from a public school. So we had to move on.
Then we looked into a private. It's a Christian school, which would have also been great because my son loves going to church and hearing Bible stories. Anyway, the school looked great, my only downside was that the classes were very small. I'm talking like 5-6 kids in kindergarten. The money ended up driving me away because I thought "There's no way I could afford this."

So after a year of public school, I decided to look into private again. I talked with people who work there about getting help to pay for the school, and they made it seem like no problem. What I had to pay would be based off my income, and I could make payments on it. They also said that if what I was requested to pay was too much, they would be able to help me. I still felt uneasy about not knowing yet, but I handed in my paperwork and paid an enrollment fee. Then when I was given the paperwork for "getting help", I see at the top that it was another $10 for that, which was never mentioned to me! That needed more paperwork that I didn't have with me so I left. Ever since then, I've been regretting paying that enrollment fee and rethinking my decision.

Last week, I got an e-mail from, who would have been, his new 1st grade teacher about meeting up. I thought, "'Ok, maybe this will make me feel better and we can still make this work." Until I saw it.... $25. $25 to meet with his teacher to see what level he was at. That ultimately pushed me into completely giving up on this school because #1, I've already paid a good amount of money that could have gone to other things (its non-refundable), and #2, WHO in their right mind would pay that??
If I knew what was going on, I could have handled the financials, but if you're tacking on extra fees for ridiculous things, I'm not interested.