Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments School choice - help me!!

OK, here's my dilemma - which school to pick!

History:

I have an HG+ rising 6th grader (DD10) who skipped 2nd, comfortably top 5-10% of the class. Recently ID'd with dyslexia and presumed ADD-I. Significant introvert and likes a steady routine.

She is in a K-6 elementary which feeds to a 7-12 Jr/Sr high school. School has generally not been a good fit but we've muddled through - least worst and all that. 6th grade is where they start switching classes, and get all the fun stuff of the oldest students (saftey patrol, news team, teachers aide, special field trips, end of year dance, 'graduation', etc.) This school, though generally well regarded (well, it's an "A-rated" school based on the various standardized tests) doesn't handle out-of-the-box so well - we had to fight for the grade skip and their perspective on technology is a little dated - e.g. my DD is not allowed to bring her Kindle to school, as it is considered an unacceptabled electronic device, on par with cell phones and ipods. 2-3 computers in classrooms, although there is a computer lab, which they get access to 1/2 hour once a week as a class. All classes have smartboards.

There is a new charter middle school, near where I work, starting next year (they don't yet have a lease signed for the new building, don't have 501(c)(3) status, wet behind the ears, green, new). They did get a significant startup grant and have accepted about 120 students, about 3:1 6th to 7th graders for next school year. They plan to use the grant funding for laptops, tablets and Macs and teach primarily from those resources (including e-textbooks) instead of textbooks, and for band instruments (Arts and Sciences Academy). The charter is clearly focused on college prep and is an outgrowth of a motivated sub-population within a generally poor, rural, and less-educationally motivated region. It appears that upwards of 50% of the students enrolled are ID'd as gifted.

Oh, did I mention that the charter is in a different school district? With a completely different break schedule (except for winter break) from the current school system, where my DS7 is likely to remain. Now, there is a possibility that I could move my DS to the charter elementary (which is where many of the students for this charter middle are coming from). If we did go through the bureaucracy to change districts, I'm not sure we could change back if there is a problem or what hoops that would entail, but it is on my current list of things to research further.

I really like the idea of the charter - they seem to have the right answers for my questions, it's predominantly run by teachers and parents, but I'm afraid we'd be jumping from the frying pan into the fire and the logistics will be a nightmare, unless I move DS, too, which feels like a much less beneficial solution for him (based on what I know now). I've been going in circles for about 2 weeks so thought I'd ask for some outside perspective from the board. Pros, cons, questions, ideas, things to dig into further, etc. There have been such good ideas and suggestions when others have come to the board with similar situations.

Thanks!!

Personally, I am not sure I'd take a kid with "issues" (of any sort, good or bad) into a brand new charter school with no record. It might sound good, and turn out to be a complete disaster. There's a chance it turns out to be great, but I'd personally rather go with something I know is mediocre than risk basically losing an entire school year in a bad school.

If you do want to go with the charter school I'd have a (long) list of very specific questions I would want answered - starting with how will they differentiate? What services will they provide for her dyslexia? How will they handle any accommodations she needs for her ADHD? How will they be evaluating her progress in regards to her dyslexia? Who will establish the goals she's working towards? Who will be providing the assistance to her and what are there qualifications? How will they handle a need for future grade/subject skips? Etc, etc.

Epoh, you definitely put your finger on the main concern. The charter school sure sounds good and looks like it has the right pieces, but the implementation is a complete unknown. That's been my biggest hangup with it so I'm going to keep investigating the options for bailout if we were to go that route.

I'm also trying to get in touch with some other parents of prospective students, to figure out what sold them on this charter - overall I think their existing optins aren't even as good as mine (based on what I do know about the local school system), but this sure feels like a big leap for anyone to take and they've got well over a hundred ready to take it.

Thanks also for the questions - there are few new ones, I hadn't thought of. They claim no problem with following the existing 504 plan that includes accomodations for both the dyslexia and ADD-I. She is well above grade level, so most of the accomodations are just to scaffold and make sure she doesn't slip backwards (at least so far). I did raise the grade/subject skip issue, just because they only have one grade ahead (they are planning to add 8th grade in 2013, then regular high school kicks in, unless they decide to charter one of those, too). They have indicated they are willing to do small group instruction and possibly even one-on-one. They are planning an Algebra I class this year, which would be predominantly 7th graders, but might be open to DD - we haven't gotten into the pre-reqs. The one thing I do know is they have one teacher for each primary subject to teach all grade levels. So jumping around between grade level classes could create a scheduling nightmare. They plan to handle that with one or two teachers (kinda floaters) who have extensive educational experience at middle and high school level (although I don't know for sure in which subjects), who would teach those small groups while the primary teachers handle the regular classes. They really do seem to have the best intentions, but we all know where that sometimes leads!

Again, the issue is they talk a good game, but who knows what happens when the rubber hits the road! Of course the only thing I have to compare to right now is the current school, where they don't even talk a good game unless pushed.

As a tangent, our school has that same rule - but it's a "we don't want expensive stuff getting lost or broken" rule, not a "Kindles have no educational value" rule. DD's teachers haven't had an issue with doing book reports and AR tests on Kindle books.

How does your dd feel about possibly switching? My gut feeling is that even though you've had to muddle through where she's at - 6th grade is a year with a lot of perks she may have been looking forward to, and if she likes structure and routine, the idea of switching schools might be stressful to her unless she's very unhappy where she's at.


JMO - I don't think the no-Kindle policy is necessarily a sign of a school with a dated perspective on technology. Instead it sounds like a school that isn't integrating Kindles across the board, where most likely not all the kids have Kindles and where the Kindle is lumped in with other electronic devices which can be distraction during class. I'm guessing that the Kindle is helpful to your dd due to her dyslexia (that's just a guess - I have a dd with a memory challenge which impacts reading and she uses the audio option on a Kindle to help with reading). Does your dd have AT accommodations for her dyslexia at her current school? If not, do you feel they would be helpful? Our ds with dysgraphia attended a school that does not have computers in most classrooms but he was allowed to do all of his classwork on a laptop computer that we supply.

Another thing to keep in mind re technology in school when you're parenting a 2e child who uses AT - having up-to-date technology can be a good thing, but it isn't going to guarantee that every child in the school has the specific AT that your child needs to use in the classroom. My ds is now in an extremely tech-friendly school and all the students in his grade will be using iPads next year. DS will also be using an iPad *plus* his laptop, because he has tech needs that aren't available on the iPad.


"Near where I work" sounds good for making it work!


It sounds like there is a motivated group of parents behind this school and they have great plans and great ideas. Charter school results though, no matter how great the plans, can end up all over the place. If it was me, I'd consider how your dd feels about where she is now. Is she asking for a change, or does she want to spend her last year of elementary school with her friends, having fun with the upper class perks that are offered at her current school? If you leave her where she is for another year, you at least are dealing with a situation you know well even if it's not ideal, and you can look at the charter school option again next year when the school has a full year of operation underway - which will give you a better idea re are they able to pull off what they say they plan to do, as well as perhaps a chance to talk to some of the parents who's children are enrolled there.

Another thought on the technology at the charter school - our ds' school just started the "all kids on the iPad" plan this past year, and it worked out well - in general - but there were also a few learning curves and discoveries of what works and what doesn't that went on during that first year. I have a good friend who is a middle school teacher who's school went all-Kindle for textbooks this past year and they too felt it was overall a success but went through a few first-year un-foreseen discoveries and challenges.


FWIW, we are sending all three of our kids to different schools to meet their very different needs. It's a bit of a pain in terms of scheduling, but it was also easier in one significant way than I'd ever thought of prior to actually doing it (they were in the same elementary for several years) - the "easy" part was that life became much easier for my two 2e kids once they were in schools which were a better fit for their needs (and it also meant I had to spend much less time advocating for them).


I don't know anything about your area, but fwiw, our school district *has* to let anyone enroll their child in the neighborhood schools where they reside no matter what they were doing for school the previous year.

Best wishes,

polarbear

Hmmm. I'm with the others. What does your DD want to do? We had some experience considering a brand new charter school that sounded awesome in the preliminary planning stages. It was going to be all STEM, and I volunteered on the hiring committee. This school also didn't yet have a lease anywhere. In the midst of the hiring process, the founding Board members had disagreements as to the direction of the school, things changed, and several Board members resigned and were replaced with people of a different focus. The school ended up moving to an entirely different location, much further than we could have driven. I'm not sure how it's doing now, but I see it's still in existence. So I guess my warning is to beware of the first year of any charter school. Could be great, but there are lots of unknowns.

Also, our local district has the same policy as polarbear's: if your kid was out-of-district and wanted to come back, the local district has to take him back. Check with your local district. If our kiddo ever needed to leave his close-to-my-work out-of-district school, I know for sure we'd have a place in our local district.

Good luck making your decision. It is nice to have a choice, anyway, but hard to make a decision.

That was pretty much our experience with a new charter as well. We moved from our neighborhood elementary b/c I was told by the district coordinator to homeschool dd13 (7 at the time) and that they were philosophically opposed to meeting her needs . Truly, there were too many things she needed and wasn't going to get in our neighborhood school and I do think that it was a good choice to move. The charter offered subject acceleration, had hired some truly outstanding teachers from a private school than had recently closed, talked a good talk, etc.

Once there, the principal was fired right before school started and we went through two or three more by the end of the school year, teachers quit or were fired mid-year, half the kids who came were likely gifted or bordering on it and the other half were juvenile delinquents, the problems were just huge. We didn't last more than one year and my younger dd was educationally derailed in that year which took a while to get back on track.

Do you have any other options of choicing to a different school that are not a new charter? I might consider sticking it out at your same school for this one last year of elementary and spending the year researching choice options for jr high that would be a good fit and more time tested.

I, too, have done different schools in different districts with different breaks for my two kids b/c they had different needs at the time. It is a hassle, but it is doable.

One thing I forgot to mention when I posted yesterday was that it's important to have confidence in how the school will handle your child's own individual level of gifted, which your second post seems to indicate they at least are willing to work with. Our ds12's private school advertises that over 1/2 the students are gifted, using a definition of "gifted" as in the top 5% on ability testing, and I am *guessing* based on getting to know the kids and ds' experience that most of the kids are much closer to 95% percentile than they are to 99% percentile. His school *has* been good for him vs his previous school in that he's had a much easier time fitting in socially and making friends, but he has still had to deal with boredom in most of his classes, even where he is subject accelerated... because the school is small, his subject-accelerated classes are a mix of kids at grade level + kids working beyond grade level. On the flip side, I doubt there is a great-fit school out there where we live (or in most places) for kids who are EG, and switching to a school where there is a larger mix of MG kids wasn't the ideal solution for ds, it was a great improvement over where he had been.

polarbear

Thanks so much everyone for the thoughtful responses. Here is some additional detail on DDs attitude and our other options.

DD is 10, she's a little fickle and her opinon may vary based on what she had for breakfast, but in general she has been getting more and more interested/excited about the charter school as a possibility. When I first brought it up, she wasn't particularly interested, but I later mentioned that I'd talked to the director just to do research and DD asked several followup questions. I showed her the website and went over several of the things I thought would either interest or concern her. I described it basically as a small school with just 6th and 7th grade, with about half the kids similar to the kids in her current gifted class (which from what I know of, the students are probably 75% MG and 25% MG+.) I mentioned the plan at that time was to use ipads for instruction and I told her they weren't sure exactly where the classrooms were going to be or what they would look like.

I pointed out that they wear uniforms, (which I honestly thought could be a dealbreaker) and she didn't seem to think that was a big deal as she tried to figure out how she could customize it.

I also pointed out that they already had a summer assignment reading a couple of books and answering several questions about the books, which again, I thought would put her off, having to work over the summer break,especially writing, which she darn near hates. Again she surprised me by asking if could she do the assignment, even if she didn't get into the charter school. I agreed and we ordered the book we didn't have for her Kindle a few days later. Of course the flip side is that she hasn't actually started to read that book or the one she already had, so the follow-through leaves a little to be desired. I am also a little suspicious that interest in the charter school peaked right about the time that she found out that she hadn't made safety patrol at the current school.

I pretty much let it drop until the last day applications were due and asked if she wanted me to do an application. She said she did. Since that time she's asked about the school a couple of times and when I mentioned going to a meeting about the school she acted very excited. She even asked about the ipads tonight at bedtime and I told her the people running the school discovered some issues with using those, so they are now planning to use a combination of laptops, tablets and desktops. She took that very in stride an didn't seem too concerned about the lack of ipads (which I think was one of the original selling points for the charter).

She's kinda almost to the point, where I think she will be disappointed not to try the charter. I think she sees it as an adventure - our past experience with other situations is that she is often very excited, deals with some trepidation at the last minute and then jumps in with both feet. Unfortunately once the novelty has worn off, as the day-to-day sets in, so does the enthusiasim. I know, I described her as routine driven; she likes the excitement of new things, at the same time she needs routines (maybe it would be better to say that the rest of us need her to have routines) - she's complicated, what can I say.

We don't really have any other options. We are way out in the corner of our school district, the next nearest public elementary school is essentially similar to ours and the next one is about a 30 minute drive nearly opposite to my 30 minute commute to work. Which leaves us without transportation or child care, since both my husband and I work full time. We have no elementary (or middle/jr high) magnets in our district and I don't think there are any charters within our district at all. We have the same issue for jr. high - the next nearest one is just not feasible from a transportation standpoint.

The one perk with our currently zoned high school is a dual enrollment agreement with the branch community college, that is just down the street. Several students each year are now graduating from the high school with AAs or significant college credits. In addition we have a major state university only about 30 minutes away. We've got options for about 10th through 12th grade. Just feels like slogging through molasses uphill in January to get to that point.

My husband works in the next district over (a different one that the charter school - yes, we live in one district, I work in a different one and he works in a third) and we've tried for several years to get DD into magnet programs and/or the lab school in that district, but since we are out-of-county and the programs are very competitive, DD has always been waitlisted (far down the list).

I've read many of these charter school stories here real time, I think over the last few years, which is why I'm so uncertain about taking this leap. It sounds good, it looks good (so far), DD is interested, almost excited, but . . . .

There are a few successful charter schools - I just need a crystal ball to know if this will be one of them. Anyone got one handy?