I toured the school this morning--it's much smaller than I expected. It's just a few rooms that they are renting in the community center portion of a church. There's also a swimming pool and a grassy area with a play structure.
Right now they have about 25 students of various ages. They emphasize experiential learning and meet with families to create tailored educational goals for the kids. It looks fun, it has some structure but it's flexible and non-authoritarian. There are adult mentors (instead of teachers) who help the kids work on their goals and structure their day. The structure is fairly loose, though, e.g.
Morning: arrival and choice time, snack, language arts
Noon: lunch, recess
Afternoon: math, biology, swimming.
The place has a homey feel to it, looks lived-in. They do a cooking project together on Fridays. There were lots of projects in various stages of completion around like a three foot high balsa wood Rube-Goldberg type contraption put together with liberal amounts of hot glue, there were computers where some kids were doing math games. Some kids were playing a complicated looking board game. Another boy was on the floor working on a large map-like project that he had made. Some kids were working on their language arts theme projects.
The kids are allowed to choose any theme and then choose to do three projects related to their theme, one of which has to involve writing. Some of the options are: write a biography of about a person related to your theme, research your theme and give an oral report, collect or draw pictures related to your theme, write a story related to your theme, build a diorama, etc.
They have specialists come in to teach the kids, e.g. one week will feature a biology professor who takes the kids on a nature walk, another week they'll have an artist who shows them how to make kinetic sculptures.
For us, there would be downsides--the expense = $16,000/yr/kid. We just couldn't do it. The commute is bad. With the small number of kids I would be afraid that some kids would not find a buddy to bond with. I am debating whether to take the kids to visit the school (the next step in the admissions process) since I don't have much hope it could work and I don't want to get their hopes up.
