I'm also finding myself considering one of the lower performing alternative schools quite a ways north of us. It is an expedentiary learning model and goes from 6th-12th. The classes are small. GT probably doesn't exist at all or is not a big deal there. It is also a good 30-40 minute commute and it would be tight to get her there from 8-3:10 (especially pick-up) with dd12 being on the other end of town and getting out at close to the same time. They have early release of 1:25 on Weds.
I'm going to quote myself here
. We went to the open house for this school last night and would appreciate any feedback. The commute wasn't as bad as I thought (about 25 mins barring bad weather). Dd really liked it.
The things she liked:
* Very hands on with "fieldwork" and a lot of getting out to do things in the environment;
* Allows for academic diversions. One of the kids gave an example of bringing in a petrified toad she found and the teacher changing her science lesson plans to be about toads and frogs and how this one could have come to be petrified (this became science for the next month);
* Relaxed -- they call teachers by their first names, some of the classes have yoga balls in lieu of desks, etc.
* Small and electives are mixed age with 6th-8th grade together.
My concerns, other than the commute & dd12 being at a school on the other side of town, include:
* The math test scores, in particular, are very poor. Our part of the state has above state avg scores on achievement tests. If the state avg is 60% of the kids proficient, many local schools will have 75-95% proficient+. Their math scores for grade 7+ run around 25% proficient+.
The principal attributes this to turn-over in math teachers and some of these teachers having not been the best fit and to the expedentiary learning model where they focus more on conceptual understanding than "drill and kill." He did say that they were working to add in more memorization of basic facts to bring those scores up.
* Only one elective/semester and fewer choices in the electives (they focus on depth over breadth);
* 6th grade is run more like an elementary classroom with one teacher. Save for math, in which she could still subject accelerate if it was the right fit, she would be in the regular classroom with no tracking for literacy or anything else beyond whatever differentiation the classroom teacher provides. While language arts isn't her strongest area (although she does have an A- in the GT reading class), she has spent this year and last in GT reading studying Latin roots, character motivation, and doing more intellectually deep work than what it looked like they did (book reports, std fare).
Thoughts?
