Why we are back at the Charter School

Our eldest daughter's educational experience has always been a bit different.  At the age of three, she went to pre-school and enjoyed two mornings a week of fun and activities which helped develop her social skills and got her used to listening to and obeying adults other than her parents.  In the first week of her second year of pre-school, at the age of four however, she told us was bored because it seemed to be a repetition of the previous year.  She transferred to the slightly more school-like pre-Kindergarten class (at another location) with her friend, and she liked that much better.

When she was five, in 1999, we moved to the Netherlands for a year where she started at the local Kleuterschool.  Unlike our local Kindergarten, this was full-time education and together with the wealth of experience associated with living abroad, it was a year of fun and adventure. By the end of that year she was almost completely bilingual, but then we had to return to America where she entered 1st Grade.  During 1st Grade she was quickly able to catch up on the little she had missed in learning to read and write in English (Kindergarten being a year of only half-days) and continued to prove herself a bright and capable student.  So far so good. 

In 2nd Grade she transferred to the elementary school.  By now, counting  pre-school, she was in her third school in four years, but as always she was up to the challenge and enjoyed three happy years there.  Her 4th Grade teacher was strict and worked the students hard, but it paid off, and she was fully prepared for Middle School.

Then there was 5th Grade at Middle School, which wasn't a happy year for her.  One teacher accused her of 'bullying' because of a mild joke she'd made at another child's expense, and of 'sexual harrassment' due to untruths told by another child who said she'd called her a lesbian.  She was ten years old.  Academically she was becoming bored with the way she was being taught and it seemed to us, always, that she could do better but with no incentive or motivation, and praise handed out by the bucketload, she learned that minimal effort was all that was needed.  This continued in 6th Grade, where again she complained that she was being re-taught material that had already been covered. 

It was during those early weeks of 6th Grade that we learned about a new charter school that had opened a few miles away, and we wondered if that school would be a better fit for her.  Despite the fact that the school had a heavy bias towards Mathematics and Science, and DD1 was - and is - more inclined towards language and literature, we thought that the streaming (American: tracking) of classes and the traditional grading system (i.e. A, B, C etc) would be better for her.  She started at the Charter school part way through 6th Grade. (This was now her fifth school.)

At first she was almost completely overwhelmed with the heavy workload.  So much more was expected of her now, not only in the quantity of work, but in that the material being taught was usually only learnt in 8th and 9th Grades.  Fortunately, she was equal to the challenge and found that slowly she became used to having lots of homework and enjoyed writing ten or twenty-page essays.  She relished the competition with her friends and time and again met the challenge of earning A's for most of her work.

This school wasn't without its problems and dramas.  Some teachers weren't up to par and some lessons were disorganised and difficult, but overall she did well there for almost four years.  During 9th grade though, she and we began to doubt that this school was really a good place for a high school experience.  It didn't seem very stable (faculty and administrators were coming and going) and it wasn't very clear as to how their high school program would develop.  Our local high school, of course, had everything printed out in a course handbook, so it was easy to see a path which students would follow through to the end of the 12th Grade.  Additionally, the charter school was weak on electives (optional 'light' enrichment subjects) and the arts, so we transferred her again to school number six.

Her sophomore year at the local high school (10th Grade) proved to be a mixture of good and bad.  I was happy to be relieved of carpool duties, but she had to leave home an hour earlier each day and getting her out of bed for a 6:45am school bus  was hard.  She had a great time socially and enjoyed several of the extra-curricular activities which this huge school had to offer.  She became involved in drama and theatre production, and took a class in the school's TV studio.  However, her academic classes were disappointing.  In her honors history class she found herself literally repeating projects she had done in 5th Grade.  She found a lot of projects involved group or partner work and instead of learning and writing papers, she was asked to draw and colour posters. 

Primarily though, the biggest letdown was in Mathematics, where she had an incompetent teacher who couldn't answer any questions not directly covered in the text book and who appeared to downgrade anyone whose answers and method of working didn't exactly match those prescribed in the book.  She became increasingly discouraged and her grades started to fall.  In the end, we reopened the debate about whether or not the charter school might have been the better choice after all.

During the long summer of 2010 we went back and forth on the subject, until at the very end of August, following discussions and meetings at the charter school, she decided that she wanted to go back.  We hope we have made the right choice, but already she seems happier, although it's only the third day.  Academically she is once again among students of similar abilities who are motivated to learn and to work hard so we hope that for her final two high school years, she will do well and be happy.