Reply to Dorothy Hamm - after-school clubs

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[quote=Anonymous]The clubs are a great thing to have at DHMS. I'm so thankful for the teachers and staff who run them. Note though that the clubs are very kid driven, which means your child needs the executive functioning skills to sign up for (not all, but most are sign up driven) and go to the clubs. No one really helps with that. Some clubs fill up quickly and it has been overwhelming for my 6th grader to figure it all out and get himself to clubs. I'm hopeful he'll figure it out by the end of the year, but for now he's hanging out with his friends after school and eating at Lee Heights.

That all said, if you have the means and your child has been or has a likelihood of being accepting to a private school, I'd recommend the private school. DHMS has been fine (again the teachers are doing their best) but it's been hard for our son to juggle the independence, organization, social issues, and learning. If your student is coming from Taylor, they may have fewer social issues because their cohort is so large, but otherwise it's a smattering of kids from the other feeders and they are very much left to their own to figure out friendships. There's no outdoor time (they get maybe 5 minutes after lunch, but not much more...I've been helicopter monitoring that). The early mornings are rough and the afternoons out of school are long. Our son's 504 has not been followed at all. There's a heavy reliance on screen time. As long as your child is getting average/passing grades, there's not a lot of concern about social/emotional issues. There's a lot of talking up of the Phoenix Time and TA (homeroom) blocks as to the social/emotional and organizational/exec functioning aspects when your child is in 5th, but so far our son has spent that time watching movies on the iPad. We thought it would be more disruptive to move our son to private than to keep him within the APS system, but that was a lazy decision on our part and we should have made the switch. [/quote]

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