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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They should really stick to torturing middle and high school students. [/quote]

Please stop. I'm a current BASIS parent and the details of this decision are really important, because our younger child is an elementary schooler and we would be open to moving them to BASIS sooner (to get stronger math and science instruction in late elementary compared for their DCPS), if the elementary school opened in time. [/quote]

I am current DCPS parent who lives super near the current middle/high building. On the one hand, I love the idea of my kid going to school a few blocks away and getting access to a super accelerated curriculum in middle/high, if that's right for them.

On the other...we love our well-run DCPS elementary. It is zoned for Francis middle, which families at our school seem to really like. Many families from our school have kids at Basis and I hear mixed reviews. But our high school is Cardozo which I don't think is on any sort of improvement path. Plus, both are further away than Basis' current campus. Francis is A LOT further away, actually.

I feel like any brand new elementary school will have growing pains, even if it is run by a national network. And I'm not sold (at all!) on Basis' approach for my particular kid, though I'm also not a Basis hater. I believe the Basis parents who have posted here saying it can be a good fit for a certain kind of student. I think it would have worked very well for my sister (now a doctor) who got straight A's without breaking a sweat, found our well-regarded public school boring and yearned for a challenge. I have anxiety and it would have been too much of a pressure cooker for me, even if I could have handled the rigor in STEM.

My child is just too young at this point for me to be able to say with any real confidence if they are the kind of kid who would thrive at Basis long-term. And the elementary is an especially unknown quantity for me...but maybe someone here has experience with the model elsewhere in the country?

So...advice? I know we have the option of trying Basis elementary for a year or so if it opens and if we get in through the lottery. We can always go back to our in-bound if it isn't working for us. But that seems needlessly disruptive for my kid, who likes their school.

I'm inclined to stick with our DCPS until I have a better idea what the elementary is like and what kind of learner my kid is, even if that means we lose the option of Basis lottery-wise. But it's a tough call. [/quote]

Tough call! I would consider it for later elementary, bc (in my experience) DCPS was really fun and happy but didn't offer enough learning, and in our experience with BASIS, they really do learn a TON. For kids who love to learn and are happy to dig in and memorize, it is a good fit. But I need to know more about early elementary.

I do have the sense that K-12 works better and people will have a better sense of whether or not their kids is a "BASIS" fit, and there will be less attrition. Right now it's full of people who came from DCPS and just were not happy with the feeder middle school option, but are not necessarily a great fit at the school and find it stressful.[/quote]

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