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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Vibe is fairly crunchy (low screen use, not allowed to celebrate Halloween/normal holidays) and surprisingly high on SAHMs/part time working moms (which are pretty uncommon at surrounding Hill schools). Long term (founding) art teacher is retiring and given her prominent influence on the school (great art classes, but also awkward over focus on racial justice issues), it will be interesting to see what gets shaken up.[/quote]

Not OP, but I've seen this "crunchy" reference about SWS a few times now and would welcome more info and examples. The Halloween thing sounds weird. I'm a working parent with fairly progressive views who values play, nature, and arts for ECE and academics and relatively lower tech for beyond. Could someone share more specifically what is it that's so "awkward" about their focus on justice issues? This wasn't exactly something I put on a list that a school needs to explicitly focus on, though I'm also not trying to go to a school of revisionist history. I'm not white and my background was lower/middle class. Trying to gauge if I would end up eye-rolling if it'd somewhat resonate.

How do SWS and Chisolm compare community-wise? Probably hard to because of the language factor but take a swing at it.[/quote]

You would definitely end up eye-rolling. I roll my eyes at ITDS all the time and I think SWS is similar. It's just so relentlessly, consciously, self-regardingly "woke" and stuck in what now feels like very dated verbiage. People get tired of it. All their talk of community and restorative justice and yadda yadda, well, the behavior in my kid's class is still pretty darn crappy so it's hard for me to be enthused about these supposedly research-based approaches. I also really loathe how they pretend to be viewpoint-neutral when it suits them, but not when they don't want to. Some opinions and worldviews are okay and some are not.

The Halloween/holidays thing is likely an attempt at being inclusive and not preferring one culture or religion over another. At ITDS, which is similarly "crunchy", they have Book Character Parade in early October, which is never spoken of as Halloween. They try to make it about banned books but parents don't really motivate to coerce their kid into something that the kid doesn't actually want to be. It's a great example of how the school (particularly one administrator) are stubbornly far left of the parents and either too much in their bubble to realize it or they just don't care. But I will say, although I had my doubts about whether this would work, I did see that the kids whose families don't allow Halloween for religious reasons were allowed to participate in the book character parade, so that was nice.

Honestly I'm completely fine with not doing holidays at school. There's no need for it. People can do holidays on their own time and school can focus on academics. Holidays at school lead to problems. At DCPS Title I, the staff is keenly aware that School Christmas is the main Christmas celebration for some kids, so they try to make it secularly-festive, but then of course that's violating the principle that schools aren't supposed to choose one religion over another. DC schools have kids of so many different religions, and even among Christians, some don't like the secular trappings of Christmas and prefer to keep it focused on religion. So I think it's reasonable for a school to just sidestep the entire thing and let holidays be a home and family thing.[/quote]

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