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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So what if the school had to offer free after care and free immersion is great!  Those 2 items alone will draw attention to any school!  If it were Spanish, French or Mandarin then people would have been all over it, right?  But because it's Hebrew people shy'd away, yes?  I personally like the small classroom sizes.  If I wanted my child in a school with 25 kids in the class I would have went DCPS so the numbers don't bother me.  Because it's Hebrew immersion they will have to "prove" themselves to be a great school that is where leadership comes in.  It may not be the hot ticket for lottery choices at the moment because it's the unknown factor in play for immersion.  When sending your child to an immersion school it's to utilize other parts of the brain that would otherwise not be used in a traditional school, a child that learns a language at an early age can always learn another no matter what the language is, the immersion piece is what matters.  The demaand will come but proving themselves has to happen first just as it happened for all other immersion schools in DC....[/quote]

I think you're missing 2 points, a small one and a big one.

Small: No question, any school offering free aftercare and language immersion sounds exciting to most parents.  The problems are: 1) Sela always said it was free for this year and unclear how long after this year they'd be able to swing it.  2) My point above is that without the free aftercare and the fact that if one was dying for language immersion but shut out everywhere else, a lot of people enrolled at Sela last year who were not as much "choosing Sela" as they were "ending up in Sela for now".  There is a difference, and from a sustainability point of view, it's an important difference.  That goes to the big point you're missing:  Big: You want in your first year to prove your school, yes that's true for all new schools.  But all the other new schools that have been approved in the last 5 years and are still running today, they started with an idea that even on paper was predictably "popular" if the school could back up the proposal with actually doing what they said.  That is not the case with Sela.  Hebrew immersion is not an idea that on paper has overwhelming support or popularity.  Spanish?  Yes.  Chinese?  Yes.  Montessori?  Yes.  Expeditionary or Green?  Probably not alone, but as a pairing with one of the others, it's a bonus for many families.  But Hebrew as the target language?  Where is the predictable popularity of that in DC?  That's a sincere question, I'm not criticizing it, but the numbers or usefulness in the US or world are simply not there for Hebrew as a language choice, and certainly not as compared to the 3 that exist today in DC or proposed: Spanish, French, Chinese and (proposed) Arabic.  The job oppourtunities and worldwide populations that speak those languages are very significant.  That is the biggest obstacle of all for Sela, no matter how good the school or Administration is.

And the numbers will be tell the full when looking at re-enrollment and new enrollment.  That will speak louder to the above issues than anything else anyone can say, and predict the near-future success or demise of the school.[/quote]

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