Reply to Upper elementary at a Title 1 school

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I started this thread a million pages ago specifically because I was concerned about having to switch my DC mid-elementary then again when we move. I wanted a school we could stay in for all of elementary and not have to school hop after second grade (like people assume every higher SES kid does in Title 1 schools). Whether an elementary school is viable in upper elementary is absolutely relevant even if you're not continuing in the feeder, but frankly we'd be panned for taking a charter seat if we did that instead, so oh well. [/quote]

See, OP, without knowing the school, it's really hard to say how things will go.  You're having a good experience until suddenly you aren't.  Your grade level cohort can happen to have bright kids or not, well-prepared kids or not, it's really pretty random who joins the class each year.  One disruptive new kid can really detract from other kids' learning time and it will take a while for the school to get an IEP figured out and staffed.  IB rights mean that classrooms can be overcrowded-- we had 29 in K one year at our Title I.  Teachers come and go, you can have a great one or a dud at any school.  Each year, you just don't know.  But there will be attrition due to lack of a desirable middle school, and the kids coming in to the upper grades likely won't be as academically prepared, so the average level of the class will  likely drift downwards over time.  A school with a strong reputation and a strong middle school will have more well-prepared students coming in, so this problem won't be as much of a thing.

And as a Kindergarten parent, you don't really know what kind of kid you have.  Early readers seem super smart but often the other kids catch up.  Some kids get really into a particular subject or sport and you might move schools for that reason.  Kids get diagnosed with dyslexia, ASD, all kinds of things in lower and middle elementary, and special needs services really just depend on the quality of the staff you happen to have.  And if you have two kids, you might move them both because of the needs of one or the other.

So that's why nobody can tell you whether you'll want to stay or not.  It's easy to say you believe in your school and intend to stay, but it's a lot harder to do when your kid is struggling or unhappy, doing school refusal or falling behind academically, or when their IEP rights are being ignored or their teacher obviously sucks.  Then you ask yourself "what am I staying *for*?" and if the answer is "to make my child suffer for my principles" or "to attend an even worse middle school", it's just kind of hard to do.[/quote]

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