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[quote=Anonymous]I understand the concern about Hebrew as a smaller language group.  It's a legitimate question, and if in the long term, it is not sustainable, that's something that we will see in the long term.  I have a friend who is a Latin professor at a university.  He faces similar criticisms about Latin, but he has had a job for quite a while, and I expect he will be able to stay teaching until he retires one day.  
At my public school, there were classes for Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Latin, Chinese, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, Arabic, French, German, and Italian (and probably more that I forgot).  Nothing similar exists in DC.  I think it was a great school, and the kids were mostly high achievers who have done quite well in the world thus far.  I don't think the school had any problems as a result of offering too many languages.  If there was a demand, they would do it.  I am waiting to see if Greek ever gets added to the mix.  Technically, it was a language magnet, but most of the kids were known for their academic excellence generally - so go figure...  Some of them were even high achievers who went to the school for Hebrew, Japanese, and (gasp) Latin!  Correlation or causation?  Either way, it was good for the public school system overall to have these academic high achievers in the system rather than in private schools.  And, it seemed to be good for the parents and students, too, at least in my opinion.  (For the record, I took French)...

But, what's funny to me is that has absolutely NOTHING to do with this unsubstantiated rumor about ALL (or nearly all) of the Hebrew teachers leaving.  As far as I can tell, two teachers are leaving, both because they wanted to or had to move back to Israel.  And one of those two told me he LOVED the school!  And, the school already had 2 new hires to replace them by June 21st...  So, what is this thread about exactly?

If you want to debate the finer points of having a smaller language group be a legitimate charter school choice, that's one thing.  But, who knows what Sela will evolve into?  Maybe they will have an Arabic arm, an Amharic arm, or a focus on Semitic languages generally.  Maybe in a few years, it will fizzle out.

I'm a busy parent.  I take this one step at a time.  I'm focused on the PK classes.  They seem ok thus far.  The PK teacher that I know is very engaged.  I don't see her leaving any time soon.  I really just want a good school with high quality language instruction for my child going into PK classes.  Does the half English-half Hebrew thing work for kindergarten -- I don't know.  But, I have two years to find out.  If anyone has experience with that, I am all ears.

Please, just end the trolling here.  I really don't care what anyone has to say about offering a Hebrew charter school.  If someone wanted to have such a thread, I would have ignored it.  But this thread started off with a highly charged and inflammatory claim that the school was failing somehow.  That teachers were leaving in droves and continued on with claims that DC would have to pick up the pieces.  What complete and total unsubstantiated BS!  Was this a waste of time meant or was it just a mean-spirited way to scare parents of prospective kids at Sela?

The question is: how good is the school that we have.  If it were no good, then fine.  But, frankly, most of the people who have ACTUALLY been involved in the school seem to love it.  There is even a 53 person Facebook group for parents of Sela kids.  It is a closed group, so no trolls there either![/quote]

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