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[quote=Anonymous]I went to the Open House at Jefferson last night too. There were about 16 or so Brent families there.

Impressions:

- It's a small school (<300 kids) and they seem to do a tremendous amount to really create individualized instruction for the kids (with a lot of the current focus on getting kids up to speed). But I suspect that same attention could and would get turned to helping students do more advanced work if they came in proficient or advanced and the school remained relatively small.

- The physical plant of the school seemed fine. No shiny all glass atriums or anything but fine. The classrooms have huge windows. A lot of the Brent parents checked out the bathrooms after all the Eliot-Hine talk (!), and they were fine too. I saw S-H post-renovation, and I wasn't any more excited about that. Jefferson has more natural light which is my big thing.

- Curriculum seemed fine (big humanities block and big math/science block during the day with some other classes in between). I imagine Latin (maybe Basis?) and the offerings of Deal would excite me more, but I haven't toured those schools yet. But I went to a PK3-8 grade school where the "middle school" grades were each taught by a single teacher with a bachelors degree in education and no specialized subject matter knowledge. So Jefferson's offering are a big step up on that.

- Didn't love all the focus on the upcoming PARCC test (spirit week, etc.) but having experienced another Title 1 school, I suspect Brent is one of the exceptions rather than the norm in not paying much attention to it teaching/student preparation-wise.

- I walked to the school from my Capitol Hill home. I hadn't gone that way for quite a while, so I was pretty pleasantly surprised by how pleasant it was. Tons of people on the street, kids playing on playgrounds and using the rec facilities, housing projects didn't seem scary. I could see myself biking there/back with a young middle schooler and probably eventually letting him or her bike by him/herself. To be determined as my kids are still young.

- I've also spoken a fair amount with the mom who has kids at Brent and Jefferson, and what she has said has alleviated a lot of my trepidation about the unknown. I don't want to drag her into this forum, but I would suggest Brent families thinking about Jefferson talk to her.

So my take home was that another school could potentially excite me more, but if the alternative is selling our house and moving to the burbs or paying $40K per year for private, I'd pick Jefferson. Our kids are still young though, so these decisions aren't in our immediate future.[/quote]

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