Reply to Hardy Middle School -- 5th grade in feeder school -- who's considering Hardy for 6th?

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[quote=Anonymous]I went to the Hardy open house today too and had a similar experience as the PP.  I was very impressed.  I'd been there before for Fillmore events, etc. but had never seen the school in action like this.  Principal Pride is very impressive for starters, but then we went into 5 or 6 sixth grade classrooms with classes in session.  The teachers seemed interested and engaged, as did the students. There was not a single peep of misbehavior in any of the classrooms or hallways the entire time -- hard to say that at our feeder school.  Everything was clean and bright in the school.  There were computers in the library and in classrooms.  The class sizes were uniformly small -- like none more than 15 kids.  We met two music teachers, both of whom were focused and interested and engaged.  The science and math teachers were just finishing their classes so we were able to talk to them some more once the kids left -- they seemed fantastic and I got a sense that they not only like teaching but the kids like them too.  Across the board, the students seemed entirely respectful of the teachers.  Sure, you'll say --- of course everyone was on best behavior because the principal was standing there in the classroom with the parents.  That probably did have an impact on the kids, but it does speak well of Principal Pride and the respect the kids have for her and their teachers.

There are advanced math, science, etc. classes that kids are sorted into in the first two weeks of school based on assessments.  Other things -- there's gym 5 days a week.  Four languages kids can choose from - Spanish, French, Italian, and (starting next year) Chinese.  Tons of clubs -- chess, robotics, rocketry, cooking, etiquette, school garden market, yoga, etc.

Regarding where kids go after Hardy --  [Insert joke about jail or reform school.]  Principal Pride said most kids go to public high school as you'd expect.  She mentioned Wilson, Ellington, and I don't recall the others -- perhaps she said Dematha and Banneker and some I hadn't heard of.  For feeder school kids, Hardy feeds into Wilson.  She said some kids go to private schools for high school too (she mentioned Maret).

Downsides -- still of course the large % of kids who have low reading/math proficiency (which the school tries to deal with by having different advanced classes); the school's sports teams don't always fare well in games due to small size of student population (the school is 1/4 the size of Deal); soccer is not a fall sport but is a spring sport (as is baseball) -- I don't know if other DC middle schools do this also; fewer kids in the school are from our neighborhood than our current feeder school --  (though there are always going to be kids who go to private, no matter how good Hardy is and becomes -- private schools have kids from all over DC also, plus VA/MD too); going to Hardy would mean we'd miss the ability to bid thousands of dollars on private school annual fundraising auction items and donate thousands to the private school annual fund, competing with other families to get listed as being in the top donor donation "clubs."

There's an intent to enroll form that we, as feeder school parents, are supposedly going to be getting next week.  We're going to do it.[/quote]

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