Reply to Reason to transfer school in APS?

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Reason to transfer school in APS?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]OP - The only way you are going to get the information you seek is to actually go to the school, tour it, attend a PTA meeting, talk to parents currently at the school, etc. You are not going to get the best information about a particular school on this board. If you are concerned about how ESL instruction works and how it impacts non-ESL students -- ask the professionals who do the work! Meet with an ESL specialist at the school or at the district level or both. Find out how APS does ESL education. Meet with parents of native English speakers at the school and ask them what their experience has been specific to the impact of ESL instruction. You can find parents of school aged kids on neighborhood listservs or on the playgrounds before or after school. Approach and ask. They have been in your shoes. I am always happy to talk to parents of pre-school aged kids who are out on fact-finding missions and every other parent I know is too. We were all there once. Meet with a teacher or two who can tell you how their classrooms work with respect to ESL and non ESL kids.  Reach out to the APS County Council PTA and other APS resources to understand how the district does ESL education.

No one can give you a definitive answer as to what the school will be like in several years. But you can get concrete answers about how the school handles ESL instruction and you can find out from parents there now what their sense is of whether their kids miss out because of time spent helping ESL students learn English.

And remember, barring your child being tutored one-on-one by a private instructor for all of elementary school, there will always be some other student taking attention away from your kid, whether it is a kid who is learning English or a kid who struggles with reading or a kid who struggles with math or a kid who is being a class clown or a kid who is otherwise disruptive. That is true in public as well as private schools. It is the nature of having one teacher with multiple students. But it sounds to me that you are not so much worried about that lack of constant individual attention as the idea that the whole classroom will have a slower pace because of ESL kids. The only way you can give yourself any comfort on that issue will be to go into the school and gain an understanding of how that work is done. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics