Reply to SWoW - What's it really like?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We got accepted last year, shadowed, and my child decided not to go but to stay at BASIS DC and potentially transfer to Wilson after 9th grade (when they start allowing kids to take AP courses at Wilson).  The main reason was that the BASIS kids never said anything great about Walls - there were kids eating and texting in class, and all they said was "you'll get used to it."  Absolutely NO former BASIS student offered a ringing endorsement either at the interview or on the shadow day and our first year after a few weeks we had a couple of kids at Walls who wanted to come back to BASIS so we changed our charter.  While BASIS would probably not have gotten a ringing endorsement from the kids at Walls (they had obviously chosen to leave BASIS), they made no comments about anything at Walls being better than BASIS and that really struck my child as wrong.  The kids don't have less homework, but BASIS has been going through so many transitions it has been several different schools.  The kids who left last year, for instance, would never have wanted to come back because of the current principal who has now finally been replaced (they should have fired him much earlier).

But the word on the street that these threads have gotten from those who purport to be DC insiders is that Kaya and her friends refer to School Without Walls as "School With Whiners" and the very fact that they put the principal in charge of both schools (and he is from what I understand not making SWW his priority) is shocking.  There is no other DCPS school where a principal is in charge of a elementary and MS that is based on boundaries AND a high school that is based on selective admissions.  And that is a sign of how little they care at the Superintendent's office about our only nationally ranked high school (last year it was #198 - to put that in perspective, the W schools in Md I think all made it into the top 100.

We left it up to our child but I was very grateful about the choice the child made because I really was not willing to let my child be part of a 4 year experiment with the absent principal and had already heard about him firing good teachers and barely being stopped from an incredibly stupid proposal to make 11th graders be at the MS - divide up SWW in effect.  These are two different schools.  Going to Francis Stevens at SWW does not guarantee and may not even provide the education sufficient to pass the test for admission for SWW for all I know.  We know two who left BASIS and went to Deal and failed the test and never got in.

I was glad SO that our child opted ultimately for Wilson and to stay another year but it was the fact that the former BASIS students at Walls never once encouraged my child to come, said that it was better, or different in a way that was better that really struck my child.  They just said our child would "get used to it."  There was not a single thing they said was better than BASIS even though at the time we had our own shitty principal.

So I think the future of SWW is a bit uncertain because Kaya clearly hates them.[/quote]
[b] because I really was not willing to let my child be part of a 4 year experiment [/b]

Wow! You put your child in a new school 4 years ago as an experiment...but yet you claim Walls is too risky.[/quote]

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