Reply to School Without Walls High School- Pros and Cons and Social Atmosphere?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Current SWW parent here.  The teacher quality is VERY uneven -- much more so than the highly-regarded DCPS middle school we came from.  Expect 2-4 lousy teachers per year, depending on your luck.  The freshmen teachers are particularly weak.  By lousy, I mean things like not giving a student a single grade for any test, project, or assignment over the entire course of a quarter.  That particular teacher had done that for years, and was apparently untouchable because of his connections to Central.  A math teacher refused to answer questions in class and bullied students.  Another teacher played obvious favorites.  Things have gotten better, but ask around and go in with your eyes open.  We had not heard about any of this from current parents before we started.

That said, there are some good-to-great teachers also, and the students are lovely.  But be prepared to supplement with tutoring to compensate for lackluster classroom performance.  [/quote]
How do you work around this? Is that half the the teachers  for freshman students?
How many subjects per year? Would you stick with it? How is your student doing? Are you happy overall?[/quote]

Yes, it was pretty much half the teachers freshmen year.  It was pretty awful.  I think we were particularly unlucky with scheduling, but it's a possibility that this could happen to you.  DC studied hard, tried to keep his/her head down, and we hired a math tutor (although not nearly as soon as we should have).  Sophomore year, there are only a couple of teachers that aren't good, but none that are as bad as the bad ones freshman year.  This year the math teacher is good (so no need for tutoring) but the chemistry teacher is not (so we pay for chemistry tutoring).

DC likes school, for the most part, and very much likes friends/social environment.  We would probably make the same choice again -- DC really did not want to go to the Big 3 we were looking at as an alternative, and Wilson seems to be its own set of problems -- but we would have had our eyes open.  We heard nothing but rainbows and flowers when we were considering it, from people who later expressed all sorts of complaints.  And we would have hired tutors at the first sign of a problem, rather than trying to push child to try to get more help from ineffective teachers.[/quote]

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