Anonymous wrote:I love the idea of some more charter schools- especially ones that are closer-in like College Park, Hyattsville, Mt Rainier, etc.
Personally we are not doing the lotteries at Robert Goddard etc because it's too far and out of the way for our commutes (opposite direction).

And in south county also it would be nice

OP here. My local public elementary doesn't offer much in the term of facilities. The playground consists of two small Kaboom-type play spaces on opposite ends of the field. Unfortunately, there is a wide disparity in the resources at some schools. I didn't see a garden space, or a composting space or any of the other low-cost options for kids on a playground.

I will approach the school about a tour but sadly, I am not holding out much hope.

I don't know about team sports being offered directly by the school, but at our neighborhood elementary there are essentially neighborhood teams that practice at the school facilities. They are administered by outside groups but they are on site so they are essentially school teams with a couple of kids from privates added to the mix. You also have a pretty active band/orchestra program so the school really is a center of the community. It hosts programs that bring the neighborhood together. I think you lose some of that due to facility limitations at many charters.

I was thinking primarily of high school when I initially made the sports/EC comments, but I think the facilities issues with retrofitting rather than purpose building a school can be problematic in the younger grades too. I do wonder though if we'll see more true school buildings turn into charters though because there have been a couple of religious privates that didn't survive the recession (like the Lutheran school in Hyattsville). Some of those buildings may need work, but they'd have a better set up from the start having things like a gym and a stage and a cafeteria.

And yes, I think the charters have to toe the line more with county curriculum since they are using the same measures for success in terms of testing results. Private schools have a lot more freedom. That being said, there is no reason you can't tackle the common core standards via progressive methods.

Do any pg public elementary or middle schools
offer team sports? I had thought none did. I also think they are required to adhere closer to the county curriculum, unlike a private school.

I love the idea of some more charter schools- especially ones that are closer-in like College Park, Hyattsville, Mt Rainier, etc.
Personally we are not doing the lotteries at Robert Goddard etc because it's too far and out of the way for our commutes (opposite direction).

I think daily PE with team sports is possibly the toughest one to check off the list with a charter. Charter schools typically don't have the funds to purpose build a facility, which is why they are often in retrofitted office spaces. Typically this means they don't have athletic facilities or green space which makes PE tough and team sports very difficult as well. Renting field time/pool time adds costs and with the charters at the high school level being pretty small typically, to get enough participation to field a team that can compete they'd probably also need to add transportation (for games, practices, etc.) and that also adds cost. I think that can extend to other extracurriculars as well - hard to have a thriving drama club if you have no performance spaces. Healthy lunch options may also be problematic in retrofitted buildings. I do think the College Park Academy potentially has a bit of an advantage over many charters because it is renting a purpose built school facility.

You might be able to get the rest of the list checked off at a charter (though I don't think a current school at PG would meet the criteria). I think one of the big negatives about charters I saw in other cities I lived in that had a lot more of them than PG County does was that extracurriculars are often really limited due to facilities and you lose a lot of the sense of community when school is just the place you work.

Anonymous wrote:

As far as comparing curriculums are concerned, you can request the information from the school and do your own research. We are looking at two different age-groups, elementary and middle/high school, so I really don't have much information to share and the things that I listed are NOT available in the PG county schools that I am zoned for, which is why I am asking about new charters.

There is a very limited pool of charter schools in PG county, unlike our neighbors across the border. I would not compare E.L Haynes, Yu Ying, LAMB, or some of the better charter schools with the lower performing charters in DC or PG County. As far as exmissions are concerned, do public schools in PG county offer this information? If they don't, why would you expect the current charters to have this information.

I mentioned exmissions in my post within the context of private schools, a analogous situation in which parents also don't rely on test scores as a measure of the school. Like I said I don't disagree that the things you posted are important. A lot of those things also generally transition into better test scores, even if that is not the focus of the school. So when you have all of those things present, and test scores are still lower than your neighborhood school (at least in my situation), I was wondering how parents determine to make the leap and figure out if there child will be better prepared academically. On one hand you have a charter with a better environment, but fairly average sometimes lower test scores, how do you assess the academics? It wasn't meant to be a contentious question.

PP here, I absolutely agree that there is more to it than test scores, but I think as a parent how are you to know how the curriculum compares to other schools? What high schools are these kids going to after 8th grade and are they prepared? What level classes are they taking at the high school level? The things you listed make for a good school environment, but you can get that in quite a few private schools in PG and that doesn't necessarily translate into a better education. If test scores are not great, what other measures do the schools use to ensure the kids are prepared academically when compared to their peers in other schools with better scores. It would be different if they approximated some of the neighboring schools, but a couple of them have test scores that are ranked in the bottom 20% for the state. In that case, why choose that school over the neighborhood school. I am not trying to bash charters at all, but I know these are things I was concerned about when trying to decide whether to apply for DC. I have similar concerns for the privates that I looked at. The only thing differing for privates was that I had info regarding what high schools the 8th graders were getting into so that helped in terms of understanding preparedness. How does it work for charters?