I was really sad before that Cal would be unable to attend my school (I work 1 mile from home, but in a different district). Now, however, I'm actually glad since the district we live in has a lot of choices besides the neighborhood schools. We have to enter a lottery to get him in, but once he is in, Lissi will be virtually assured to get in when she is school-aged.
Here are the 2 schools we are most highly considering.
A Piaget-theory-based school
Pros:
very creative and artistic, and Cal definitely has artistic gifts
engaging themes that last 3 months each, incorporating reading, writing, science, art, music, etc into the cool themes (such as water, forest animals, etc)
lots of great parent reports
K-8 so if we love the program we don't have to worry about schools again until high school
moving into their own building (used to share with a neighborhood school) so there will definitely be an opening for ds if we put it as our 1st choice
VERY close to our home (less than one mile) and very close to my work (about 1.2 miles)
Cons:
new building means all new procedures that the school has never had to handle before (need a principal, lunches, secretaries, discipline, etc)
Chinese school: 50% of the day is in English, 50% of the day in Mandarin
Pros:
Awesome opportunity to learn another language (and an extremely important language is my guess based on the way the world politics are going right now)
extremely young age of starting the language would make accents almost imperceptible (for many children)
Able to communicate with grandparents in their native language (Wink is sad that he does not speak Chinese)
very high percentage of Asians in the program
very high percentage of children adopted from Asian (China in particular) so that parent groups sometimes have adoptive family meetings
Cons:
shares a building with the neighborhood school of that area
very traditional rote memorization and drill type practice
only K-5 so we'd have to go through all this again for middle school
at least a 15 min drive (if we have no red lights and no traffic)
no guarantee Cal would get in from the lottery
half a day in a foreign language could be really hard and frustrating (!)
We have to make our lottery ranking decisions within the next 2 weeks.
