School Information Fair

[naomikritzer]

Ed and I left the girls with my parents today, and went to the Minneapolis School Choice fair. Here is how the Minneapolis schools work: we have a community school, and if we choose to send our kids there, we're guaranteed to get in. This is really awesome in some neighborhoods, not so awesome in others. We also have a list of magnets, charters, and open schools that we can get busing to. We can also elect any other school in the city but we have to take the kid over ourselves. Since there are several excellent schools on our list of possibilities, I am not inclined to try to sign up for several hours of extra driving around each week.

We already knew we were interested in Dowling Urban Environmental and Seward Montessori. I had some reservations about our neighborhood school but figured we'd go check it out. I was also very curious about Ramsey Fine Arts magnet and Whittier Fine Arts magnet.

We visited the Dowling table first. The principal was there; he's been at Dowling for 18 years (though not, I'm guessing, principal that whole time) and was clearly a passionate believer in his school. Which is a good thing. Dowling's test scores are respectable, but he had a sheet that showed them broken out by percentile. The top 20% of the students scored in the 97th percentile on whatever test it was; the bottom 20% had still scored in the 50th percentile, and the middle 60% had some respectable in-between scores. Dowling is described as an "urben environmental" school but apparently they've had to drop some of the environmental activities they used to do because of a need to fit with the required state curriculum. I asked whether the kids get recess; he says that most do, though the third-grade teacher seems to keep the kids in more often. We had an overall good impression and are planning to visit the school to see how it seems in person.

We visited the Hiawatha/Howe table next -- this was our neighborhood school. We weren't impressed. They weren't awful, just uninspiring. I don't think we're going to visit there.

Then we visited the Seward Montessori table. I really liked a lot of what I heard there. I don't know a lot about the Montessori philosophy but the classroom environment sounds a lot like what I had at Wingra: mixed-aged classrooms, kids allowed to move around, lessons done in small groups, manipulatives to introduce math concepts. Something I have noticed in the past about Seward Montessori is that the parents are extremely enthusiastic, almost to an evangelical degree in a lot of cases. (This may be a montessori thing.) We will definitely visit Seward Montessori.

Then on to the Ramsey table. I hadn't heard of Ramsey before a few weeks ago. It's not as close to us as Seward and Dowling. It sounds really cool, though. They teach Spanish by having an art class once a week where Spanish is the language of instruction, which seems like a really cool way to teach a second language to little kids. We're going to visit there.

We also checked out Emerson Spanish Immersion school. The Kindergarten teacher there turned out to be the daughter of springbok1's nursery school teacher Peg Unger. I've run into Megan Unger a couple of times in the cities and as always, she recognized me and said hi. Anyway, I am ethnocentric enough to be a little uncomfortable with the idea of Molly not starting to work on reading English until second grade, even though Megan assured us that the skills transferred over, no problem.

The last school we visited was Whittier. It's an arts magnet though they seem to be moving it to a pre-IB program. The pre-IB stuff sounded cool, but not in a way that had us thinking "damn! if only this school were closer to our house!" Like Ramsey, Whittier is kind of a hike. We're not going to visit there.

Anyway, we've narrowed it down to three schools that we want to visit: Dowling, Seward, and Ramsey. We will probably try to make our visits the week after next, or maybe the week after that. We have to turn in our card with our top two choices by January 15th. (And no, they assure us that it won't help us any to turn our card in early.)

Comments

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

I talked to a friend and her daughter last night about Ramsey, where the daughter had attended. Said daughter recently transfered to another school. She said, "Half the kids in my class were still learning English. It was a drag." She's 10, so, 5th grade, I think. Her mother said that Ramsey is supposed to be an Arts Magnet school, but there is much less art then when her daughter started, and in general, it has gone downhill.

You've been to Dowling for water exercise, so you may have some sense of the school already. The students get to swim in the pool regularly, but I don't know how often now that Pat is retired. (She still does the exericse classes after school as part of community ed, and substitute teachs occasionally during the day.) And the good gym teacher who succeeded her was deployed to Iraq, what a waste.

I've heard good things about Seward, but I have also heard not all kids benefit from Montessori schools. Some kids need more structure, some kids benefit from the self-directed nature of it.

My $.02. See you at WFC!