My daughter attended St Alcuin for 13 years, and recently enrolled in Greenhill for high school since St Alcuin goes only through 8th grade. She was accepted to all three high schools to which she applied - Greenhill, Hockaday and Ursuline - so it was great to have some choices.
A little bit about the school. St Alcuin combines a traditional Montessori education with an International Baccalaureate program in Middle School. Montessori groups students into different levels - Toddler (tiny), Primary (Pre-K), Lower Elementary (1st - 3rd grades), Upper Elementary (4th - 6th grades). Since each classroom has students from 1st thru 3rd, 4th thru 6th etc it allows students to experience repeated cycles of learning from older kids and evolving to be mentors for the younger ones. The Middle School IB program combines elements from multiple subject areas into one learning experience. For example, each 8th grader had to develop a restaurant concept, which required them to: create a floor plan using Sketch Up (Art/Technology), design a menu(Art/Tech), build a P&L (Math) and marketing program (Humanities), and prepare lunch for 50 using several of the menu items within a budget of $150.
She got off to a great start in Primary and developed a love for reading by the time she was five. Couldn't keep enough books in the house. In Lower El, students started doing "researches". This required children to pick a topic, research it in the library and present results to the rest of the class...great experience to develop confidence in speaking to others. Upper El students go camping for a week and prepare all the dinners in the classroom before going, along with the traditional math, English, science etc. Foreign language study, Spanish or Mandarin, begins in 4th grade. The music teacher, Ms Delgado, has a PhD in music and teaches great theory as well as hands on experience with instruments and voice.
The IB program in Middle School is the crown jewel, but everything in 7th and 8th grade is carefully built on the curriculum from earlier years. Kids studied aspects of other cultures, and then Skyped with students from those countries who were doing the same about the US. Students won 1st (Connecting the World Online), 2nd (Workflow Software) and 3rd (Globalization and Outsourcing) place awards in the Flat Classroom project, a competition for Middle and High School students in six countries based on Tom Friedman's book The World Is Flat. Both grades went on a serious campout to Big Bend, where the students went on a 20 mile hike and canoed 33 miles down the Rio Grande (school doesn't go there anymore, due to the safety concerns, but they still go on a big campout). Ms Fahey is an awesome math teacher, and all three students attending Greenhill from my daughter's class tested out of Freshman math. There's a variety of MS athletic teams, as well as D-League sports for younger students.
All in all a fantastic school. My daughter left incredibly well prepared for high school. That said, no school is perfect. If there's one area where the school could improve it's prep for ISEE (Independent School Entrance Exam), the test students have to take when applying to private high schools. Kids take a mock ISEE in early December, and my daughter scored 4 of 9 on math and 8 of 9 on verbal. So I sent her for a handful of math test prep sessions with a tutor, and her score improved to a 7 when she took the test in January. So an earlier mock ISEE would allow a student to assess sooner whether additional prep is warranted. Great school, fabulous faculty, and a supportive, engaged parent community (100% of families have contributed to the Annual Fund three years running). Highly recommended! read more