Quote:
Originally Posted by aheatherton
Hi,
I just saw your post about the Wilson School and see that no one responded. We are planning a move to NJ and the Wilson School came highly recommended for our daughter. Just wondering if you ever got feedback, experienced the school first hand, etc... Any info you have about the school would be greatly appreciated.
|
We didn't go to Wilson, and do not know anyone who did, hence I don't have first-hand information about the academics.
At the time when I looked at Wilson, it was for my special needs daughter, she has high IQ, but slow in processing, hence a school with smaller class size would help. It was recommended by the consultant at a learning center she attended. I eventually considered the school for both kids.
We went for open house, and I think one of my kids attended the school for a day. My impression was that the school was small both in student body size and the physical building. My kid liked the school though, but probably because of the classmates. A concern I had at the time was that the grade my daughter was supposed to be in had only about 5 , 6 students which I thought was not healthy for her. My daughter also interviewed with Newark Academy and found out one of the Wilson students was also interviewing, and according to my daughter, the student's family was also concerned on the class size. I also felt that because of the smaller class size, they could not afford to be as selective as other private schools which may or may not be good.
I met with the faculty and the admission people, I thought they were nice and caring, but I don't think I can say much.. I looked into the curriculum and thought it was okay. I asked for homework assignment and felt that the teachers did try to make connections among various subjects, say they were learning ancient ??, then the Language Arts readings reinforced the same area.
As the school only goes up to 8th grade, they claimed they had high success rate of transferring the students to Newark Academy and Pingry, both were expensive and quite difficult to get into.
Wilson's tuition was affordable by NJ standard (around $20K at the time and would be a good deal if the kids were able to transfer to Newark Academy which is over $30K).
The main reason I didn't consider it was because it did not have busing, we may be able to drop off our kids, but the pick up could be very expensive and may not be reliable.
My kid eventually had a tutor who was a teacher at Wilson and all I can say is that I don't regret not sending her there...but then the tutor may just be a bad apple.