Charter Schools and Francophone

We have been very happy with Francophone.  Teachers are absolutely wonderful and the school community is warm and diverse (coming from all over the globe as well as all over the East Bay).  As you know it is a new school and that means there are still some areas where they're figuring it out, as would be expected.  No school is perfect.  Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go to a neighborhood school, and while I can imagine the benefits of that, I've also seen that when you have people specifically choosing a school and coming from all over the East Bay to attend that means you have parents and families who are really invested in the place.  If you want true language immersion, diversity, and a tight-knit "roll up your sleeves and pitch in" kind of school community, I think you'd be very happy there.    

We tried Francophone last fall and ended up withdrawing our child. When we toured the school their first year, there were co-executive directors who seemed on top of things -- we particularly liked the years of experience one of the directors brought. Based on that experience we applied to Francophone and were elated when our kid was allotted a spot. We knew that the school was new and we would have to be flexible and pitch in; in fact, we looked forward to being part of that community. Unfortunately, the class (this was for a lower grade) was disorganized, I interrupted two fist fights on the first day of school (I stayed to volunteer when the teacher announced that she would love parents to stay if they could), and the playground felt dangerous (the whole school on one little play structure, which meant that the little kids were getting pushed out of the way). Some of the teaching staff were still in France and so weren't physically present for the first week of school. We loved the idea of a charter immersion school and were prepared for some disarray, but this just felt unsafe and more than we were willing to experiment as a first school experience. I'm glad to see from the other review that things seem to have settled down, but I wanted to give an alternative perspective.