HUELO - Parents and teachers are weighing their options for accrediting the private, independent Real Ongoing Opportunities to Soar, or ROOTS, School.
The most obvious benefit of accreditation would be enhancing the credibility to the school, but "we are such a community-oriented school, we're not sure yet," said Shay Chan Hodges, a board member at the school who is among those studying the issue. "It's something that needs to be looked at."
Officially, students at the school register with the state as being home-schooled, she said. That means that once a year the students undergo standardized testing at a public school to ensure they're keeping pace academically with their peers in public schools.
The ROOTS school has no administration, so all the tuition paid by parents goes directly to teachers and other educational expenses for children, Chan Hodges said.
If the school went through accreditation, that review process could affect the school's independence and, for example, require the school to hire a principal, which would add administrative costs, she said.
"We know exactly where money is going," Chan Hodges said. "We're trying to preserve the community nature of the school, keeping the quality of education really high."
One of the unique features of the ROOTS school is that parents are required to volunteer their time to help teachers, she said. "If parents don't act, things don't happen. There is no administration to pick up the slack."
David Brown, executive director of the Northern California office of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' Accrediting Commission for Schools, said that while accreditation helps improve the quality of education at schools, it would be an "overstatement" to say that attending a nonaccredited school would hinder students' future chances of being accepted to colleges and universities.
"It's often true that elementary schools don't feel the need to be accredited," he said, particularly since students in primary schools don't move directly on to college.
Brown said the accreditation process does take an intensive look at the quality of schools' programs and "improves what they do."
Colleges and universities look more at a students' academic records and test results than at what school they attended, he said.
"The school doesn't guarantee anything," he said.
Chan Hodges said she has two sons - a 13-year-old attending the 7th grade at Kala-
ma Intermediate School and an 11-year-old in the 6th grade at ROOTS - and she believes they are both at the appropriate schools for their individual temperaments.
"They're both very different," she said. "They're where the need to be right now."
She said her older son needs more social interaction with a larger group of peers than what is available at the smaller, more intimate ROOTS school. She said her younger son would find it "overwhelming to be at Kalama."
"He's very creative, very intellectual," she said. "He thrives in the ROOTS school in part because the teachers work with a multiage group, they respond where each child is."
Chan Hodges said she believes her younger son is studying more advanced algebra than his older brother at Kalama. The 11-year-old has the advantage of a smaller classroom setting, with only five students in his math study group, she said.
Chan Hodges said she understands that being accredited means schools aim to achieve educational standards and that "usually means" it "raises the bar."
But, "it doesn't necessarily follow," she said.
