The hardest part of looking at a new school is not knowing what you have just started. You send one message and it feels like you have set something in motion that will be hard to stop.
So here is the whole thing, in order, with nothing left out. You can stop after any of it.
1. You send us something
The form on our visit page asks four questions. Answer them in a sentence each or write three paragraphs — both are normal, and neither one changes what happens next. If you would rather talk to a person, call 615-431-5637 and someone in this building picks up.
We read every message ourselves and answer most of them the same day. There is no form letter, no drip sequence, and nobody will call you repeatedly afterwards.
2. We sit down and talk
You will meet Casey or one of the administrators, and the first thing we ask is for you to tell us about your child.
Most parents open with what has gone wrong. That is not a criticism — it is the question you have been asked at every meeting for years, and you have got good at answering it. But we want the other half too. What is your child like when nobody is grading them? What do they do for hours without being asked? What do you see in them, as opposed to what you have been told?
That conversation can take an hour on its own. It is the most useful hour of the whole process, and it is the part people are most surprised by.
3. Then we walk around
Classrooms mid-lesson, on an ordinary day, with the teachers your child would actually have. Nothing is cleared up or rearranged for visitors.
Expect students to come over and say hello. They do that for anyone who opens the door, which probably tells you more about the building than anything we could say on a tour.
At the end we fill in the practical parts: tuition, which Tennessee programs you may qualify for, and what a weekly schedule could look like for your child. Most visits run an hour to an hour and a half, start to finish. There is nothing to sign.
4. Two shadow days
If it still feels worth continuing, your child spends two days here.
Two, because on the first day everybody is on their best behaviour — our students included, and they are very good at it. The second day is the honest one. It is where your child finds out what the place is really like, and where we find out how to teach them. Both of those matter, and one day gives you neither.
5. Then you decide
Not before. You will have met the teachers, watched a normal morning, and heard what your child made of two days in it. If the answer is no, that is a real answer and worth having — you will know something about what your child needs either way.
A word about paying for it
Ask us before you fill out a single form. Tennessee runs three programs families often have not heard of — the ESA, the IEA and the Education Freedom Scholarship — and there are scholarships through approved granting organizations on top of those. Our funding calculator shows what each one is worth against a year here.
Families who assumed this was out of reach quite often find it is not. It costs nothing to ask, and asking early saves you filling in the wrong paperwork.
That is the whole process. If you want to start it, send us four questions’ worth or call 615-431-5637.