Note: The comments below were originally posted on the Google Maps page in July 2021. You can read the original post here.
My goodness, a lot of 1- 2-star reviews with no text. Makes me doubt their legitimacy! Well, I'm writing this to offset that a bit. We chose Founders because our school district is the absolute lowest-rated in NH, and we heard horror stories about the public middle school. It just so happens that our daughter started 7th grade at Founders for the 2020-21 school year, which made for a very hard setup regardless of what school it was. She was remote the 1st & 2nd quarters, hybrid the 3rd, and full-time in the 4th.
For being all remote, she really took to the classes and the teachers very quickly and has nothing but positive things to say. And from our observations, and looking at her schoolwork and what they are learning, it is a rigorous but interesting curriculum and the teachers are VERY good. There has been just one problematic teacher, and when we wrote the dean with our concerns, she immediately called us to talk with us for half an hour for more details. (We hate complaining about teachers and had never done so before.)
The workload is a lot heavier than at her elementary school, and even though she had the option to drop classes as needed if she felt overwhelmed, she hasn't wanted to because she really likes all of them (except the one mentioned above). In the 4th quarter she did start to be unhappy with the workload--but her previous charter school had very little homework so it is a bigger change for her by comparison than it might be for kids coming out of the local public school.
Founders is EXTREMELY flexible with parent requests and/or student needs when it comes to tailoring their curriculum, something which public schools can't do nearly as freely. And although the classes are challenging, the teachers have been very fair with allowing make-ups and re-do's, even to the point of walking her through things she was having trouble with on tests, giving extra time, and such; I think their flexibility may be partly due to the extreme challenges which are inherent to this year's remote learning model and we're very grateful for that. And if it's just business as usual, that's even better.
She also had some issues with anxiety in 2020 just due to the pandemic and then we were thinking that may have been added to with the entirely new learning environment, and her guidance counselor was very helpful in this area. It definitely got better when she started doing hybrid.
So, that has been our experience so far. We do not have any complaints!
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