We moved to Lexington in 2003 when my daughter was 4 years old, a year before she started kindergarten. The biggest reason I chose Lexington was the superior school system. We thoroughly enjoyed her elementary school years and we found her teachers engaging, creative, and supportive. When my daughter entered middle school, we saw problems arise. She would come home explaining, ‘The teacher did not have enough time to teach the material in class,’ or ‘not enough time to explain the homework assignment for the night’. Life only got worse in 8th grade as I came to realize I had two students: my MCAS student was an over performer with many of her scores in the 80-90th percentile, meanwhile my transcript student had a C average. She was struggling with allocating time for homework and studying for tests in 6 different subjects every night. She was taking time away from homework in subjects she was strong in (English, History, Science) to put into tests in subjects she was less comfortable with (Math). The net result was the missing homework assignments would drop her grades by 1-2 letters. As the school years went on, there were more and more gaps between material she was understanding because there wasn’t enough time to fill those gaps, so the grades in all of her classes kept falling.

Meanwhile I had friends in other states whose schools had adopted the fewer, longer class system, and friends in Lexington that had moved their students to private schools with similar schedules. All of them were reporting calmer, happier students and overall home life. In January of her 8th grade year, we made the leap; she applied to and was accepted to a private school. Six weeks into the program, my C student became an A student. She began to enjoy subjects she had thought she had hated or just needed to “get through” to satisfy graduation requirements. Time at home returned to laughs and jokes instead of tears and excuses.

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