Open Window School
Open Window School/Vista Academy, Cougar Mountain area off of Lakemont Blvd.
Mission: Open Window School nurtures and challenges students of high intellectual ability and inspires them to new levels of academic excellence, creativity, and personal accomplishment for participation in a diverse and changing world. (from school website)
Values: Nurturing environment, Creativity, Passion for learning, Personal excellence, Outstanding faculty, Curriculum, Collaborative community, Respect for individual, World vision
Education for the Gifted child: The Open Window School (OWS) creates education specifically for gifted children. Children are identified as being gifted based on their performance on privately administered IQ tests. A child needs to score 95 percentile or better on the tests to be considered as being gifted.
This is an interesting category of children who along with high intellectual abilities often demonstrate the following characteristics:
Highly verbal
Sensitive
Intense in passions and focus
Perfectionist, risk averse
Need specific kinds of social, emotional support and enables them to collaborate
Excel at academics
Unique features
Deep understanding of the Gifted child: The school is founded on a strong understanding of gifted children. The curriculum, schedule, teaching faculty and all activities are created keeping in mind the needs of this specific category of children.
Differentiated, individualized curriculum: The curriculum for Mathematics and Language Arts is most clearly differentiated with children learning material at their own pace starting Grade 3 and even earlier for specific learning activities. The curriculum for social studies is grade leveled based on Washington State standards. The hands-on science curriculum is covered on a whole class basis and involves team-work.
Gentle and caring environment: Faculty and administrators work hard to make education a gentle experience for the highly capable, achievement-focused students that they serve.
Curriculum and instructional practice documentation: Each teacher documents Curricular practices and instructional methods used. This allows for longitudinal analysis that ensures removal of redundancy and linkage to learning standards. This is especially important for gifted children who don’t thrive on repetition.
Classroom feel, teachers, specialists
There are only 23 graduate schools in the U.S. that offer teacher training for working with gifted children. OWS requires teachers to have experience and/or training in education for gifted children. It ensures the fulfillment of this requirement by providing in-house training. Teachers sometimes start out as Instructional Assistants and then move on to being classroom teachers.
Every classroom has two instructors; the primary teacher and an instructional assistant.
Kindergarten and 1st grade have 18 students each.
Grades 2-8 have around 20 students, sometimes up to 24 students. Each grade level has 2-3 sections.
Classrooms sometimes bustle with activity as teams of students work together but most often students are found working by themselves. This is specially true given the differentiated nature of the curriculum. Teachers are found in 1:1 or small group instructional settings. Other than a few instances, it is rare for a teacher to do whole group teaching.
Classroom teachers cover content in Language Arts, Math, Science and Social studies. Particular 4th/5th grade teachers focus on teaching Math, Social Studies and Language Arts across grade sections. Middle school teachers (with 5th grade becoming more a part of middle school next year) have specialists for Science, Language Arts (with differentiation). The classroom teacher differentiates middle school Math while social studies is taught to the whole class.
Being highly capable themselves, it is not uncommon to see teachers move on after 5-7 years as they seek out a different challenge.
Specialists for Art, Drama, Music, Spanish, Library, Technology, PE. Spanish instruction is also differentiated starting 5th grade.
There are several co-curricular activities offered in addition to the core and specialist subjects including Knitting, Rock band, Chess, Soccer amongst others.
Site and space
OWS is located on the picturesque rolling hills in the Cougar Mountain area on 6.7 acres of land. Classrooms are housed in 3 buildings. The classrooms are simple, with round tables in lower grades and more traditional row seating arrangements in higher grades. Grassy knolls and playground structures invite outside play. The school will undergo a public capital campaign in the coming year to expand the outdoor space and build a new science laboratory amongst other additions.
Admissions
The admissions process starts with school tours and is followed by the submission of a complete application that includes results from a privately administered IQ test. Applicants to 3rd grade and higher are invited to come and spend half a day at the school.
Acceptance is competitive with 1 out of 4 applicants being accepted in Kindergarten and 1st grade and 1 out of 2 for higher grades. Kindergarten, 1st grade and 3rd grade and the most natural entry points for applicants.
Tuition and financial aid
Lower school: $17,070
Middle school: $22,140
Aid: Given to 20% of families covering 6-90% of tuition
Parent involvement
Parents are expected to volunteer at least 20 hours of time in the year. They can choose to pay or the hours. The parent association is very active and every accepted family is automatically a member of the association. Annual events arranged by the parent association include: Multicultural event, Positive impact project, Invention convention, book clubs, speaker series and parent social night out.
Ideal parents
Attempt to understand what OWS does
Are involved in supportive roles while leaving primary instructional responsibilities with teachers
Focus on the process of learning rather than the product/achievement or results of learning
The numbers and other must-knows
Established 1983
250-300 students
2 teachers per classroom
8:1 student-teacher ratio
Extended-day program available
Alumni
Most often go to other independent schools including Lakeside, Seattle Academy, Bush, Overlake, Northwest, Eastside Catholic, Forest Ridge along with public schools. That said, in this year’s first-ever 8th grade graduating class, there were more students that went to public schools than had been expected.
Final word(s): The Open Window School is a safe, nurturing and sensitively crafted learning space for highly intellectual students. The differentiated curriculum and focus on process versus product empowers achievement-focused students to move at their own accelerated paces while satiating their curiosity. Offerings in visual art, drama, music and PE provide opportunities for multi-talented students to find other areas of passion. Highly capable instructors that pride themselves on flexibility and creative curricular design keep learning alive and engaging.
Information source and research method: Based on a school tour and in-person meeting with Director of Admissions Nancy Wells.
For additional information on admissions, classroom activities, curricular content and methods, teacher expertise and accomplishments contact Anoo Padte.
Disclaimer: This is an independent review of The Open Window School. It is not a statement by the school or its officials.