Synapse School

My son has been here for only one half year. There is nothing else like it in the Peninsula Bay Area — and we looked at everything. The administration and school staff are all top notch. My son’s teachers are the best we’ve ever experienced. A lot of schools talk about social emotional learning, but in this place they really deliver. In a period of 6 months I have seen my son’s confidence, curiosity, and love for learning grow to a level we have never seen. I wish we started here years ago. Learning is more than memorizing and hours of drudgery, it’s teamwork, application, and creativity. This place gets that in a big way.

Our older child has been attending Synapse for the past one and half years and LOVES it. He looks forward to attending school everyday. The teachers and staff are positive, caring and engaging. They pay close attention to each child’s needs, strengths and weaknesses, be it emotional, social, academical or intellectual. The open communication between teachers, staff and parents ensure that concerns are immediately addressed and have positive lifelong impact on the child. There is almost zero teacher attrition.
The students are very curious and most have age appropriate deep and logical thinking skills. Each morning the teachers check in on the children’s emotions/​feelings and their subsequent progress during the day. This helps the children to be emotionally secure and confident which is fundamental for their social, intellectual and academic development.
After a year at Synapse, our older child (who is a member of Mensa) experienced an increase in his IQ score by 11 points, and is more mature and responsible. We sent one of our younger children to Synapse this year and observed that the younger child (who previously resisted trying out new stuff/​ideas for fear of failing) is beginning to take risks and be open to new ideas.
Our children LOVE Synapse.

All I can say is that we feel truly blessed that such a unique, incredible school is so close to us and we have the opportunity to be a part of it. Our daughter started in September as a Kindergartner (Level 1) and we could not be happier. At the end of the day we were searching for a school that would keep her fire and passion to learn alive all while having a lot of fun. The things that drew us to Synapse (to name a few) were the block scheduling, the low teacher to child ratio, the helical model, the injection of fun and humor, the social-​emotional component and the fact that they were incorporating the latest research as to how kids learn into the school – imagine that?!? The school really seemed «too good to be true» based on what we heard a year ago in the Parent Information night, but I have to say, we are 3 months in and we are thrilled – Synapse is «walking the talk.» Our daughter has a great group of classmates that fortunately come with an awesome set of parents that we are enjoying getting to know. Our daughter comes home each day totally charged with all the new things that she has learned and we see her applying what she has learned all the time. Synapse just keeps adding oxygen to that fire and it-​is-​a-​blazing and we love it. As we fall asleep at night we truly have peace-​of-​mind that we have provided our daughter with the best possible option for her. Thank you Synapse!

Our child will be starting his second year at Synapse in the fall. We also opted out of our coveted neighborhood public school. Our experience has been excellent. We came to Synapse because we believe in the project-​based learning approach to education. Specifically, we believe in it’s ability to nurture critical thinking and creativity, both essential qualities in the 21^st century world. Synapse has more than delivered. The teachers are passionate and professional and the executive team have both tremendous dedication and a solid track-​record of success in the area of gifted education. For those who believe that there is something better than our traditional didactic educational model, Synapse delivers, and then some. My son can’t stand to miss even a moment of school!

Our son attended this school for one year. We had some good– and a lot of bad– experiences.
First, the good. His teachers were eager and engaged*, and the curriculum was very hands-​on with a strong focus on building social intelligence. Moreover, the other kids in the school were stunningly intelligent and intellectually active. We found this mix to be a blessing and a curse. Our son got some exposure to some very interesting kids, but most of them had social problems. It wasn’t a very good environment for him to work on his own social problems.
Now, the bad. I can sum up the most fundamental problem in one word: hypocrisy.
For example, they asked us over and over not to let our son watch anything remotely violent– and preferably nothing at all– on TV and in movies. But on my first classroom visit, the teachers put on Scooby-​Doo for an hour or so. Not such a big deal to me, but it had the average slapstick, «bonk the perpetrator on the head» stuff you’d expect in old Scooby-​Doo episodes. And this was hardly the only time they asked us to do something at home and did the opposite in their school.
Also, with all the lip service they give social intelligence they simply didn’t know how to handle our son’s social challenges. Our son was taken out of the classroom about once a day on average. These problems were escalated to us about once a week; this was a huge disruption as we would have to drop everything and pick him up. Every time I picked him up, my son would tell me what a bad person he was. Eventually, they asked us to send him to a psychologist. After thousands of dollars of tests and a lot of time invested, the psychologist’s recommendation was to take him out of the school and put him in an environment where his good nature was reinforced. To top it all off, the principal initially told us she would gladly talk to the psychologist to help her with her diagnosis, yet when the psychologist called, first she was too busy, then she couldn’t talk about our son because «he was no longer a student at Synapse.» A fitting finale given our overall experience there.
There was a lot of talk about some innovative curriculum involving a spiral and some 6 points of social behavior or something. I probably got that wrong, because I didn’t hear anything about this outside of the brochure we were given when we first visited the school. None of it came up during my frequent classroom visits.
Now our son is doing very well in our little mountain public school. His teacher has almost 30 years of experience and is really impressed by how hard our son tries to do good things. The academics are a bit below his level. But, ironically, we’ve found it’s not an issue due to the most valuable lesson we took away from Synapse: bright kids don’t have a problem with academics, so don’t sweat it. They often are behind socially, however, and we are now much happier with his very experienced teacher and an environment in which our son can focus solely on getting along with others and making himself a good person.
* This is intentional. We were told that inexperienced teachers were preferable because they could be trained the Synapse way. In the end, we found that the teachers were learning alongside our son as the year progressed. While it was heartening to see, we’ve found that our son’s best teachers were also those with the most experience.