The Parent Perspective. It is such an important viewpoint when choosing a new school, especially one like NuVu High School—so far afield from what most parents have experienced in their own traditional schooling.

Questions prospective parents often ask current families range from “What made you choose NuVu for your child?” to “Do you feel as if NuVu is preparing them for what’s beyond graduation?”

For Natalie Guthrie, the option to enroll her son Bryson into NuVu was a well informed and experienced choice. “My husband and I are both educators and we come from two different worlds. He works at a private school and I am an assistant principal at a public school, but I'm also a teacher,” she explains.

In Natalie’s experience, when students leave her classroom, it’s the hands-on activities they remember the most. It was this type of experience Natalie wished for her son. She says, “We didn't need a box to fit him into. We needed a playing field where he could see that there were many shapes, not just boxes and triangles and squares. We needed something where he did not feel like he had to fit into that school model. We needed a school model that fit the many different dimensions of who he was as a person.”

For Whitney Whinnery, her son, Charlie was tested with a high IQ, but his dyslexia placed him in lower classes at his former school. Whitney discovered that his discussion level and comprehension was miles beyond the classes he was in. This led to a visit to NuVu, based on recommendations from other NuVu families they knew. After that first visit, Charlie knew that this was the school he had been waiting for. “One of the questions on the NuVu application was something like ‘Imagine if NuVu didn’t exist, what would next year look like?’” recalls Whitney, “ and Charlie wrote ‘I would be held back by a long, outdated system that doesn’t work with my learning style. I'd be in lower level classes, forced to work in mentally draining ways, just so I could crawl my way up to higher level classes, leaving me leagues behind everyone else, unable to go to the colleges I deserve to be in and away from the careers where I would excel.’” Whitney says that after reading that, NuVu was a no brainer.

Both of Charlie’s parents are architects, and Whitney says that NuVu feels similar to her time at architecture school, where you learn to approach problems collaboratively. “I feel like NuVu is what our society needs today,” she says. “Everybody right now is winner take all, highest GPA, the right college, the right win, win, win— it's all about self. And once you get into the workplace, all of a sudden it's about how to collaborate and bring people together and explain your side—and that’s not what we're teaching our kids in traditional schools. For Charlie, I knew the hands-on learning would really be his way to see who he was, feel good about who he was.”

It was the opportunities Erin Croft Graves saw for her son Lloyd that encouraged them to take the NuVu plunge. “The size for one—he has opportunities for relationship building with mentors and coaches and that has been huge for him,” she explains. “He learns best with interrelational learning, and it's that connection with the people who are teaching him and a sense that they know him. He feels seen and heard.”

Erin says she’s seen Lloyd's education become well rounded, learning beyond academics to move into deeper social and emotional levels. “He's found a way to aspire to make something that he loves to make, put together, troubleshoot and trial and test —that has become one of his passions. And he’s also found a way to talk about it in terms of impact on a larger scale.”

Rebecca Walsh, along with her husband, are creatives, but admits she lives in a very academically ambitious community. She often fields questions about her son Max’s education from other non NuVu parents, such as will your child have enough credits for college? But for her, that’s not the most important factor of a NuVu education. “I don't know many people who knew when they got to college, why they were at the exact school that they'd chosen. What we will know at the end of four years is who Max is and he'll know who he is through the work he’s produced—which will position him to understand better where to even begin his search.”

‍

‍

For more information on rolling admissions for NuVu High School visit https://www.nuvuschool.org/admission or contact Karen Sutton, Director of Admissions at ksutton@nuvustudio.org or call (617) 945-7716.

‍