Commonwealth Academy

I would definitely not recommend CA for the following reasons:

The administration does not seem to care about the welfare of the students. There were numerous examples of blatant antisemitism in the middle school that continued throughout the year and the administration only did something about it once when parents complained enough. The administration made it very clear they wanted this to just go away. The school will try to say they took countermeasures like bringing in a Holocaust survivor, but literally the next week after this more antisemitic threats were made, and nothing was done about it.
Numerous faculty members are leaving in the middle of the school year with no warning, including a well regarded counselor and an ADHD coach - this suggests exceedingly poor culture within the school. To make matters worse, students that relied on these critical faculty were allowed to flounder after they left, and the administration made no efforts to find replacements before the end of the academic year. Finally, it is well known that 2 well regarded faculty members in math left CA to join other schools in Maryland that is over 40 minutes from their residences whereas CA was much closer. This also suggest exceeding poor work culture within CA.
Unlike other schools in the DC area that cater to students with learning differences, CA has no math specialist, and only one reading specialist who is forced to carry a full teaching load (and therefore cannot function as a full-time reading specialist). The CA administration decided to instead invest in occupational therapy and speech therapy that became compulsory for many CA students. We have heard that rather than addressing more traditional occupational therapy topics like improvement of handwriting skills and improving phonological reasoning, students are subjected to a brushing therapy where kids are touched all over their bodies and persistence therapy.
CA lacks qualified staff to adequately assess the academic performance and educational challenges of students with learning differences. After our child started at a new school, the faculty at the new school stated that based on CA evaluations they would have predicted that our child would have been behind academically, yet our child is excelling in the new environment and has been placed in advanced classes. This suggests that CA staff are not competent to perform such evaluations. Our child is thriving socially and academically since leaving CA.