Logistics of starting JR after 9th

[Anonymous]

We’re moving back to town this summer and my son will be an upperclassman (not 9th) - our options likely will be JR and a couple of other schools. I called the school today to ask for the email address of the appropriate counselor along with the director of an academy he’s interested in, to see if it would even be feasible for him to join the academy late in the game since that would help us decide if he should go there, but the person I spoke with was immediately intensely irritable and said quite aggressively that we won’t be allowed to speak with anyone at JR until my student is enrolled there and school has started in the fall (and that he can’t choose classes until then), and that I can only obtain information from the website [which doesn’t have the information we need]. Is he really supposed to start school without being able to choose classes ahead of time? And how can we figure out if it will be a good fit before understanding what his options likely will be? He is coming from a pretty different system (no APs) so it’s not straightforward what requirements he will have met already and what classes he’ll be allowed to take. This is not my first rodeo with DCPS but even so I was pretty thrown by the intensity of her vitriol. Is this generally what we’d have to look forward to there or was it just the one person I happened to speak with? And are we just SOL for finding out any more information about what his schedule will look like (other then the generic stuff on the website, which may or may not apply to him) and if he could still join an academy?

[Anonymous]

Yes that's how it will be. Even if you came from a feeder you might not get the classes you want...every year they have problems with scheduling and it takes weeks to fix. In the past they have done home visits for new students to verify residency but not sure if they still do. Not sure what your other options are but if they are dcps there will be similar amounts of bureaucracy most places.

[Anonymous]

Welcome to JR. A great school but the whole “we take two weeks to fix your schedule” thing sucks.

They expected DC to attend a JROTC class they should never have been in by saying “just go. We will fix it. We have two weeks.” All while missing two weeks of the class they should have been in. In fact it was the same period so we told our kid just to go to the new class and explain to the teacher that they’d eventually show up on the roster.

Log into computer. Change class. Send kids to correct classes. Its so dumb. They have a good portion of the summer to fix and they don’t. It’s honestly the only thing that really annoys me about JR.

[Anonymous]

A parent of a current student in JR who is in an academy. You can start in an academy as late as tenth grade (my DS added a second academy in tenth grade.) You cannot do so any later. This said, I third the other posters that schedules can be a mess and you need to apply to the academies (it’s simple and straightforward but…) which you can only do after you enroll.

With regard as to whether various classes will count for purposes of AP or prerequisites for AP - not so much unless it’s a college class. My kid had someone in his classes who had to retake a class they already took in a different school because of that issue. Now, maybe they filed wrongly or it was a glitch, but it’s a possibility.