Deciding whether to try for latin
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Anonymous
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Next year we will have a 4th grader. We are at an east of the park elementary (not capital hill) and have been reasonably happy with our experience. Our child is learning well and happy with school. We have neighbors that have had good experiences at our zoned middle and have landed happily at application DCPS HS’s. That said we also have many friends who have already left our elementary for deal/Hardy feeder DCPS elementary schools and charters (mostly bilingual charters).
In general I am not a fan of charter schools and want to avoid opting out of DCPS in the anticipation of issues like I see so many other families do. I think many schools are amazing individually but have issues with their cumulative impact on the larger system. I believe our local schools would be stronger if everyone was invested in the inbound schools. I would not keep my child at a school not meeting their needs but am not interested in stressing over optimizing their experience by finding the absolute best school. All that said doing the lottery for 5th grade at Latin is tempting. Both campuses would be reasonable commutes. Not as easy as our inbound but not onerous. I also know our chances of getting in are low and dislike the idea of getting my kid or myself excited about the possibility only to be 200 on the waitlist. That said I also don’t yet know enough about the details of Latin beyond reputation to make an informed decision. So do I ignore Latin and keep sticking with DCPS unless my kid starts having a bad experience. Throw Latin into the lottery and only get more info if we get in (will we have enough time to learn enough about the school between getting in and needing to decide). Or do we learn about Latin and try to make an informed decision before the lottery and run the risk of falling in love with something we likely can’t have? |
Anonymous
| Always lottery. It doesn’t commit you to taking a spot, but keeps your options open. I also never told my kids until there was a choice to make (even if they didn’t have a say in the choice). |
Anonymous
| Yea I don’t understand why you would make a decision before you have a decision point. Lottery for it, and if you get it then decide. |
Anonymous
| Lottery and stop this hand wringing until you actually have a decision to make. You probably won’t. Don’t bother with open houses until then either. |
Anonymous
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I'm guessing your IB high school is Dunbar, like us. We won't send our kid to Dunbar, so we are lotterying for Latin and BASIS even though we like DCPS and are fine with our middle school feed.
We will tell our kid we are lotterying, but won't do school tours unless we get in somewhere. And then we'll make a decision with our kid based on our options. We won't hype up any school or focus on it unless we know it's a real option. For me, knowing we don't want Dunbar for HS makes this an obvious choice, because it's a hedge against being in the position where our kid must get into an application high school. You have to let go of the whole "DCPS v. Charter" or "neighborhood school" thing in DC. If there were lots of good DCPS middles and high schools, you could be picky in that way. There aren't, do you need to be smart. |
Anonymous
| lottery. I didn't want to leave my elementary school for 5th, so I lotteried and hoped we lost so I wouldn't have to make that choice (I probably would have gone with latin). We lost and now I have no regrets because I didn't foreclose on a potential path. Some of the lottery is just managing the emotions of guilt around choice. Lottering and loosing does this well and odds are you will loose. |
Anonymous
So true! |
Anonymous
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OP, your beliefs are not uncommon for elementary-age parents. The problem is that DCPS will put your philosophical commitments to the test! I was heavily, heavily involved in our IB for years, and I learned that it's NOT just that people don't enroll. It's that but it's also the concentration of high-needs kids, and the dysfunction and incompetence of the central office. It's partly due to teacher quality too, but honestly if they fired all the incompetent teachers there wouldn't be enough incoming teachers to hire to replace them, so we're kinda stuck with it.
It sounds like you're running up against the higher stakes of middle and high school, the low quality generally of DCPS middle schools, and the uncertainty of application high school admissions. Because you, like everyone else, have your limits and are not willing to put your kids in a school that's over your personal line. Some people hit that limit in preschool, others in elementary, others now. I would suggest you list Latin, because it probably won't happen. If you'd like to stick with DCPS, I suggest you check out Stuart-Hobson, Eliot-Hine, Francis, and Wells as potential middle schools. Be open to a 6th grader riding a bus-- lots of kids do this and it's fine. The DCPS neighborhood school boundaries are arbitrary and the city changes them sometimes-- it's not like some major philosophical issue to go out of boundary when it's just a line on a map. |
Anonymous
| More options are better than fewer options, arent they? Also, you probably won't get into Latin. You should just apply and then forget about it until you actually have to get serious about making a decision (i.e. when you get into Latin or when you have a phenomenal lottery number). Chances are, you will be the 10,847th person on the waitlist so it will be moot. |
Anonymous
We did this and actually got in. We didn’t really investigate the school at all or bring it up as an option to our child until after we got in. We were at a DCI feeder so it was a tough choice but happy with Latin. |
Anonymous
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Yeah, you should definitely lottery.
Also, as your kids grow, you will realize that the problems with DCPS are not going to be solved by more rich kids opting in. DCPS middle school, for example, is WAY too tech heavy in every class. Latin is not. The science curriculum is much more solid at Latin. They write far more. and on and on... In elementary school this feels like a demographics issue (and DCPS elementary schools are quite good, and can differentiate within classes. As your kids grow, the school itself matters more because the curriculum really varies, middle schoolers cant really differentiate within the same class -- everyone gets and is graded on the same assignments. |
Anonymous
Not OP but I am also the parent of an elementary school student EOTP and a teacher at an application HS in DC. I know some middle schools are better than others but I also teach HS students from a huge variety of middles (many complete non-starters on this board) and I see them doing well in HS (and no- not because they did tons of tutoring in MS). So I carry this tension. Do many of them have great science or history background from middle? No, but to be honest that doesn’t stop them from jumping right in and diving into the HS content. I really believe a reasonably bright student with good reading skills can be successful at a far greater range of schools than most will consider. |
Anonymous
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If OP wasn't a troll, and I'd give advice, but its obvious that this is a troll post.
Is this AI/bots doing this? Why are there so many of these fake posts these days? |
Anonymous
| Basis is the answer. |
Anonymous
What you are saying is backed up by a good deal of research. But capable eventually need a place they can spread their wings, and that’s not most DC high schools. |