Middle School Choices Next Year

[Anonymous]

Second what 21:47 says. Consider Hardy as well. Dd attended Hardy and had some excellent teachers. There were one or two train wrecks as well but overall it was a decent experience. May not be your first choice but worth a look.

[Anonymous]

Agree on which publics to look at (Latin, Deal, Hardy) and don't know anything about the admissions odds for privates at 6th vs. 9th, except that they might vary from school to school.

So here's my limited bit of info. If you're thinking about HS at GDS, I think middle school at GDS is the way to go. The kids come back from the HS to thank their middle school teachers (whom they bitched at the year before re the workload) for preparing them for what lay ahead. 8th grade in particular is really ambitious and demanding. And there's a lot of work on writing.

Kids I know who have come from DCPS (for some reason, the ones I happen to know came from Oyster and Key), seem to do fine in the middle school (both socially and academically). Personally, I thought that the fact that the MS was on the lower school campus was a plus. It minimizes neurosis about college admissions and exposure to sex & drugs, while the presence of little kids seems to bring out the best in many adolescents. And, best of all, the teachers in the MS all seem to think 12-14 year olds are the greatest! I was a skeptic, but they've almost got me convinced at this point, LOL!

FWIW, I suspect that Sidwell would be the same wrt the middle school as good prep for HS.

[Anonymous]

Oh and the last thing I'd add is that I think GDS is best for a kid that is a self-starter and intellectually curious or ambitious. Solid floor but no ceiling is my metaphor for the teaching I see. It's not a crack the whip/keep the pace place; it's more a sky's the limit place. I suspect that there are smart-but-not-that-into-school kinds of kids who would do better in a more demanding or competition-oriented environment.

[Anonymous]

PP Do you think GDS would work for a "pretty good" student? I personally know three students who've transferred out of GDS because it's too rigorous. Ditto students from Maret and Sidwell (one apiece).

[Anonymous]

Depends on the type of pretty good student. If you have a kid who loves learning and who doesn't have to be the best at something to feel good about him or herself, it could be a great place. It's intellectually playful and it's supportive, but it's hard fun (i.e a good/strenuous but rewarding mental workout). And it fires on all cylinders in the sense that there are lots of academic contexts where kids with public speaking, acting, artistic skills, and imagination get to show their stuff and have it appreciated.

My impression, formed over a number of classes, is that most kids there are pretty good students -- not truly exceptional students. Then again, my "pretty good" might be someone else's "excellent." Hard to tell.

[Anonymous]

I think 9:19 did a well-balanced, fair job of describing the process of applying to the top privates. We applied from a private K-6, and this poster is spot-on about the head of school talking to the target school and about the private elementary school offering SSAT prep. Plus the 15:1 ratio of applicants to acceptances was true in our year, and the ratio is even lower when you consider that some of the 10-20 slots in the target grade are reserved for priority candidates, so that your kid may well be competing for even fewer "real" slots. It was incredibly stressful for us and for DC, even though DC got into a cathedral school. Plus DC will interpret getting wait-listed somewhere else as a rejection (which it basically is, although we didn't paint it that way). It would be really wrong to minimize all this.

[Anonymous]

OP: you might want to check out Edmund Burke for your child. Small classes, and lots of attention from teachers. To the PP who talked about how hard it is to get into private school from public: that may have been your experience, but it wasn't mine, nor was it like that for most of my friends who went from public to private. My kids didn't have any trouble getting into several schools, and most of the other children I know didn't have any trouble either.

[Anonymous]

I think that the use SSAT results to help you to decide whether/where to apply to privates was good advice (and might explain different admissions experiences). Also, the two people I know who have taught at Burke (one permanently, one as a sub) are excellent teachers who had nothing but good things to say about the school and the kids. Definitely worth a look! I was looking for PreK-12, so we didn't apply, but if I were doing a HS only search it would certainly be on my list.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP: you might want to check out Edmund Burke for your child. Small classes, and lots of attention from teachers. To the PP who talked about how hard it is to get into private school from public: that may have been your experience, but it wasn't mine, nor was it like that for most of my friends who went from public to private. My kids didn't have any trouble getting into several schools, and most of the other children I know didn't have any trouble either.

I think it matters a lot which private you're thinking of applying to. OP mentioned some really competitive schools. I think Edmund Burke is fabulous, but the admissions odds are perhaps a bit better.

[Anonymous]

I thought this was a DC Public schools thread....Take your private talk to the appropriate thread.

[Anonymous]

OP here. Thanks for the some of the thoughtful comments provided thus far. I know quite a bit about the private school scene already but really wanted more information from parents in the public school system about their experiences with Deal, Latin (and Hardy as well event hough it's not our in-boundary school). I really want to consider these public options before resorting to private schools if possible (knowing very well that the schools I mentioned are highly competitive).

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

One standout thing about Deal, is that all the Deal parents I met were happy with their child's experience there, tho the school is not perfect
My child just started, and is reporting class sizes as low as 12, for some subjects!

[Anonymous]

Woo - that's great to hear!

Isn't total enrollment this year at Deal @900 students?

[Anonymous]

I only hear great things about Deal, too. Many of my child's classmates went their from Oyster. The size seems daunting but they geniusly divide the grades up into teams and students only have classes with their team so it feels quite manageable and dare I say cozy for them. I am wishing we'd gone to Deal instead of, gulp, private. (It's working really well where DC is. Still ... ) And the parents were know have high expectations and are critical thinkers about their children's education so if anything was amiss I would have heard about it I am sure.

[Anonymous]

There have been some threads about Latin. As I recall, current parents say great things about it. If you search the forums you will probably find them.