Private School - has it been worth the money to you?

[Anonymous]

Yeah! And let’s not forget Pinecrest, Berkeley Prep and Ransom Everglades!

[Anonymous]

Not even close. Name school, mentioned more than once on this thread. We pulled out during the primary years and we do public. Public is materially more academically challenging, and we get to avoid crazy annoying private school behaviors.

[Anonymous]

Yes, the private schools our children attend/ed are/were the right fit for them. We are very happy with our decisions all along the way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not directly on point, but i'll play devil's advocate: I went to private from grades two through five. My mom pulled me out of public because our in-bounds school had two tracks: immersion (which now everyone loves, so it's crazy to think in the 80s that people were worried this wasn't a great option) and split classes (i.e. 30 kids from 1st and 2nd in one room with 2 teachers - chaos!). I went to all girls school, which cost around $4500 a year back then. I was highly gifted, and spent much of my time doing independent work. My mother was chummy with the vice-principal, who ultimately suggested to her that I transfer to the local public middle school that had a strong gifted program. Apparently, the VP told my mom that their job was to take bright but not stellar young women and get them into good colleges. From a quick scan of facebook, looks like most of my old classmates met upper middle class men and have lots of babies staying home in the same suburb we grew up in. I don't think the school ever saw its role as educating the next supreme court justice. This was in a suburb with good schools, but the private did come anywhere near matching the competitive, academic and special schools that we seem to have today in DC. So definitely a different era and not an apples to apples comparison.

We used to live in Florida, and I would never ever ever send my kids to private there. Most of the people with money in Florida do so through, well, non academic means. Lawyers don't get particularly rich down there. So you have professional atheletes, real estate developers, modeling and film industry, and a lot of people stashing their money from other shady economies (like Russians, Venezuelans etc who likely made money under the counter and needed to get it out). The private schools are consequently a non-academic sh*t show. Crazy drugs, partying and stuff you don't want to think of 16 year olds doing. There is no way I'd put my kid in private there. Very different than DC where there is such an emphasis on education and career.

You are generalizing about Florida's privates.

Yeah, I'll have to let the some 70 NMSFs at American Heritage School know that their school is a non-academic shit show

You revived a thread from 2015 for this post? Are you a high school student in Florida?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not directly on point, but i'll play devil's advocate: I went to private from grades two through five. My mom pulled me out of public because our in-bounds school had two tracks: immersion (which now everyone loves, so it's crazy to think in the 80s that people were worried this wasn't a great option) and split classes (i.e. 30 kids from 1st and 2nd in one room with 2 teachers - chaos!). I went to all girls school, which cost around $4500 a year back then. I was highly gifted, and spent much of my time doing independent work. My mother was chummy with the vice-principal, who ultimately suggested to her that I transfer to the local public middle school that had a strong gifted program. Apparently, the VP told my mom that their job was to take bright but not stellar young women and get them into good colleges. From a quick scan of facebook, looks like most of my old classmates met upper middle class men and have lots of babies staying home in the same suburb we grew up in. I don't think the school ever saw its role as educating the next supreme court justice. This was in a suburb with good schools, but the private did come anywhere near matching the competitive, academic and special schools that we seem to have today in DC. So definitely a different era and not an apples to apples comparison.

We used to live in Florida, and I would never ever ever send my kids to private there. Most of the people with money in Florida do so through, well, non academic means. Lawyers don't get particularly rich down there. So you have professional atheletes, real estate developers, modeling and film industry, and a lot of people stashing their money from other shady economies (like Russians, Venezuelans etc who likely made money under the counter and needed to get it out). The private schools are consequently a non-academic sh*t show. Crazy drugs, partying and stuff you don't want to think of 16 year olds doing. There is no way I'd put my kid in private there. Very different than DC where there is such an emphasis on education and career.

You are generalizing about Florida's privates.

Yeah, I'll have to let the some 70 NMSFs at American Heritage School know that their school is a non-academic shit show

You revived a thread from 2015 for this post? Are you a high school student in Florida?

I didn't realize it was from 2015!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At a work event, I recently met a Landon graduate who's now in his late 20s. He impressed me as being very smart, personable, and poised. I told him we had considered Landon for our son (although we ultimately chose a different school). He said he and his fellow Landon friends have talked about whether it was worth it for them to go to Landon, and how they're uniformly on the fence about whether or not it was worth it.

But he seemed so thoughtful and genuine that it made me think that it probably was worth the tuition, even if he didn't recognize the school's impact on him.

I think his friends mostly contemplated how public school would have freed up their parents to invest that money and be more comfortable in retirement. That's a good point. But for most people, if you don't send your kid to private, are you necessarily setting aside an extra $30,000 to invest each year? (I do know one neighbor who did this for their twins -- sent them to MCPS for elementary and saved the equivalent in private school tuition for each child each year.) Now, for 6th grade, they are able to do private with the capital gains.

My DH went to Landon. He feels the same as this young man and will not send our son to Landon ever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:At a work event, I recently met a Landon graduate who's now in his late 20s. He impressed me as being very smart, personable, and poised. I told him we had considered Landon for our son (although we ultimately chose a different school). He said he and his fellow Landon friends have talked about whether it was worth it for them to go to Landon, and how they're uniformly on the fence about whether or not it was worth it.

But he seemed so thoughtful and genuine that it made me think that it probably was worth the tuition, even if he didn't recognize the school's impact on him.

I think his friends mostly contemplated how public school would have freed up their parents to invest that money and be more comfortable in retirement. That's a good point. But for most people, if you don't send your kid to private, are you necessarily setting aside an extra $30,000 to invest each year? (I do know one neighbor who did this for their twins -- sent them to MCPS for elementary and saved the equivalent in private school tuition for each child each year.) Now, for 6th grade, they are able to do private with the capital gains.

My DH went to Landon. He feels the same as this young man and will not send our son to Landon ever.

Where will you send them instead?

[Anonymous]

Yes, every penny. DS switched in HS and because of certain circumstances, he needed to be in a smaller, discussion-based environment. It was exactly the right thing for him. We do get FA which made it possible. It totally depends on the kid's needs.

[Anonymous]

Yes, definitely, but we were fortunate not to have to financially sacrifice as much we just are not big spenders -- not on mortgages, not on luxury cars or other material goods, and all our own student debt was paid off long before we had kids. Each of our kids had certain needs/limitations when they were young. Private let them flourish and largely overcome those drawbacks, and put them in a position to attend very highly regarded colleges. Still works in progress -- up to them how to use the opportunities the they have been given. You only get a shot at being an undergraduate once.

[Anonymous]

Yes, I work in MCPS and they started in public. I moved them just in time. I've been privy to so much dysfunction and meanwhile, they're getting a solid education. What irritates me though is that their private isn't substantially different than the highly rated publics I attended growing up. They were town schools, not county schools, and the town was fairly homogenous, so they had fewer challenges. But they functioned well because it was harder to pass the buck or justify 10,000 layers of bureaucracy, or move people around and pass the trash, or basically reinvent the wheel every five minutes. I do wish I had raised them somewhere I could feel good about using public schools. But given that I didn't, I'm grateful I could afford to shift gears. I feel sorry for students who have gotten the worst of mcps in a lot of ways. The past several years have seen a real decline.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes, I work in MCPS and they started in public. I moved them just in time. I've been privy to so much dysfunction and meanwhile, they're getting a solid education. What irritates me though is that their private isn't substantially different than the highly rated publics I attended growing up. They were town schools, not county schools, and the town was fairly homogenous, so they had fewer challenges. But they functioned well because it was harder to pass the buck or justify 10,000 layers of bureaucracy, or move people around and pass the trash, or basically reinvent the wheel every five minutes. I do wish I had raised them somewhere I could feel good about using public schools. But given that I didn't, I'm grateful I could afford to shift gears. I feel sorry for students who have gotten the worst of mcps in a lot of ways. The past several years have seen a real decline.

My hometown area still has town schools and they’re all garbage. In a 20 mile radius you have nearly 10 different school districts; all of them awful, tiny, bleeding students, half empty buildings, dumb parents — only people winning in that arrangement are the administrators of each tiny district.