Annandale High School

[Anonymous]

Anyone know anything good or bad about Annandale High School? Our kids are still very young, but if we choose to stay in our current home they would eventually go there. They didn't do so well in the rankings according to the Washington Post, but just want to check and hear it personally from other folks.

Thanks!
K

[Anonymous]

I have no first hand advice (my son is only 2!!) but we are looking at houses and some feed into Annandale. After talking to friends who have high school age kids, we felt pretty comfortable with the idea of being inbounds for it. They have a very good music program and theater too (that's important to us) and the over-crowding is being dealt with right now.

That being said, we decided not to buy anything that feeds to Annandale because of the middle schools. Both Poe and Holmes seemed unacceptable to us. We know some teachers that used to teach at each and the atmosphere there is pretty bad, not a lot of extra-curriculars, lots of safety issues, etc.

I'm sure your kid could succeed at any of these schools, but that is what we heard from word of mouth. I'd talk to people in your neighborhood who actually attend the schools rather than put too much faith into what you hear here!

[Anonymous]

Annandale doesn't rank highly because the test scores aren't awesome. Which is pretty typical for the Fairfax and Arlington schools that have high percentages of poorer kids, non-white kids and ESL kids. Fairfax is considered to have very good public schools, overall, so if you decide to stay put, you could do a lot worse than an average school in a better-than-average school district. (I did just fine in a similar situation - honors, high GPA, good test scores, full tuition scholarship to GW.) And the boundary shift of some kids to Frost/Woodson should relieve some overcrowding. That said, it wouldn't hurt to look around and see what else your money could buy. If I had decided to stay in Fairfax, I would have looked for something feeding into Woodson or McLean HS, but we moved to Arlington for the commute into DC.