AAP school experience

[Anonymous]

OP, IME, this depends largely on the school. My DD went to a center school that is not well regarded in these parts, and has a small AAP cohort. The kids in AAP were not treated as anything special, and they mixed with Gen Ed kids for all their specials and recess. DD had good friends both in her class, and outside of it.

The problem actually came about in high school for her, where she is going to a school with kids that have established friendships for many years. She's fine now, but it took many months to break into friends groups.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s awful.

The kids who come to the center are endlessly told how smart and special they are at home and look down on the Gen Ed kids. Their parents treat the school like their own personal private school. The superiority complex infects the entire AAP class including the kids in boundary, and the Gen Ed kids internalize the message.

It’s super awesome when your 3rd grader comes home and tells you they aren’t smart enough for “special smart kid” program.

The whole program needs to end.

Amen to all of this and the stuff said previously. Avoid center schools!

[Anonymous]

There is a lot of bullying at the AAP Centers. It comes from parents and teachers who tell these kids they are better than the General Ed children. Newsflash: they're not.

[Anonymous]

We were at a center middle school that had a lot of kids from another pyramid. The school was sending a lot of kids to TJ and the parents/kids from the other pyramid tended to have a very transactional attitude towards our school. They just saw it as a path to TJ and oweren’t interested in longer-term relationships because their kids were either going to TJ or a different high school than the other kids.

Eventually FCPS sent those kids back to their own school, so our school still has AAP but the students all live within the base boundaries. The percentage of AAP kids declined and the atmosphere improved. The AAP kids are just in different “sub-schools” than the other kids, but all the kids have access to honors classes and everyone knows some of the non-AAP kids do just as well in high school, if not better, than the AAP kids.

I think people have a different perspective about the ES program because that’s when the initial decisions are made, and it either stings or provides a false sense of superiority for a few years. From everything I’ve seen, it’s mostly a reflection of which parents are pushing their kids the hardest or working the system the most at the time. As FCPS started having more kids who were less well prepared, some parents started seeing AAP as more of an academic “life or death” situation for their kids.

[Anonymous]

The problem with FCPS is that all kids should be learning the AAP curriculum. The general education classes in elementary school are not teaching nearly enough. There needs to be a separate gifted and talented program for the extreme cases of children who are very highly gifted (most students do not fall into this group).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The problem with FCPS is that all kids should be learning the AAP curriculum. The general education classes in elementary school are not teaching nearly enough. There needs to be a separate gifted and talented program for the extreme cases of children who are very highly gifted (most students do not fall into this group).

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, it's parents of the gen ed kids who cause the most strife. They pass their jealousy off to their kids, which is nonsense if AAP is the lousy program they claim it is. If that were true, why would it matter what class your kid was in?

You remind me of the first boundary meeting I attended--many years ago. A parent stood up defending the (then GT) program. She said that we need it because if "other" kids were in the class with hers that her child would be bored and cause trouble.

Irony: At graduation from high school, her child was not going to college. My DD was over 4.0, AP Scholar, commended National Merit, and won many department awards. Her child was not at any of those ceremonies. Maybe, he would have been better off with the "regular" kids.

Your projection is laughable. None of what you said here was anywhere in my comment. Nice try, but the irony is that you are the kind of parent who obviously has a problem with your child's placement. Reasonable parents do not care what class other kids are in, nor do they fill their kids' heads with crazy ideas. Congrats on your smart prodigy, I guess, but surely you don't think his lack of success has anything to do with "being with regular kids."

Bull. No one wants the troublemakers or academically low kids in their kid’s classes.

Reading comprehension is hard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There is a lot of bullying at the AAP Centers. It comes from parents and teachers who tell these kids they are better than the General Ed children. Newsflash: they're not.

OK AAP haters, when you say teachers are telling kids that they are somehow superior because they are in advanced academics, we totally know you have lost the plot and are just grasping at straws to make your arguments. Parents I can buy. Kids saying dumb stuff I can buy. But a vanishingly small number of teachers would be that incredibly stupid or intentionally mean.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We were at a center middle school that had a lot of kids from another pyramid. The school was sending a lot of kids to TJ and the parents/kids from the other pyramid tended to have a very transactional attitude towards our school. They just saw it as a path to TJ and oweren’t interested in longer-term relationships because their kids were either going to TJ or a different high school than the other kids.

Eventually FCPS sent those kids back to their own school, so our school still has AAP but the students all live within the base boundaries. The percentage of AAP kids declined and the atmosphere improved. The AAP kids are just in different “sub-schools” than the other kids, but all the kids have access to honors classes and everyone knows some of the non-AAP kids do just as well in high school, if not better, than the AAP kids.

I think people have a different perspective about the ES program because that’s when the initial decisions are made, and it either stings or provides a false sense of superiority for a few years. From everything I’ve seen, it’s mostly a reflection of which parents are pushing their kids the hardest or working the system the most at the time. As FCPS started having more kids who were less well prepared, some parents started seeing AAP as more of an academic “life or death” situation for their kids.

Any parents who are given a false sense of superiority by AAP are just flat not paying attention. Seriously.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There is a lot of bullying at the AAP Centers. It comes from parents and teachers who tell these kids they are better than the General Ed children. Newsflash: they're not.

+100

I don't know about teachers saying that, but parents and their jealousy over a class placement are the biggest problem.

[Anonymous]

Part of the issue is that many parents who adopt a more relaxed and free-range approach to their kids’ development end up resentful if the pushed/prepped kids end up in AAP and their kids remain are in Gen Ed. Especially if the Gen Ed classes have a lot of kids who are seriously behind academically. They end up having second thoughts about their parenting approach and worried that their kids will fall through the cracks.

It works out over time, however, if you continue to trust yourself and your kids. By high school AAP is irrelevant and the Gen Ed kids often will have caught up academically. But the younger parents haven’t experienced that yet, so they fret and see insults everywhere they look.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Part of the issue is that many parents who adopt a more relaxed and free-range approach to their kids’ development end up resentful if the pushed/prepped kids end up in AAP and their kids remain are in Gen Ed. Especially if the Gen Ed classes have a lot of kids who are seriously behind academically. They end up having second thoughts about their parenting approach and worried that their kids will fall through the cracks.

It works out over time, however, if you continue to trust yourself and your kids. By high school AAP is irrelevant and the Gen Ed kids often will have caught up academically. But the younger parents haven’t experienced that yet, so they fret and see insults everywhere they look.

Maybe they should talk to some neighbors at the bus stop, on the playground during walker pick-up, or at school events or sports then. There should be a few parents around with older kids who can tell them what's up. I certainly knew before my oldest was even in 3rd that AAP makes 0 difference in high school and is only of value if your kid is bored at the regular math pace.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, it's parents of the gen ed kids who cause the most strife. They pass their jealousy off to their kids, which is nonsense if AAP is the lousy program they claim it is. If that were true, why would it matter what class your kid was in?

Agree! They have an inferiority complex.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Part of the issue is that many parents who adopt a more relaxed and free-range approach to their kids’ development end up resentful if the pushed/prepped kids end up in AAP and their kids remain are in Gen Ed. Especially if the Gen Ed classes have a lot of kids who are seriously behind academically. They end up having second thoughts about their parenting approach and worried that their kids will fall through the cracks.

It works out over time, however, if you continue to trust yourself and your kids. By high school AAP is irrelevant and the Gen Ed kids often will have caught up academically. But the younger parents haven’t experienced that yet, so they fret and see insults everywhere they look.

Maybe they should talk to some neighbors at the bus stop, on the playground during walker pick-up, or at school events or sports then. There should be a few parents around with older kids who can tell them what's up. I certainly knew before my oldest was even in 3rd that AAP makes 0 difference in high school and is only of value if your kid is bored at the regular math pace.

With everyone doing the same benchmark and Advanced math curriculum being heavily watered down starting this year, there is less academic benefit to AAP currently. The only thing I can tell from our base school which is also the center is that the kids who take up most of the teacher's time either behavior wise or academic wise (or both) are concentrated in gen ed. It sounds like a mess from what I have gathered. Of course parents are going to want out of that sort of environment, where any well behaved on grade level or higher child would be largely ignored every year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is a lot of bullying at the AAP Centers. It comes from parents and teachers who tell these kids they are better than the General Ed children. Newsflash: they're not.

OK AAP haters, when you say teachers are telling kids that they are somehow superior because they are in advanced academics, we totally know you have lost the plot and are just grasping at straws to make your arguments. Parents I can buy. Kids saying dumb stuff I can buy. But a vanishingly small number of teachers would be that incredibly stupid or intentionally mean.

At my son’s AAP center, a teacher asked a child who didn’t follow a direction if “they had just gotten off a boat from China and didn’t understand English”. So yeah, the teachers can be stupid. FWIW, this was in a mixed AAP/GenEd gym class.