Sidwell college advisor leaves

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If this bad parent conduct occurred, then it should condemned. But the article wasn't exactly the sort of journalism on which the Post build it's reputation. It started off by quoting from the director's holiday note to parents (which read in part like an eggnog-fueled screed). Then it quoted an anonymous parent who confirmed that s/he heard a "rumor" about some other parents behaving badly. Then it pivoted to quoting various people (not from the Sidwell Friends community) on the record who discussed what they have observed or theorize in various other schools and contexts, not specifically Sidwell Friends. As reporting, it's pretty thin gruel. Does the Post still employ editors?

Eh. Sounds like you're too caught up in p.r. mode on this one. The article was perfectly reasonable and measured IMHO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wow, 8:31 seems like the kind of parent that prompted the whole SFS rumor mongering mess. Our kids go to another school but we know many SFS alumni and parents and I think it is a fantastic school. I don't know the counselor she's talking about, but let's run through some of her complaints just for fun:

1) "sloppy, failed to spell-check emails" -- We all strive to be perfect in every aspect of our jobs, but everyone makes mistakes. Especially if you are bombarded by anxious students and parents with daily or hourly emails that border on the unhinged. Sometimes, speedy replies take precedence over a second reading. Maybe it's just a generational thing as proper spelling and punctuation in text messages are signs of digital incompetence.

2) "missed self-imposed deadlines"-- There are many well-established important deadlines for the college admissions process that begin with meeting 1-on-1 with each student, helping them create lists of potential reach/match/safeties, identifying teachers to write recs, etc. Almost all of the responsibility for getting these done rests with the student, not the counselor. In our experience, none of the counselor self-imposed deadlines are crucial to the process.

3) "failed even to provide suggestions for reach schools" - You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Are there any top colleges that you've never heard of? Among the single digit admission rate schools, there are no strategic suggestions besides ED, just student preferences/dreams/wishes. These college counselors should be spending most of their time suggesting match and safety schools.

4) "eager to suggest schools with profiles way below our kid’s SAT scores" - What about grades and teacher recommendations? All the top colleges look askance at private school kids with high SATs but mediocre grades and recs. They are the poster children for over-privileged toffs.

5) "DS and I paid more than $160,000 these past four years" -- You can lead a horse to water...Did Sidwell offer your child good teachers and curricula? If you weren't satisfied, why did you keep paying? Is college admissions the only metric you use to measure the value of high school? Did you not believe the SFS when they told you that college admissions are not their measure of success?

6) "SFS even made the f!cking pottery class a graded course" -- I think art courses are graded everywhere. So are drama and music classes. Some students at SFS are exceptional artists and they deserve to be held to rigorous academic standards too. Would you just prefer a grading system that only include your DC's As on the transcript?

I think the only failure at SFS is in the admissions office for not providing enough counseling to parents like this that it is a really bad fit. Keep out these kinds of parents and you avoid the really over-the-top behaviors.

Thanks for your input, P.G. Good luck.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wow, 8:31 seems like the kind of parent that prompted the whole SFS rumor mongering mess. Our kids go to another school but we know many SFS alumni and parents and I think it is a fantastic school. I don't know the counselor she's talking about, but let's run through some of her complaints just for fun:

1) "sloppy, failed to spell-check emails" -- We all strive to be perfect in every aspect of our jobs, but everyone makes mistakes. Especially if you are bombarded by anxious students and parents with daily or hourly emails that border on the unhinged. Sometimes, speedy replies take precedence over a second reading. Maybe it's just a generational thing as proper spelling and punctuation in text messages are signs of digital incompetence.

2) "missed self-imposed deadlines"-- There are many well-established important deadlines for the college admissions process that begin with meeting 1-on-1 with each student, helping them create lists of potential reach/match/safeties, identifying teachers to write recs, etc. Almost all of the responsibility for getting these done rests with the student, not the counselor. In our experience, none of the counselor self-imposed deadlines are crucial to the process.

3) "failed even to provide suggestions for reach schools" - You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Are there any top colleges that you've never heard of? Among the single digit admission rate schools, there are no strategic suggestions besides ED, just student preferences/dreams/wishes. These college counselors should be spending most of their time suggesting match and safety schools.

4) "eager to suggest schools with profiles way below our kid’s SAT scores" - What about grades and teacher recommendations? All the top colleges look askance at private school kids with high SATs but mediocre grades and recs. They are the poster children for over-privileged toffs.

5) "DS and I paid more than $160,000 these past four years" -- You can lead a horse to water...Did Sidwell offer your child good teachers and curricula? If you weren't satisfied, why did you keep paying? Is college admissions the only metric you use to measure the value of high school? Did you not believe the SFS when they told you that college admissions are not their measure of success?

6) "SFS even made the f!cking pottery class a graded course" -- I think art courses are graded everywhere. So are drama and music classes. Some students at SFS are exceptional artists and they deserve to be held to rigorous academic standards too. Would you just prefer a grading system that only include your DC's As on the transcript?

I think the only failure at SFS is in the admissions office for not providing enough counseling to parents like this that it is a really bad fit. Keep out these kinds of parents and you avoid the really over-the-top behaviors.

This is absurd. No school should be hiring someone in an external-facing critical position who can't communicate well in standard written English. One assumes that poor writing, grammar and spelling would not exactly help with recommendations and other communications sent to a university admissions office about a Sidwell student.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Nice. You can thank this years douchebag senior parents.

Have they hired a new counselor yet?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow, 8:31 seems like the kind of parent that prompted the whole SFS rumor mongering mess. Our kids go to another school but we know many SFS alumni and parents and I think it is a fantastic school. I don't know the counselor she's talking about, but let's run through some of her complaints just for fun:

1) "sloppy, failed to spell-check emails" -- We all strive to be perfect in every aspect of our jobs, but everyone makes mistakes. Especially if you are bombarded by anxious students and parents with daily or hourly emails that border on the unhinged. Sometimes, speedy replies take precedence over a second reading. Maybe it's just a generational thing as proper spelling and punctuation in text messages are signs of digital incompetence.

2) "missed self-imposed deadlines"-- There are many well-established important deadlines for the college admissions process that begin with meeting 1-on-1 with each student, helping them create lists of potential reach/match/safeties, identifying teachers to write recs, etc. Almost all of the responsibility for getting these done rests with the student, not the counselor. In our experience, none of the counselor self-imposed deadlines are crucial to the process.

3) "failed even to provide suggestions for reach schools" - You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Are there any top colleges that you've never heard of? Among the single digit admission rate schools, there are no strategic suggestions besides ED, just student preferences/dreams/wishes. These college counselors should be spending most of their time suggesting match and safety schools.

4) "eager to suggest schools with profiles way below our kid’s SAT scores" - What about grades and teacher recommendations? All the top colleges look askance at private school kids with high SATs but mediocre grades and recs. They are the poster children for over-privileged toffs.

5) "DS and I paid more than $160,000 these past four years" -- You can lead a horse to water...Did Sidwell offer your child good teachers and curricula? If you weren't satisfied, why did you keep paying? Is college admissions the only metric you use to measure the value of high school? Did you not believe the SFS when they told you that college admissions are not their measure of success?

6) "SFS even made the f!cking pottery class a graded course" -- I think art courses are graded everywhere. So are drama and music classes. Some students at SFS are exceptional artists and they deserve to be held to rigorous academic standards too. Would you just prefer a grading system that only include your DC's As on the transcript?

I think the only failure at SFS is in the admissions office for not providing enough counseling to parents like this that it is a really bad fit. Keep out these kinds of parents and you avoid the really over-the-top behaviors.

This is absurd. No school should be hiring someone in an external-facing critical position who can't communicate well in standard written English. One assumes that poor writing, grammar and spelling would not exactly help with recommendations and other communications sent to a university admissions office about a Sidwell student.

Agree. Mistakes happen but should not be often. It should be edited and proofed.

[Anonymous]

They are bringing back a former head of counseling who was EXCELLENT! As for the article, I think it was pretty weak from a journalistic standpoint. It suggested that a lot of the other anecdotes from around the country were also happening at Sidwell. Definitely could have used better editing.

[Anonymous]

You can't fix these people in 4 year,s you just have to screen them out. I think the crazy parents/students at SFS are out of the ordinary, but there are a couple every year. There was a student last year who was absolutely detested by the teachers and classmates because they/he were so anxious and full of themselves. Contrary to the advice of everyone at SFS, he and his parents thought he was too good to apply to any match or safety schools. Not surprisingly, he only got one provisional acceptance to a non-Ivy on the condition he took a gap year first. He blamed it on preferences for the undeserving (athletes, legacy, first-gen, etc.) ahead of white males. Despite having a forced gap year, the kid still acted like he was better than the students going to SLACs like Williams, Claremont, Amherst, Reed, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You can't fix these people in 4 year,s you just have to screen them out. I think the crazy parents/students at SFS are out of the ordinary, but there are a couple every year. There was a student last year who was absolutely detested by the teachers and classmates because they/he were so anxious and full of themselves. Contrary to the advice of everyone at SFS, he and his parents thought he was too good to apply to any match or safety schools. Not surprisingly, he only got one provisional acceptance to a non-Ivy on the condition he took a gap year first. He blamed it on preferences for the undeserving (athletes, legacy, first-gen, etc.) ahead of white males. Despite having a forced gap year, the kid still acted like he was better than the students going to SLACs like Williams, Claremont, Amherst, Reed, etc.

This post is really low class as it gives such specific details which probably make the student dentifiable. You are exactly the kind of parent they should be screening out that would write such private information on a public forum like this about one kid or about one family.

[Anonymous]

As a parent of a kid going to LS at Sidwell in September, I am now terrified, thanks. I think it emphasizes our burden will be on helping keep college preoccupation in check, and leaving the school if the atmosphere seems toxic.

FWIW, I found Garman to be very level-headed and willing to talk through placement with (non-superstar or glamorous) parents like us. And he talked a lot about the antisemitic events happening in US because he knew that LS admits had a lot of questions. And he said to all the admits that thinking of private school as a means to an Ivy League end is an attitude that won't serve you well for the next 10 years. This could be just lipservice but at least it's lipservice to the parents who may join the community (and still have a chance to go elsewhere if it's not what they want to hear).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:And he said to all the admits that thinking of private school as a means to an Ivy League end is an attitude that won't serve you well for the next 10 years. This could be just lipservice but at least it's lipservice to the parents who may join the community (and still have a chance to go elsewhere if it's not what they want to hear).

He's not alone in preaching that wise message. I hear the same thing from leadership at the Cathedral schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/on-parenting/when-parents-are-so-desperate-to-get-their-kids-into-college-that-they-sabotage-other-students/2019/04/02/decc6b9e-5159-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html?utm_term=.08f8bf40cbb2

Wow, and to think I was disappointed when my kids got waitlisted, if I knew then what I know now I would have been grateful not to have been sucked into the Sidwell vortex. What a disaster...

Our DC loved Sidwell and was WL in a prior year too, but I'm sure the experience there would have been great had it turned out differently. Every school can end up with an oddball situation and usually the things that grab headlines are not reflective of most people's experience of a school. I do feel for the upcoming class though, as turnover is challenging at such a critical moment.

The challenges that have faced several schools in the DC market of late, with Sidwell and Field the most egregious, are not “one off” or “oddball” situations. They are reflective of a breakdown of staff leadership/management and board oversight and are a deep concern to current and prospective families because they have long lasting effect on retention and matriculation. Field experienced significant attrition and low yield this year as a result of their challenges and I wouldn’t be surprised if Sidwell - even elite Sidwell - experiences the same. Also worthy of note, there have been several schools that have strengthened their management, board composition, commitment, and values centered approach over the same term. Burke, Milton, St. Andrew’s, and Lowell all come to mind as schools demonstrating stellar leadership on both the professional and volunteer levels. Of course Sidwell will make positive corrections and bounce right back, but these situations always show the dark underbelly when it come to privilege

[Anonymous]

Sidwell will no longer be able to cruise along on the Obama Effect to drive application numbers and keep its reputation burnished. It’s still a great school but the gas indicator light is on. The school needs to focus on and deal with some urgent challenges, whether it’s college staffing, improving math and science st the secondary level, retaining and recruiting younger faculty stars, or figuring out the campus plan, etc.

[Anonymous]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/what-college-admissions-scandal-reveals/586468/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a parent of a kid going to LS at Sidwell in September, I am now terrified, thanks. I think it emphasizes our burden will be on helping keep college preoccupation in check, and leaving the school if the atmosphere seems toxic.

FWIW, I found Garman to be very level-headed and willing to talk through placement with (non-superstar or glamorous) parents like us. And he talked a lot about the antisemitic events happening in US because he knew that LS admits had a lot of questions. And he said to all the admits that thinking of private school as a means to an Ivy League end is an attitude that won't serve you well for the next 10 years. This could be just lipservice but at least it's lipservice to the parents who may join the community (and still have a chance to go elsewhere if it's not what they want to hear).

It's INSANITY. And you know what? In the end, it doesn't matter--this college rat race, students staying up until 3 in the morning doing homework to get into their 'dream school' that they just know they have to get into because parents and peers have drilled it into them that that's where they have to go and is the only route to success but they've been miserable the entire time. It's a bunch of baloney--kids get to college, are burnt out, unhappy, have a warped view of what success is, look around and think, "is this all there is? I literally wasted my youth being stressed out, over-worked, and focused on crap that really doesn't matter." And the posts from Sidwell parents on this thread, no matter how many try to say, "it's an isolated few", show exactly what the school stress is like for students and families. They represent exactly what Sidwell had built for itself, and now we'll see how that plays out. When the end game is success via stressed-out students, high-powered parents, and value placed on a result rather than focusing on the process, what will the ultimate result be?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This article is infuriating for two reasons. First, it conflates one jerk parent with parents who break the law – and please cite specific examples of other bad SFS parents. I keep hearing about this one perfect storm anecdote but only vague rumors.

Second, it ignores the fact that the SFS counselor in question sucked. Sucked. And Patrick hired him, heard complaints about him in his first year, and either didn’t do a good enough job re-training him or didn’t re-train him at all.

My kid had the counselor in question (CIQ) this year. He was terrible. He was sloppy, failed to spell-check emails, missed self-imposed deadlines, failed even to provide suggestions for reach schools, and responded to direct questions from our kid with vague, hedged bromides. But he was eager to suggest schools with profiles way below our kid’s SAT scores and in areas of the country that were of no interest! In other words the CIQ offered no sound, direct, strategic advice. He wanted our kid to do the easiest thing and aim really low to make his life easier. And, no, our kid was not shooting for Ivies.

NO parent would be happy with CIQ. Not at SFS or any public school. Patrick hired him; good riddance to both of them.

My DS and I paid more than $160,000 these past four years and, believe me, SFS ran our kid ragged. SFS even made the f!cking pottery class a graded course – yet one more thing for kids to stress about. We never expected Ivies would be a fait accompli. All we wanted was for the CIQ to do a professional job. Instead, he was literally the worst employee – the worst experience – our kid had in upper school.

One more thing. Bryan Garman needs to go as well. SFS is just bouncing from scandal to scandal – anti-Semitic kids to imploding college counseling department – and embarrassment to embarrassment. Can’t raise any money for the Washington Home which most parents think was an ill-considered acquisition anyway. And there’s still a ton of turnover among the mediocre administrative ranks (Patrick, MS principal, LS principal, AD). He can’t fundraise and he can’t run the school smoothly so he brings nothing to the table.

While I agree with you about the CIQ, I have to take exception with a few of your other points. The new AD is fantastic and replaced someone who had been there over 30 years. The new MS Head replaced someone who had been there over 30 years. The new LS head replaced someone who had been there about 7 years and she had replaced someone who had been there over 40 years. Turnover happens, and most of the hires have been good.

Most everyone connected to the school thinks buying the Washington Home and 3939 Wisconsin Ave were once in a generation opportunities that had to be done.

And there aren't anti-semetic people at the school. What happened two weeks ago was woefully misunderstood by the Administration and resulted in poor discipline decisions.