Why w school students not preferred in Blair magnet
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Anonymous
| DC will be in 9th grade in a W high school. Did not make it to Blair SMAC magnet. Talking to others I get a feeling that very few (2 or 3) students from MS made it to Blair though MS is one of the very good schools, with so many bright kids. Why is it that the screening committee would prefer to select a student from non w school area over the one from w school with former having equal or lesser scores? Why is this assumption made that a student from silver spring would benefit more from Blair magnet than the one who would go to Churchill or Walter Johnson or Wooten. |
Anonymous
You make a lot of assumptions. There are 100 slots at Blair open to students from 16 high school clusters. 2-3 from any one middle school is actually fairly high, especially if you are excluding students who attended an MS magnet (I believe for the purposes of HS applications students are grouped by their home MS if they are grouped at all). The pre-requisite for admission is completion of Algebra I and that is the knowledge which is tested. Guess you wouldn't believe it, but even in Silver Spring there are at least a couple very good candidates at each MS and more qualified applicants than slots available. |
Anonymous
| Isnt Blair just for kids on the Eastern side of Moco? Are there no other magnet HS's in the county? |
Anonymous
Blair is for the southern part of the county. Still has 16 highschools. The "northern" magnet has 9 highschools. |
Anonymous
Blair •Bethesda-Chevy Chase •Winston Churchill •Walter Johnson •Richard Montgomery •Rockville •Sherwood •Walt Whitman •Thomas S. Wootton •Northeast Consortium •Downcounty Consortium Poolesville •Clarksburg •Damascus •Gaithersburg •Magruder •Northwest •Poolesville •Quince Orchard •Seneca Valley •Watkins Mill |
Anonymous
OP, you are basically saying this: 1. My child, in one of the middle schools in Bethesda or Potomac, was not accepted to the Blair SMAC magnet. 2. Only a few children in that middle school were accepted. 3. There are a lot of smart children in that middle school. 4. Therefore the Blair magnet admissions are biased against children from middle schools in Bethesda or Potomac. |
Anonymous
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Is there anything to support this allegation that non-"W" schools get preference? I doubt it.
You may not know this, but "W" is not a category that exists in the MCPS administration. It is completely an invention of DCUM. |
Anonymous
| There are MANY great students in non-W clusters. |
Anonymous
That is nothing to support that W schools are discriminated against for magnet programs. I do think W school students are less keen on going to Blair. Some think it is too far and some think home school is good enough. |
Anonymous
Don't know how the total enrollment of the two subsets compare but looking county wide there are 200 STEM slots and about 11,000 eighth graders, meaning only 1.8% of eighth graders are admitted. Compare that to the acceptance rate at your W feeder MS. I doubt it's out of line. Ideally in your count of kids accepted to Blair, include everyone from the home MS even those who attended TPMS or Eastern. If you can't do that, use the estimate provided elsewhere that roughly 50% of the incoming Blair class came from TPMS. Which would mean only 0.9% of eighth graders at home MS are accepted. So unless there are well over 300 eighth graders at your DCs school 3 admissions is better than expected. |
Anonymous
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Your theory doesn't hold up, OP.
Take a look at the data. Wooton and Walter Johnson are among the top high schools for # of kids sent to magnet programs. http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/info/choice/Appendix-B-Program-data-tables.pdf Churchill also, although not technically a "W" school. The only one that doesn't send a lot of kids to the magnets is Whitman and from what I've heard from talking to parents it's because Whitman is so good that why bother applying elsewhere. The commute is also terrible to Blair from that part of Bethesda. There was a book about top Whitman students a few years ago and one kid went to Blair for a year and then his parents pulled him out because they thought Whitman would be better. He ended up going to Harvard so it sounds like it worked out for them. |
Anonymous
| You can also see the MS sending schools and you'll notice that Cabin John and Hoover are close to the top of the list. This data is from a few years ago so it's possible that things are different now but I don't know any reason why because the criteria for admission hasn't changed. |
Anonymous
Churchill is THE W school. |
Anonymous
That's silly. Churchill starts with a C. |
Anonymous
Churchill is not the name. The whole thing is silly since Wheaton and Watkins Mill start with a W. |