Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Stoddert is very tight knit, and if you don't want to pay for a townhouse there are lots of apartment buildings and condos.
The problem with "tight-knit" is that it's also very cliquey. A real epidemic of spoiled rich kids, and if your kid doesn't fit in, it's brutal. That said, that stuff goes year-by-year. As the parent of multiple children who have/do attend, our experience has ranged from lovely to vicious.
I am interested to know/confirm from this poster - Stoddert has been cliquey and at time vicious? Ugh. Can you say more? Was that even in the earliest grades?
There are a lot of wonderful families and kids there, but there are also some very wealthy families and very spoiled children. So, it's a crapshoot depending on where you end up in your class placement. Of the four kindergarten classes when our DC entered, three were harmonious, and one was a snakepit of very nasty children. You write it off as little kids not knowing what they're doing, and for DC things were really nice for 1st-3rd grade, as the core of 5-6 nasty spoiled kids were either in other classes or sufficiently distributed. Fourth and fifth grade, they were all back in the same class and it was just brutal, brutal, brutal. Absolutely relentless bullying about body shape, clothes, athletic ability, shoes, phones... it was unreal, and really hurt our kid, and from talking to other parents we were not alone.
And another parent, who had multiple children different years, confirmed that we weren't crazy, but said some years the class is great and other years its not. That's the flipside of the "tight-knit" thing—you don't need many rotten apples to poison the whole bunch.
What was really galling though, is that the administration did nothing... vague platitudes when we brought it up, assurances that bullying wasn't tolerated and that the kids involved were "good kids", etc. They seem very happy to cruise along as if everything is friendly and kind, because 85 percent of the time it is.
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