Reply to PK3 Inbound for solid school.. Where to rank?

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "PK3 Inbound for solid school.. Where to rank?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think you need to sit and truly decide if immersion is what you want. TBH, I think that's the biggest decision PK3 parents make, lottery-wise.

PK is done well across the district, and being in an amazing school vs. a pretty crappy school for PK3 - they're basically the same. Truly. We're doing the lottery for 1st right now and have done a ton of open houses and the differences in upper elementary across schools are enormous. But, the tours are dominated by PK3 parents, so I've seen a lot of PK3 classrooms and heard all the questions and answers and guess what? They're all basically the same. And the parents are all pretty clueless about what will matter to them as their kid gets older. You just can't evaluate an elementary school when your oldest child is 2.5 in any real way, it's not reasonable.

So forget about all that and make the one decision that matters: Do you want to commit to immersion or not? Because it DOES matter if you start at 3 or 5 or 7 when it comes to immersion. But I also think immersion only works if you're going to lean in as a family. In language summer camps, lots of books in the target language, maybe the parents learn a little? The payoffs can be huge if you lean in.

If you decide immersion is for you - rank every immersion school you can reasonably get to in true order of preference and put your IB at the end of your list as backup. [b]If you decide it's not for you - just put your IB as your #1 slot, leave the rest blank[/b], and revisit the whole school decision thing for K or 1st once you've been doing the "school" thing a few years. Spending PK at your IB school is a fabulous experience. Meet all the neighborhood kids, walk to school, easy playdates nearby, get to know families, have people you can call in a pinch to pick up your kids (cannot overstate the value of this!).[/quote]

This all tracks except for the scenario of ranking the IB school and leave the rest blank. Depends on the school. Some people are IB for schools that almost never have spots for PK3 unless you have sibling preference. You'll want backups.[/quote]

Definitely this advice. I listened to people in my neighborhood who did not have recent experience with the PreK lottery, and ended up not matching ANYWHERE because I had a super short list. It ended up working out, but it was a serious panic for a few weeks. Look at SY25-26 WL data for your IB and the schools you're targeting and make sure you have at least 1-2 "safeties."[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics