Reply to WAPO article on Prince George's County Schools

Forum Index » MD Public Schools other than MCPS

Reply to "WAPO article on Prince George's County Schools"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]April is too late though if they are serious about trying to stop people from using private as the default. Registration fees (and sometimes deposits) have already been paid to privates at that point. It is much harder to talk someone out of a decision they already made and the people who are really nervous aren't going to wait and chance losing a spot at a private so they can check out the open house in the spring. The open houses need to be happening prior to application deadlines for the private schools - that means they need to be doing these and publicizing them in the fall.

I also don't see why this should fall on the PTA. If this is a PGCPS problem then PGCPS should be doing something about it. We've moved around a lot and in the 2 states we lived in prior to MD, the local districts held a kindergarten roundup/open house in the late fall. And the schools publicized these events to people who lived in bounds (flyer on the door from one, signs on street corners in the other state). I don't think those would be very expensive things to put in place and it would encourage people to come see for themselves rather than just having to rely on gossip and a website when deciding whether to write the registration/deposit check to the private. The PTA can be really involved with the greeting or event planning, but maybe PGCPS needs to say *every* school has to do an open house in November or something like that. If it is put on the PTA to get it done then you're going to have schools with nothing happening because they don't have very active PTAs. Or you have people who already committed to public and maybe don't know about the private school timelines planning the event for the other people who are already committed to public.

I don't know about the schools for other posters, but there was just a huge difference in reception between the public and private schools for us. When we looked at privates we were offered tours and information about the schools. When we went to see our neighborhood school we were given a registration packet and nothing else. We were told they "don't really do tours" and that there would be an open house for new kinder students in August but we'd only get the info mailed to us after we registered DC. I know the privates are "selling" their schools and PGCPS technically isn't, but maybe they need to rethink the approach here.

I think about the hundreds of volunteer hours my DH and I have put into our older child's private school over the past few years. And the money. Had she been in public we would have given those same hours to the school and a lot of the money we spent would have come back to the local school in the form of donations on Donors Choose. I'm sure that's true of many families in private schools who are zoned to PGCPS. That's a real loss. 
[/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