Reply to Moving to MoCo over the summer

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Reply to "Moving to MoCo over the summer - magnet programs"

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[quote=Anonymous]We also moved to MoCo the summer before my ds entered 6th grade -- we only got here about a week before school started. From my research ahead of time since we didn't know we were moving here until late spring, well after the magnet middle school magnet classes had been formed, I figured there was no sense in jumping through the hoops just to be wait-listed.

My ds is just finishing 8th grade at Tilden and has applied to the STEM magnet at Blair for next year. He is also applying to the APEX AP in-school "magnet" program at Walter Johnson, his home high school.

We got him onto the advanced math track available for middle school under the current curriculum. Although the placement test only put him in the mid-level 6th grade math, it was clear after only a couple of weeks that it wasn't challenging at all (he's a math kid) so we fairly easily switched him to IM, so he then took algebra last year and is in geometry this year. The other "advanced" courses he's in such as English and Social Studies really don't seem all that advanced to me even though they have the label. So in name they are accelerated -- in practice, not to much.

Although we chose to live in MoCo rather than Fairfax County for a number of reasons, I do sometimes regret our choice in that I think Fairfax does a better job of offering a range of accelerated options. In MoCo the magnet slots are very few and I think there are many more kids who would benefit from acceleration in different subjects. My now 5th grader was bored in 3rd grade at our local school (that is highly regarded) and we were fortunate that she got into an HGC, which has been much more challenging academically. But I think a number of her friends at her home school could handle the HGC challenge/workload and there is insufficient opportunity to let kids thrive at various levels.[/quote]

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