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[quote=Anonymous]Does the school really matter for motivated kids?  Yes and no.

Montgomery County uses the same curriculum countywide (which I'm not thrilled with), so that shouldn't be a factor.  However, how principals run their schools varies widely (and principals in elementary change often as that position is viewed as a stepping stone to higher positions.)  More critical yet is the teacher who implents the curriculum in the classroom.  My kids who are two years apart had profoundly different experiences at the same school (immersion, not W).

My experience is that a child who is advanced academically, and isn't given the chance to progress, will eventually resign themselves to not learning and start to lose their motivation.  MCPS has some great programs for these kids, but they don't start until 4th grade, and the four years preceding that (K-3), can be terribly demoralizing if they aren't lucky enough to get teachers who are willing to challenge them.

You indicate that your child is highly intelligent, but not necessarily academically advanced, and enjoys learning how things are put together and work.  I suspect your child may find the pace of learning to be slow.  However, MCPS focuses a lot on experiential/discovery type learning.  Rather than just lecturing about a math topic, for example, they like to give the kids manipulatives, so that they can discover the concepts themselves.  It sounds like this approach might really appeal to him.

Peers, as previous posters have suggested are important.   At W schools, you will find the advantages that tend to correlate with high SES.  However, most MCPS schools probably have kids that could offer your son a peer group.  We live in Rockville, and a lot of the families I know are middle-class professionals who are highly invested in their children's education.  You can get data about individual schools here:

http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/glance/

As an aside, I don't know why posters have been assuming the child is four.  As the cutoff date is September 1, anyone who turned 5 on September 2, 2016 or later would be starting K this fall.  It seems more likely, at this point, that a child starting K would be 5 years old rather than 4.  This doesn't even count kids who might have been red-shirted for whatever reason.

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