Reply to APS - From option school to private

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm curious which option schools people are thinking of leaving, but understand not wanting to share.[/quote]

We left Claremont. Claremont has an amazing principal and was a wonderful school (facility, teachers, enthusiasm), but APS (and Claremont) were too overcrowded, which made pandemic learning a disaster. If Claremont had 500 kids instead of 700, I think it would be a much better experience. Lunch was around 1050 due to overcrowding pre-pandemic, and my child felt like a number (We had GREAT teachers, but how can you expect Immersion teachers to track 50 kids?)

If your kid gets an Immersion spot, in my opinion you're getting more than a public school education because you're getting the bonus of a life-long language skill...and we had siblings in the pipeline who would have benefited too.

However in the end the amazing option of Immersion just wasn't enough to gamble other things away (smaller class sizes, strong spelling/writing skills, teacher attention etc). The final straw was APS's utter paralysis in spring of 2020 when COVID began, which convinced us we could not trust the district with our kids' education, and (sadly) we left the immersion experience, but it was the right move for us. Honestly I do think it's a harder call to leave an Option school than a regular APS school because you're getting some "bonus" private-school type features (for free). But you have to weigh everything carefully. [/quote]

We weight everything carefully and reject private school for two children, though we could afford Catholic school in VA.

Like most middle-class middle class families in this Metro area, we need to budget carefully to live here. Our kids speak Chinese well--one of us is practically native speaker-because we've been hosting Chinese au pairs for a decade, paying for classes for the kids at a weekend heritage school for many years, and sending the kids to the mother country for camps and long visits with relatives.

I can live with our just-OK Arlington middle school and Washington-Lee to continue to afford the inputs to raise the kids bilingual, and other inputs like math summer camps and a writing tutor. Can't pay for private and continue to supplement on this level. I'm also not crazy about the cocoon atmosphere of private schools.

Pick your poison, because no school solution is going to be anywhere near perfect.  I consider APS a base on which I can afford to build, a path to decent public universities that will save me a bomb on expensive private colleges, nothing more. [/quote]

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