Reply to WJ - Senior Prank Gone Bad?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Walter Johnson is a wonderful school, as has been explained in multiple threads on this forum if you bother to look. The only issue is that lots of other people think so too, and it's terribly overcrowded, but most core subject teachers are great and the administration is excellent. The kids are mostly all normal, decent, kids. They don't all throw their poo :-)

I haven't heard of this prank, and I really don't think it's important enough to weigh in your decision to let your kids attend. Academics and daily crowds are what affect students the most. Also consider that in 2025 there will be another high school nearby, which is in construction today - Charles Woodward. The boundaries will have to be tweaked. I'm sure both school will be equally good, but I just want to let you know that your kids might not end up at WJ. 
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They have had their fair share and more of issues this year.   [/quote]

Hmm... I keep track of these things, and the multiple knife and guns found on MCPS high school students this year have been evenly distributed among a lot of schools. WJ has been pretty quiet in that area. 
Sure, there's always the odd racist incident that is systematically blown out of proportion in wealthy white suburbs (because any excuse to bash on those schools), and completely ignored and swept under the rug in lower-income schools (because they're dealing with enough teen absenteeism and getting everyone to graduate that they don't even count racist slurs).
The sex scandal '22 was at Walt Whitman crew.
As for academic issues, frankly, WJ is doing better than most.

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this is so true, One kid uses the N word at a W school and it makes the news. It gets used 1000 times a day at the poorer schools and it is just kids being kids. [/quote]

Aside from the crux of the point, the difference is that the kid that is probably using the N-word at the W school is, well, White, and at "poorer" schools, it's not used as much as people think. Even if it is used, it's with a different, more harmful intent in mind. Common sense says that the people affected by the word get to use it in whatever way they want. Certain groups of people can't under ANY circumstance, and for good reason. So let's not use this as a time to excuse the n-word or try to bash on lower-income schools, because whether they use it or not doesn't automatically predict their academic and overall achievement at all. Please and thanks.

"...because any excuse to bash [on] those schools" these racist incidents there aren't odd or "systemically blown out of proportion" - it's what's done every day at those schools and people are calling it out, not bashing. It deservedly gets attention because of the historical context and reputation of those schools. What the poster is trying to do is obviously use coded language such as "teen absenteeism" and "getting everyone to graduate" as though their standards are lower and talented students are not there, so excuses should be made for them. It's constant on this forum and it's quite frustrating, not to mention sickening, as adults set the tone and kids pick up on it. This comes from someone who went to East County schools from K-8th and a W for HS, so I've seen both sides. Again, this isn't the main point, but wanted to call it out.[/quote]

I'm the poster you are calling out. I understand feelings may be hurt when facts are baldly stated like this, but there is value in telling the truth. W schools are ripped apart on DCUM anytime there is the least incident, racial or otherwise, not because people actually care about the incidents, but because wealthy districts are popular targets for criticism. Posters are happy to virtue signal if higher-income white and asian families can be blamed in the process.

I also understand your point about how self-reinforcing certain facts can impact student/staff motivation and initiative, but that's called life. You can't pretend some schools are higher-performing than they actually are, just to protect certain people's self-esteem. On the contrary, you challenge them to do better - that's how you build resilience. One of my children has special needs and needs to work 10 times as hard as the average student to get the same grade, so we know all about resilience in this family.

There is no coded language in what I'm saying, BTW. [b]We are a mixed-race family[/b] who moved from Silver Spring to Bethesda, for a better education. I know what I'm talking about, and my experience appears to be more recent than yours.
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Oh, yes. Folks with anti-Black rhetoric always love inserting in a later post that they are "not white" or "in a mixed race relationship." It's so common that we should put it on the DCUM bingo card.

The woe is me language about how hard it is to attend a W school is just icing on the cake of this post. [/quote]

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