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Reply to "Any Thomson families out there?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thomson demographics
 Black: 15%
 Hispanic/Latino: 62%
 White: 2%
 Asian: 19%
 Pacific/Hawaiian: 0%
 Native/Alaskan: 0%
 Multiple races: 1%
[/quote]

We attended Thomson through 4th grade and left about 3 years ago.   I can tell you that when my child started in 2006 that the demographic population of the school was very different.  If I remember at the time it was more like 40 AA, 35% Hispanic 20% Asian and 5 %  white.  This breakdown was pretty much the case through all the grades.  When we departed I think the PK classes were nearly 85% Hispanic.  The challenge Thomson has is that the second language issues are huge.  Many of the parents can speak Spanish but cannot read school info sent back in Spanish.  Likewise many of the Chinese students parents came from Taiwan and tended not to speak Mandrin, but could read it.  It took us forever to figure out all they ways we were miscommunicating and the principal turnover complicated this issue.  What Thomson has are parents who really want their kids to succeed and will help their children, what it does not have are adquate supports to help these parents help their children.  This is not so much the Principal per se but a real blind spot that DCPS has towards how many second language children are now in the system.

I personally think that  there is a lot of potential at the school, but there will be a focus on pulling kids up in terms of language, this will make it difficult to have traditional PTA type programs and may mean very advanced kids get less focus.

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I've lived in Taiwan.  Even native Taiwanese can understand Mandarin even if they don't speak it.  And there is only one written Chinese language.[/quote]

I know in Taiwan they use traditional characters (versus the simplified characters on the mainland). But my understanding is that it's pretty easy to read one if you know the other?[/quote]

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