Reply to Please tell me about your A student's experience at Wilson?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ours are not at Wilson (yet), but from visits there and from friends who have kids there, it seems like there is a vast racial divide, socially, academically, and in extracurriculars. If you look at the website, some activities/sports appear to be all white kids and some all black kids. Few are mixed. We are coming from a diverse AND integrated school so expect that to be a shock.

As an outsider, it's interesting to hear people talk about Wilson as diverse, a great way to learn to get along with different kinds of people, etc., when the kids actually don't seem to mix much at all, but just pass each other in the hallways. Kids mostly seem to hang out with kids from their elementary schools, which as we all know, are quite racially segregated. So students (mostly white) from Murch still seem to hang out with other Murch kids, etc., basically carrying the segregated elementary school feeling on through high school.

Just seems like a sad reality, although I'm sure there are individual exceptions. What have families who have been there for a few years experienced? Is the divide as deep and wide as it appears?

FWIW, we do know several black and Latino families from our current school who are not even considering sending kids to Wilson for this reason. I'm sure many white families are also turned off by the segregation, but I don't think anyone has great ideas for improvement.[/quote]

I have no kids at Wilson so I can't comment on this directly.  However, 25 years ago I went to a school that was probably a slight majority while but sizable Latino and black students.  At school and after, I mostly hung with white kids but I was friendly with everyone and still am.  I don't live in my hometown but am Facebook friends with/see at reunions many of my black and Latino classmates and have a great time reminiscing with them.  I don't think any of us would look back at high school and think there was a "divide" in a negative sense.

So it's possible that even though the kids at Wilson might not totally intermingle all the time they still consider the others friends, just not ones they hang with outside of school.[/quote]

This seems consistent with our child's experience.

I think it's true that the boys sports are more segregated (mainly aa kids playing basketball and football; mainly white playing baseball, soccer, and lacrosse).   I can't speak for the girls teams.     And the non-sports extracurriculars (music, theater room, newspaper, etc) seem very integrated.  [/quote]

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