Reply to Families who can afford private but go public, why?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We live in an affluent suburb outside of NYC. GS 10, small classes (under 22), and involved active parents. In our district, people only send their kids to private school if they have attention or behavioral problems. We briefly looked into the private schools and they have graduating classes of like 20. Seems stifling to the child's social development. If you want something ultra special, then you'd do boarding school (but I'm personally against that and would never agree to it).

Are the public schools in VA really that bad?[/quote]

Different types of systems.  You might feel differently about the public schools in NY if you had Westchester or Nassau Counties each running a county-wide system rather than having separate districts in Scarsdale, Bronxville, Great Neck, Syosset, etc.

If North Arlington, McLean, and Vienna could operate their own schools, they would be equally strong, but the schools in those areas are run by county officials who treat them as cash cows to subsidize poorer schools (the NoVa equivalents of Yonkers and Hempstead) and otherwise ignore them.  So of course people get fed up with the neglect and consider privates.  And it’s a vicious cycle because the support for higher taxes to pay for public education is diminished as well.

FCPS ends up being more of a social services agency than anything else.  The goal of its School Board is to spend as much money as possible on “wraparound services” in poorer areas and to ignore the wealthier areas. They have gotten away with it for a long time because people spend money on supplemental tutoring for their kids, and won’t readily admit that their highly ranked public schools aren’t that good, but the cracks in the wall are starting to show. [/quote]

You gotta be kidding. North Arlington operates APS for its own benign right now. You haven’t a clue how schools are funded, either. Fine, split off. You take the Cheesecake Factory and south Arlington will take amazon. Good riddance to you.[/quote]

There is also the state aspect, where NoVa residents heavily subsidize kids in the rest of the state.  Add that to how the county-wide systems allocate the money in their budgets and the public schools in the more affluent communities in NoVa are crap compared to their Mid-Atlantic and New England counterparts.  But, again, as long as test scores are high, due to prep classes and tutoring that parents pay for on the side, the school systems can boast about their performance. [/quote]

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