Reply to Teachers - can you tell which kids come from wealthy families and which don't?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, absolutely.  Not always, but often.  The kids who have air pods, 3 Helly Hanson jackets, an iphone x, and shoes worth more than my monthly salary.  Others have stories of spring break trips to France.  The kid sitting next to them has one sweatshirt and spring break is watching netflix for a week.[/quote]

Genuinely curious. What school do you work in where you see both of these extreme demographics?[/quote]

I'm not the PP but my kids go to a school like this (not in DC). It is very wealthy overall but also has 25% FARMS. It's a university/hospital community with many families being the children of physicians and professors. So there is a huge disparity of wealth and education level.  There are some wealthy neighborhoods with large homes. There are also some really rundown trailer parks and lower-income apartments that feed into that school. Some of the students are refugees who moved here with very little. Many are lower-income recent immigrants from Mexico or Latin America. Some are poor African Americans.

It's an interesting dynamic looking in from the outside (I'm a parent not a teacher.) At the elementary school level, the kids don't seem to know or care if they do. By middle school, the kids know who comes from where. Those in the wealthy neighborhoods are sometimes labeled as snobs. Some of them are, but it's a broad label applied to everyone who lives there. The rich kids go on fancy vacations and camps, etc. The poor obviously do not. I don't know how they feel about having rich classmates, but I imagine it can be hard sometimes. In general, the rich kids hang out with each other but of course there are exceptions. By high school, it is quite evident who is college bound and who is not. At college preparedness meetings, most of the faces around me are white, and I recognize them from the richer neighborhoods. On the Facebook page, I see mostly the same rich parents discussing school issues. There is a huge disparity in test scores.

I should add that in general, the richer families are socially conscious and are very good about collecting money/giving time to those with lesser means. And I don't find the parents to flaunt their wealth, even if the kids do sometimes. But of course, it's easy to tell who has money. Overall, it's a weird dynamic. We are fairly well-off but not rich (I'm a SAHM, my husband works an office job). We live pretty low-key - do driving vacations, not into designer stuff, etc. But we've saved for college for our kids and moved here from DC so we had good equity to buy a house in a "rich" neighborhood. My child has two friends who are definitely not wealthy. It can be uncomfortable when they talk about what they are doing after high school. One girl wants to go to college but her mom hasn't saved anything. One of their other friends gave them a used car because they had no money to buy one. My child's other friend hasn't saved for college either. She may go to community college. The parents never attend the college meetings. My daughter had to tell them to sign up for the SAT, etc. It is like two different worlds in one school.

In the DC area, I think TC Williams is like this.[/quote]

Is this the DMV? I can’t think of any university/hospital like area in MCPS or FCPS.[/quote]

No, we are in Chapel Hill, NC.[/quote]

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