Reply to what do you say to neighbors about why you are choosing private vs the local public?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some of the reason why people get upset about your decision to go private is because they want you in public because your family - presumably wealthy, educated, and valuing education for you and your child - would make public schools better.

I know I feel that way.  I'm in the trenches, sending DS to DCPS and working to make them better.  I want as many allies as possible in this effort, and it makes me upset when those families are lost to private schools.

BC[/quote]

I think many families just want to live in a neighborhood where all the kids go to the same school. When kids go to many different schools, it starts to break up the neighborhood. Alexandria could probably be a top notch educational system with all the money there, but too many families go on to private school. Families that do want to live in a neighborhood with a strong public school system, won't move to the neighborhoods where private is popular further weakening the public school there. People get upset about magnet schools in a very similar way to private school choices simply because it's different from the local school.[/quote]

The comment immediately above captures our experience perfectly. We live in the Walt Whitman district, but at least 50% of the kids in the neighborhood ended up at private schools.

Some of our neighbors would have preferred that all the kids went to the same (public) middle school and high school. Some made the point subtly, but others were more blunt.

The question then is how does one deal with these disappointed neighbors?  We never attacked the public schools in responding. Nor did we say the privates were better. It just seemed to us that our boys needed a different environment. We were trying to avoid an argument, not provoke one.
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