Reply to So, what is wrong with Hardy?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hardy's problem is that there are WAY too many OOB kids who bring poverty, dysfunction, and generally pull down test scores. That's why IB families don't want to go there.[/quote]

I'm IB - we call it the "4th grade flight."  Hardy's students have too many social/personal issues for the school to be able to focus on academics.  I went to a similar public middle school (decades ago) and had to fight with my fists every day.  I didn't learn anything and had to take many private summer school classes and correspondence courses to make up for all the lost time.  I don't want to put my kids through that misery. I don't care what anybody else thinks about a middle school's "status", or about whether the students wear uniforms or not.  I just want my kids to get a good, basic education, and to be safe.  Based on my tours of the school and conversations with other parents, I am not convinced Hardy can provide a decent education in a safe environment for my kids.  Some IB parents make it work -- they are wonderful people, and their kids are fantastic.  I don't think I could make it work for my kids.[/quote]

What leads you to believe Hardy isn't a "safe environment?" Do you really think there are fights there every day? Every week? Every month? Every few months? If so, you are sadly misinformed.

--Mother of an 8th grader [/quote]

IB parent here. My kid graduated from our IB elementary a couple of years ago. In his class there were two kids who went to Hardy. One of them came home from school one day beaten up. He was at Hardy because his parents couldn't afford private, they quickly moved to Bethesda. A story like that spreads like wild-fire in an elementary school community. Hardy may in fact be no less safe than Deal, Bethesda public schools or some privates, but it's got a hill to climb in terms of its reputation, and it's not climbing it.

Sadly, the problems with Hardy's reputation go back to the Pope years. I've talked with parents from that era and there are lots of stories of violence. I've talked with in-bounds parents who were told the school wasn't going to do anything to protect the physical safety of their children. There were a group of people at the school at that time who used children as pawns in their adult struggles, and they are despicable people, unfit to be involved in education. [/quote]Pope-era mom here. We did not have this experience at all. But then, according to you, I must have been too busy using my child as a pawn. "[i]Lots[/i] of stories." I can imagine there may have been an incident or two that I didn't hear about but I love how supposedly educated people elevate that to [i]"lots."[/i] If there had been "lots of stories," I would have heard about it. [/quote]

By "at the school" I meant administrators and teachers, not parents.

Question: were you IB or OOB? It seems like there were different realities in those days depending on where you lived.[/quote]We were OOB at the time although we had been IB when dd was in elementary school.  Like I said, I can imagine that there were some fights I didn't hear about but my dd's main concern was that she felt her friends were overly domineering -- typical middle school girl concerns -- but I never heard "lots of stories" about violence.  If you want to take our OOB status and use it to discount what I have to say, there is nothing I can do about that.  But dd and her friends (a mix of OOB and IB) all managed to finish Hardy, graduate from high school, and go on to good colleges and that is what counts.[/quote]

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