Reply to If you are Wealthy and in MCPS, what made you decide to stay in public school?

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Reply to "If you are Wealthy and in MCPS, what made you decide to stay in public school?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was a private school lifer and hated it.

Would have actually had access to better colleges if I had attended the local public schools, with more STEM classes and more activities, and without the long bus ride.

I also think it's important to interact with different people; my lilly white and Asian private school with mostly UMC families didn't prepare me appropriately for life.[/quote]
Yet you self-affiliate as wealthy, indicating that it did prepare you to be a successful contributor to society.

I think you also misunderstand how college access in public school works. Yes, kids can go to excellent colleges, particularly STEM. Kids also go to substantially worse colleges in large numbers, community college and even at “W” schools a lot of kids don’t go to college at all. These are all equal options and actually when you understand how exceptional the public students are that make it to top colleges, you realize that it’s less likely your child will be one of them.

[b]Just be forewarned now, in public school you are in your own and there are big, potentially life-altering consequences for relatively small mistakes. That’s what growing up poor and being a public school lifer taught me.

To each their own, but just be prepared that the safety net is gone and there is a bottom that I don’t think you contemplate existing[/b].[/quote]

Dp. Those were ominous statements. Can you elaborate, please?[/quote]
MCPS is trying to change this dynamic, but stupid mistakes in public school can easily leave students with criminal records. At private school, you might get expelled but unless kids do something with irreparable harm they are unlikely to call the police.

In public school, parents can be surprised by C and D grades at the end of the marking period if kids are telling you everything is fine. One semester with a 2.0 will clearly have a dramatic impact on college applications. Alternatively, private schools monitor performance closely and will intervene quickly for even just an abnormally poor result on one test.

And just to be real for a moment, kids can get lost and I’ve seen it. Fall in with the “wrong crowd” (like not just suburban privileged bad, but legitimately will end up in prison bad) and it takes a long time to deprogram that mindset. While private is not perfect and there are lots of issues, I would never believe that the bottom that private school kids could fall through would be anything close to what I’ve seen at the school I went to. I feel a great degree of sadness for what happened to some of the people I went to school with. [/quote]

I don’t know about this. I have two high schoolers and know a lot of upper middle class kids in what you would probably consider “bad” MCPS high school, and  literally there is zero overlap between “UMC going to college” kids and “headed to prison” kids. Like, they never even cross paths. My nerdy clarinet player is not getting invited to go rob people.[/quote]

You are so naive.  I was valedictorian, and my academic peer made friends with the druggies in an elective art class and it was all downhill from there. I went to an Ivy League and have a typical DC life, she ended up as a vet tech at petsmart. Still a nice person and not in prison, but as a parent not the life I want for my children. [/quote]

This is very adolescent logic. Some bad person made her a “druggie” and suddenly it was all over? So, this person had all the same money and family support and mental health as you, and just happened to sit next to a bad kid and her life went boom? This is how Nancy Reagan thought drugs work, but not how they really work. Your friend was either poorer than you or more despairing with less family support. [/quote]

Seriously. I had friends in high school who did a ton of drugs — pot, acid, shrooms … I didn’t take any drugs at all. The kids who did tended to have other things going on, including really acrimonious divorces and things like that.[/quote]

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