Reply to Culture at McLean High vs Langley High?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Langley is 65% white, less than 2% low-income, and the kids mostly live in McLean and Great Falls. McLean is 55% white, about 10% low-income, and the kids live in McLean, Falls Church, and Vienna. Both schools are over 20% Asian.

The dominant culture at both schools consists of hard-working, ambitious kids taking lots of AP classes and preparing for college, but Langley is a bit more “Type A.” The precincts that are zoned for Langley mostly vote Republican, like Clifton and Fairfax Station, whereas the precincts zoned for McLean tend to vote Democratic, like nearby Arlington and Falls Church City.

Langley used to have more students, but the enrollment at McLean has been larger for the last few years. Langley still beats McLean at most sports, except for gymnastics, tennis, and the occasional basketball game. [/quote]

Another thing to keep in mind is that some students reported as “white” have parents from the Middle East, and this adds to the diversity at both schools. Really, any public high school in FCPS is going to have kids from a lot of different ethnic backgrounds.

The bigger difference is among the degree of economic diversity. Langley and McLean have the lowest percentages of low-income kids of any high schools in the county, but McLean is fairly close to Madison, Oakton, Woodson, Robinson and West Springfield at around 10%. One of the elementary school feeders is a Title I school, and some McLean HS kids volunteer to tutor there. The student newspaper also recently had a feature article about students who came to the country as refugees.

Langley is under 2% low-income, and students there simply are not going to interact on a regular basis with as many kids who come from families of lesser means. Even if their families are not the uber-rich sending their kids to area privates, the environment is a bit more of a bubble - although many of the kids there are very interested in global affairs and knowledgeable about things happening around the world (Langley has a very strong Model UN program, for example).

Both schools are strong in STEM courses and foreign languages. Both offer the usual high school languages (French, Spanish, German and Latin), but Langley also has Japanese and Russian, while McLean has Chinese. [/quote]

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