Reply to When to go private from DCPS

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "When to go private from DCPS"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Another thing to factor in is the emotional toll of the application process on a child that is old enough to understand what's happening. With applying to PreK and Kinder, they're happily oblivious. You can more easily paint the process to the child as "seeing where mom and dad think would be a good place for you to go to school" and not "seeing which schools think you're smart enough to go there." You don't have to tell them where they didn't get in because they don't ask. They have no idea what the differences between the schools are. DS came home from one playdate desperate to go to the school that had "a fuzzy brown rabbit in the room" (there was, in fact, no rabbit lol) and liked another that had "a cool water fountain" (a water bottle filler). He was thrilled that he got to go to the "water fountain school."

Your 9 year olds will have friends with big brothers and sisters who tell them (and they WILL then tell your kids) that "The smartest kids go to . . ." They're not going to buy "We picked [third tier school] because we thought it was a better place for you" after you've already sent them off to an entire Saturday morning of testing at the school their friends say the smart kids go to. It doesn't matter how often you tell your kids that it's luck of the draw.

I'm all for a little healthy failing in a kid's life for developing resilience, but this is nothing like not getting a spot on the travel soccer team. It feels much more personal. I'm sure some kids shrug it off just fine, but it really does feel like an evaluation of how smart they are. When my oldest was in 2nd grade at DCPS, I drove my 3rd-grade nephew's morning carpool to their K-6 school one day. My nephew was moving out of the DMV for the next school year, had visited his new house and school playground in the new town over the weekend, and was talking about it. This got one of the other kids in the car unintentionally bragging (I really think they were just excited) about going to the T3 school they were going to, and the two other ones were pretty quiet. As we got to school and this kid kept chattering about how cool the climbing wall was or something, one of the children who had been quiet yelled "Just stop TALKING about it, okay!?!?" and slammed the car door shut. He was in tears. It broke my heart. They were 8/9, but that kid at least clearly knew what was going on. We were pretty sure my oldest would be a strong enough student to attend DCPS until applying to boarding school or an independent day school, but my youngest isn't as academic, and overhearing this conversation was the straw that broke the camel's back. I didn't want to entertain the idea of him thinking he wasn't smart enough to get in somewhere his friends were going when he was 8 or 9 years old. The next application cycle, we applied for a spot in PreK for him at schools we would be comfortable with him staying at until grade 12. I'm glad we did. We had such a great experience that we moved DD as well. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics