Reply to Would you move for Deal and J-R?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ignoring the mean spirited posts…

We live in bounds for Deal & JR.  If you’re going to move anyway, and schools are a priority, I would absolutely look at VA and MD (more VA than MD, due to all the redistricting chaos in MCPS). Recognizing that some kids do fine and have good experiences at Deal and JR, we were unhappy with our academic experiences in DCPS and tired of the usual DCPS chaos. Kids are in private now. Hopefully DC schools get their act together, but they were a mess during the pandemic and have not yet fully recovered. [/quote]

What was it about the academic experiences that made you unhappy? And has the private school experience helped? We are weighing everything but want to understand what people have been unhappy with at Deal and J-R (other than proximity to chaos or disruptions caused by other students). What about the education was lacking in your view?[/quote]

Not the PP you're responding to. This longtime DCPS parent who ultimately bailed for a suburban school (divorced, co-parent with Arlington resident) can tell you that the problems are glaringly obvious. I don't say this as a hater; I say this as a parent who really wanted DCPS to work through 12th grade.

As you must know, as a general rule, DCPS doesn't formally track/ability group in middle school other than for math. Even at Deal, the DCPS MS with the most favorable demographics for learning, your kid end up in humanities and science classes with a bunch of classmates who work one or two, possibly more, grade levels behind yours.  There isn't nearly enough challenge or a push for a bright kid, and teachers aren't to blame.  But I think the worst part about Deal was that the grading system was absurdly opaque. We almost never saw corrected work.  In a nutshell, we had no idea where most of the grades were coming form, or how to up our game after suspiciously low grades were given.

Low-capacity DCPS just doesn't think nearly enough through. If your kid is advanced in a foreign language, chances are good that they'll get lumped into a beginning language class anyway, leaving you to struggle to extract them from said class for weeks or months.  And if you have a real problem and admins blow you off, going up the chain tends to be nightmare. Phone calls or emails aren't necessarily returned and if you get somebody on the phone and they figure out that you're an UMC family, they may or may not bother to help.  Another big problem is that nobody seems to be a rush to fix urgent seeming problems in DCPS, like broken bathroom stalls (bathrooms are often locked at Deal), or collapsing seats in an auditorium, of the fact that your kid's science class has had a STEM clueless sub for a couple months now.  PTAs wind up raising money to fix problems DCPS should fix.

If you're super patient, fairly woke, seriously committed to your DC life and prepared to do heavy lifting to keep your high-performing and well-behaved kid(s) learning, DCPS is fine for middle school, at least at Deal.  That wasn't our situation.  Good luck, OP.  [/quote]

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