Reply to Feedback on Yorktown HS

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can anyone speak to the quality of education at Yorktown and whether meaningful college counseling is offered?

Is it a pressure cooker among the high achievers (which I've heard accounts for nearly 25% of the class!)?[/quote]

Yorktown senior parent here- College Counseling was not beneficial at all in my opinion.  But, this could be counselor dependent.  The counselors help you organize your letters of rec, etc., but in terms of helping you select colleges, they will direct you to Naviance. The counselors are literally managing hundreds of kids... hard to get a personal feel.

As for pressure cooker, yes, it can be if your child decides to take many AP classes along with advanced courses.  You can control, to some extent, the level of pressure....  If you are concerned about *rigor* which is a key word for college admissions, then yes, it will be a pressure cooker.  But, some of that is also teacher and class dependent.  Some classes (AP US History, AP Chem, high level Math, etc.) will be much harder than say AP Economics.

There is a lot of bad press on this feed for this school and WMS.  Not sure it is any different than other Arlington schools or Fairfax schools for that matter.  It is a large school in an affluent area....good teachers/bad teachers, overachievers and underachievers, etc.[/quote]

It is very different from other Arlington schools.  Other than diversity, similar to W-L; but definitely not the same feel or atmosphere as Arlington Tech, HB Woodlawn, or Wakefield.  Many people think Wakefield isn't academic enough; but it has the usual AP classes and the AP Capstone which actually teaches students how to write a real research paper -- that's a huge plus IMO.  And Wakefield does it without the pressure cooker feel.  Most of the college stuff seems focused more on specific minority groups; but that just contributes to the less stressed atmosphere for the UMC white families.  I don't know, but I suspect there's more "coddling" at Wakefield.  Good or bad, the point is that it's not the same as Yorktown.[/quote]

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