Reply to Flint Hill 9-12, opinions, experiences?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can anyone share your experience or thoughts on flint hill? DS will be entering 9th next year.[/quote]

Former Flint Hill teacher here, with experience at basically every type of independent school in the area (supposed "Big 3" pressure cooker, Montessori, parochial, classical education, etc. - done it all). Every experience is what you make of it, and in my opinion FH does a good job providing a broad range of experiences for its students. Elite athlete? Their volleyball team is a national power, and the school sends athletes to college from a variety of sports every year. Want to take a bunch of AP/Honors classes? That's also an option. Your child needs support from a learning specialist? They have a whole team for that. Interested in other pursuits? The robotics team is elite and competes with college teams nationally. Want a diverse, friendly student body? They have that as well.

The flip side is that perhaps Flint Hill tries too hard to be "all things to all men" and comes away without a defined identity of its own. Yes, Flint Hill grads get into plenty of good schools, as has been pointed out on this thread and elsewhere, but if you're gunning for a top-twenty college (to the extent that those rankings aren't a bunch of BS anyways, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish), it's going to be a challenge if your kid isn't in the top 10-20% of their class at FHS, whereas at a place like Sidwell or Maret or St. Alban's/NCS that might be more like the top 40-50%. Still, some people on this forum would have you believe that Flint Hill is populated entirely by knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, which is emphatically not the case. Yes, FHS got its start as a segregation academy in the fifties as a result of [i]Brown v. Board[/i], but as I already mentioned, they are very diverse now and have taken serious steps to be a welcoming place. However, that comes with a caveat. Although they draw their student body from something like a 35-miles radius, most of them come from Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, the epicenter of the anti-mask and anti-LGBTQ backlash that put Glenn Youngkin in the governor's mansion in November (so they're not 100% fully committed to inclusion). At the end of the day, it's a good-not-great school, but has a number of options for your child to chart their own path and have a great experience.[/quote]

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