Reply to If you are wealthy would you send your kids to a W school over private?

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "If you are wealthy would you send your kids to a W school over private?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In our W neighborhood probably about 1/3 of the kids go to private. A large percentage were struggling in public for one reason or another. Many are quirky and could not deal socially with the big competitive environment of public schools and others were having trouble being motivated academically. I can think of only a handful of popular well adjusted kids who are A students who decided to go to private even for 9th.[/quote]

Where I live in Bethesda 20817, everyone--or nearly everyone--with money is doing private.  Liberal or Conservative.  They have the resources and want out of MCPS.[/quote]

I grew up in Bethesda, specifically the Whitman catchment, and graduated from there in 2009. Back then, most people I knew who lived in gigantic $2M+ homes were going to private schools instead of Whitman, though there were still a handful of kids in those homes who attended Whitman. Most kids actually attending Whitman back then lived in $600k-$1.5M homes. Fast forward to today, and homes zoned for Whitman and Churchill that are less than $1M are nearly non-existent, and even tear-downs are going for $900k. Homes that sold for just $1.3M as recently as 2019 could sell for $2.2M today. I find it extremely difficult to imagine that people living in an area that is as prohibitively expensive as Bethesda are abandoning MCPS for privates when the school enrollment trends in Bethesda show otherwise. In fact, I worry that Whitman and other schools in Bethesda/Potomac areas (and even RM at this point) are increasingly becoming "private public schools." Whitman was really affluent when I attended in the 2000s, but we still had an actual cohort of real middle-class students. Not DCUM "middle-class," but actual middle-class. I'm talking about dual fed families, households where one parent was a teacher for MCPS, and even a handful of students with a parent or parents who worked in high-paying blue-collar jobs. You won't find any families like that in Whitman anymore. In the next decade, there will be almost no kids at Whitman whose parents didn't buy their house (at least partially) with family money unless MoCo strives to bring more desperately needed affordable housing in the Whitman catchment. [/quote]

I can just tell you that most people at my country club do private school, and most of the people I know in the 2+ million homes in 20817 do private school.

Some are family money.  Many are entrepreneurs and other high earning professionals.[/quote]

I think this pretty much sums it up. I've lived in Bethesda and Chevy Chase for a number of years now. Much of this school discussion can be reduced to basic human nature. For the very wealthy and privileged - the country club demographic - they will never send their children to a W school. Projecting status and exclusivity is very important to them. Nothing anyone says is going to convince them that sending a kid to Whitman is more valuable than sending a kid to Landon or Holton Arms. Because in their world it isn't. There's no status there.

For professionals with smart well-adjusted kids in the W clusters - families earning say 500, 600 thousand a year - nothing is going to convince them that spending $100,000 a year on two kids to attend private is worth it, particularly when you can get a very high level, very rigorous education at a W school. Those kids loading up on AP classes work their asses off. But they also have the benefit of being in a large school where there are all types of kids and everybody can find a place. Plus the wide variety of extracurriculars available at these schools. It's a no-brainer for these families.

So what you see - at least in the neighborhoods I'm familiar with - is that the private school kids tend to be very wealthy or they are special needs. Families decide that publics aren't going to work for their particular child. Could be behavioral issues, ADHD, lots of things. But to succeed in public schools does require a certain amount of self-motivation and an ability to read social situations.And everyone wants the best environment for their child. For many special needs kids who need more attention, privates probably are better.

Nothing anyone says here is going to change anyone's opinion. People live in their realities.

To the poster who said you can't take multivariable calculus in a public school here, yes you can. Whitman certainly offers it.[/quote]

Spoken as someone who clearly has no direct experience with top private schools. [/quote]

We have kids in private and some of this is true. The wealthiest in our zip code choose private more often than not and their kids are mostly lifers. For those who UMC but not uber-wealthy it's mostly the kids who have some kind of learning or social issue who chose private and many start in MS or HS.[/quote]

We're not uber wealthy, [b]but we have sent both kids through private school not because of any learning issues.  Mainly wanting a way to get away from the woke culture at mcps[/b] which has destroyed  education as we knew it.  It is not a burden for us financially at all, but we don't have private jets or vacation homes.[/quote]

Well, arguably, you haven’t accomplished much yet given that the alleged “woke” culture did not start until 2020.  So you “sent them through” for a whole two years? (*insert exaggerated Nancy Pelosi clap*). And probably a tiny cheap catholic school, nonetheless. 🙄 Stop embarrassing yourself. [/quote]

Started well before 2020 at MCPS.  There has been a creep for years.[/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