Thank you both for your thoughtful replies (sometimes hard to get on this board!). We would be sad to leave the warm community of our Catholic school, but we feel we have to do what's best for our child academically. Thanks again!

PP 18:41 - Is "SA" St. Ann or St. Agnes? How long ago was your experience there?

Welcome to APS (possibly)! As an APS, I have seen a lot of kids with a variety of special needs come to the public schools from Catholics. I haven't yet seen any go back to Catholic school, except in one case where numerous sibs were still at the parish school and it was just too difficult to have kids at two schools, logistically.

We moved our DS and DD from an Arl catholic to Arl public. At that time SA was oversubscribed (30 kids in K class, 31 in 1st gr) when both needed smaller environments. It was harder on me and DH to leave the incredibly warm school community than the kids. They became CCD kids which you can probably appreciate is a less respected way to participate in parish life but otherwise thrived socially and academically through ES. I was surprised by the higher level of teaching at the local public compared to the first year teachers the kids had at SA. There was lots of slicing and dicing of the kids into different reading and math groups and generally a lot of attention paid to their respective strengths and weaknesses. I had underestimated the importance of music, Art and PE until the kids experiwnced amazing programs at pur public. One is in a private HS now and one is now in public MS. I was disappointed that SA wasn't a good fit for my kids but appreciate the path we took. Good luck!

We are considering moving our DD from Catholic school to Arlington Public School (we are looking at Campbell). She has some special needs that we feel are not being addressed at her current school. I would love to hear from any parents who have done this and their feelings about the move.