Anonymous wrote:Do you think your current 4th grader is having a better experience at the HGC than your older child had at Piney Branch?

Yes, though it is also a different situation with the loss of the math acceleration that the older one got. That math along with science is what helped elevate Piney for him. Compacted math is not challenging enough. That's the case at all the schools now.

The biggest loss in the move was losing science as a special. But the gains have been far greater than I could have imagined.

Do you think your current 4th grader is having a better experience at the HGC than your older child had at Piney Branch?

When Mr. G was principal at Piney, they incorporated some of the HGC projects into the curriculum. I believe it was a way to keep some of the HGC families at the school vs. having so many kids leave for Pine Crest/Oak View.

We have a child who stayed at the school and had a fantastic experience; though I will say that his friends who went to the HGC did get more projects overall and had higher responsibility expectations. Math at the time seemed slightly stronger at Piney.

When current 4th grader got into HGC, we chose to leave Piney for HGC. New principal (who is great in many ways) made no effort to encourage HGC families to stay. I got the sense that they wouldn't be keeping Mr. G's program in place, especially since there was no push to tell us how the school would serve these children. It was a huge difference in a time frame of 2 years.

Thank you!

There is not one at Piney Branch. What you might remember hearing is that Piney Branch was incorporating some of the programs and methods used at the HGCs to try to keep more advanced students in-house. At least that was the official line when our daughter was there three years ago. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, as our daughter wasn't in that cohort. Pincecrest and Oakview are the HGCs in the Takoma Park/Silver Spring area.

No, I thought there was one at Piney Branch.

Are you thinking of Pinecrest? I don't think Piney Branch has one.

Somewhere I remembered hearing that Piney Branch has an HGC, but when I looked on the MCPS website it was not listed. Does anyone know? TIA