This is great to hear. Do you know the range of accepted students in the Science and tech program was last year?

My son's bestie did this. He seems to be doing just fine and has plenty of friends.

My DC made the transition from FCS to ERHS S/T this year. He has been very successful, earning straight A's on his first report card. It has been exciting for him to be able to participate in a national club and to do classic high school things like go to a really big homecoming.

He was extremely well-prepared for the transition because FCS taught him: how to write, how to take responsibility for planning his schoolwork, how to ask for help, and how to communicate with his teachers. It is not at all the case that FCS is not "rigorous." (I'm starting to think that there is a troll on here who simply will insist on writing that whenever FCS comes up.)

It is important to be sure that kids from FCS are placed into the right math class; because many do so well on the placement test, they may be placed in a math class that is more advanced than is appropriate given what they actually have studied so far.

It is true that a big change for him at ERHS is the need to keep up with lots of bureaucracy, deadlines, and many diverse, small assignments. (That stuff has nothing to do with rigor, of course.)

As for the transition from small to big: there are so many kids from FCS and from the whole Route 1 corridor, it was not a big deal for him at all. It is different, but exciting, not overwhelming.

Also, we have an email list of all of the FCS families who made the transition, and we share information that way. That is another FCS bonus - community.

We have found that the most important thing in making the transition is to be sure that parents go to all of the introductory meetings so that you can immediately get plugged into SchoolMax, get an email account, and meet your VP and guidance counselor. (This takes some extra attention because you are transitioning from private into PGCPS.)

With these resources, you all can keep track of whether any needed changes have been made and can track that assignments are getting counted and graded correctly right from the start. Again we found the hardest part to be just keeping track of all of the diverse assignments and making sure that he was getting all of the credit he should, so that ability to track and respond gave us both a sense of control and a daily check-in to the new context.

They’ll likely know plenty of people from school/ neighborhood. Encourage DC to join a sport of club. That helps a lot. Academics can be hard esp since FCS isn’t particularly rigorous.

Wondering if anyone’s DC made the jump. 2 questions if so: 1. How was the transition to from a small private to a big high school (understanding that magnet is smaller too). 2. Was DC adequately prepared and able to keep pace?