Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Question- if one parent lives in DC and the other in MD, can one child go to a DC school and the other attend in MD? We are thinking of having our high schooler attend a MD school and our younger child continue at a school in DC. I’m fuzzy on how this works. Want to be sure we do what’s legally right. We have split custody.

For DC, the focus is mainly on establishing that it's the parent's residence, not the kid's: https://osse.dc.gov/page/office-enrollment-residency-supporting-families-students

They can do a home visit to make sure that your kid is actually living there (like, that they have a bed and clothes and such). But obviously they would have that, since your kid is living there part of the time.

I don't know about MD. But if the kids are truly splitting their time equally -- like, every-other-week -- MD would not be able to say they didn't want to educate them.

Anonymous wrote:Question- if one parent lives in DC and the other in MD, can one child go to a DC school and the other attend in MD? We are thinking of having our high schooler attend a MD school and our younger child continue at a school in DC. I’m fuzzy on how this works. Want to be sure we do what’s legally right. We have split custody.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not the poster you're responding to but we're East Asian immigrants looking at leaving DC for Oakton this summer, between 8th and 9th grades for our eldest. I work in Vienna a few days a week. Oakton teaches Mandarin and Japanese and Hindi, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese on demand. Why do you care?

I just googled it and it looks like Oakton does not in fact teach all of those languages on campus.

They certainly do, call their World Language dept. if you want specific info. We have a printout with their language offerings for the fall.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not the poster you're responding to but we're East Asian immigrants looking at leaving DC for Oakton this summer, between 8th and 9th grades for our eldest. I work in Vienna a few days a week. Oakton teaches Mandarin and Japanese and Hindi, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese on demand. Why do you care?

I just googled it and it looks like Oakton does not in fact teach all of those languages on campus.

Anonymous wrote:If a school teaches Vietnamese or Tagalog to immigrant native speakers whose first language at home was Vietnamese or Tagalog, are they really “teaching” those languages?

I’d be most interested in how many native English speaking European American kids born at Inova sign up for Tagalog. Anyone have numbers?

Anonymous wrote:Not the poster you're responding to but we're East Asian immigrants looking at leaving DC for Oakton this summer, between 8th and 9th grades for our eldest. I work in Vienna a few days a week. Oakton teaches Mandarin and Japanese and Hindi, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese on demand. Why do you care?

Anonymous wrote:Above is a myopic DC argument. NoVa schools teach more languages than DCPS to serve local immigrant populations. My kids in NoVa schools have immigrant classmates who speak languages at home other than Spanish, like Arabic, Hindi, Vietnamese, Farsi, Russian, Korean. A number of Fairfax high schools teach half a dozen Asian languages as well as Arabic and Russian. Some schools teach all six AP languages, Spanish, Mandarin, Latin, Italian, German and French, often past the AP Level (IB Diploma Higher Level language).

Anonymous wrote:MCPS have slipped in the last decade while NoVa schools have soared. My kids attend NoVa public schools, near where my ex lives (we share custody; I live in Upper NW). They've been able to take advanced classes from 7th grade in all core subjects. Their high school teaches 10 languages. There are prerequisites for most AP classes at their schools. Etc. My ex moved out of DC to NoVa for a reason. If he hadn't, I would have. Sorry, but you guys in DC fighting to get into Latin, BASIS, DCI, Walls, Banneker, JR and MacArthur are fighting over scraps.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have close friends and relatives with teens in schools in Fairfax, Arlington and MoCo. The friends became our pals in our DCPS ES. It's clear to me that there really isn't any comparison between dysfunctional, low-capacity, ambition challenged DCPS and the high-capacity school systems in the burbs. For starters, those counties support advanced programs for ES and MS. They track academically in middle school in all core subjects by 7th grade. They also run serious test-in HS programs, mostly the school-within-a-school type. Parents in those school systems grumble on these threads because it's all relative - they haven't experienced DCPS middle or high school chaos and ad hocery.

The bolded is not true for MCPS. MCPS MS offer advanced math class (generally taking algebra in 7th grade) and advanced social studies. There is no advanced English or science. For languages, you take high school classes in middle school. For my kid, those have been the most challenging. The advanced social studies class has some more work than the regular one, but it's not especially challenging. The advanced math class is probably similar to what DCPS does for kids who take algebra in 7th.

MCPS has been fine for us, but we also liked the upper NW DCPS we were in before and think our kid would have been fine with Deal/J-R for high school. I know a lot of people in DC don't have those choices -- but if you play the lottery and have no luck and find yourselves having to move, I would put Deal/J-R just as high on the neighborhoods to consider as the MCPS schools.

- Former DC resident, now MoCo resident, again