Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Will be moving out of state to Bethesda for work near NIH. Have two high school age children. A future coworker expressed some concern that my children may feel like they don't fit in with their classmates/neighborhood . Should I be concerned as well?

Whitman is arguably the best high school in Maryland. Not only with your child be fine, but will thrive.

Anonymous wrote:Will be moving out of state to Bethesda for work near NIH. Have two high school age children. A future coworker expressed some concern that my children may feel like they don't fit in with their classmates/neighborhood . Should I be concerned as well?

Anonymous wrote:Will be moving out of state to Bethesda for work near NIH. Have two high school age children. A future coworker expressed some concern that my children may feel like they don't fit in with their classmates/neighborhood . Should I be concerned as well?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Will be moving out of state to Bethesda for work near NIH. Have two high school age children. A future coworker expressed some concern that my children may feel like they don't fit in with their classmates/neighborhood . Should I be concerned as well?

What race are you? Not all POC are treated the same.

Children are half black/half Indian

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:commute from hoard county and live there. Montgomery County has had it's day and it is never going back to the good ol days,

+1. MoCo on a clear downtrend. Go for NoVa.

Yes. With Youngkin as governor, NoVa is going to the good ol' days, joining the rest of VA.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Will be moving out of state to Bethesda for work near NIH. Have two high school age children. A future coworker expressed some concern that my children may feel like they don't fit in with their classmates/neighborhood . Should I be concerned as well?

What race are you? Not all POC are treated the same.

Anonymous wrote:OP, looking at the school cluster boundary map, NIH is located at the confluence of boundaries for the school HS mentioned above:

1 - Whitman (west of Old Georgetown Road and south of Greentree)
2 - WJ (west of OGR, north of Greentree, and north of Cedar line)
3 - B-CC (east of OGC, south of NIH campus at McKinnley and the adjacent neighborhoods east of 355)

It's a good chance there are parents seeking close by commutes working at NIH in these nearby neighborhoods.
Here are the At a Glance statements for each. WW has a reported farms rate <5%, while the B-CC and WJ are around 20%.

https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/regulatoryaccountability/glance/currentyear/schools/04406.pdf

https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/regulatoryaccountability/glance/currentyear/schools/04427.pdf

https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/regulatoryaccountability/glance/currentyear/schools/04424.pdf

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a multiethnic foreigner, I can assure you, OP, that ethnic and national diversity is NOT a problem. Also, economic diversity is not a problem either! There are kids who show up to school driving brand new Jeeps and Teslas, and others, like my kids, who take the bus and if they drove, would have a 12 year old Mazda or nothing at all. Everyone finds their friend group. It's the silver lining of large publics - there's always someone who likes what you like.

NIH is closest to Walter Johnson HS: it's overcrowded but an excellent school! Bethesda-Chevy Chase HS is in downtown Bethesda and slightly less rigorous (fewer APs, but IB program). Walt Whitman HS is as good if not better than WJ, but further away from NIH to the west (a little more homogeneous rich white kids than WJ and BCC).

ethnic diversity is not the same as racial diversity.

-non white person

Also, what makes you say BCC is less "rigorous"? By what measure is it "less rigorous"?

We don't live in BCC cluster but I'm curious what measure you are using to define "rigorous"?

To me ethnic is just a better word for racial because it encompasses a greater number of possibilities, PP. There are multiple ethnic origins and cultures inside broad categories of skin colors, and I'm allergic to the uniquely American habit of just defining people by black/white: it completely ignores all the finer points of cultural and regional identity.

To your other question, yes, with years of comparing notes between my friends and I (whose kids go to these three schools), we've come to the conclusion that teacher quality for core classes is higher at WJ and WW. Some core teachers at BCC are apparently terrible, and this materially impacts the students' content mastery and grades. Conversely, I've never heard of a terrible core class teacher at WJ and WW. There are also way more AP offerings at WJ and WW. BCC has the IB programme, which is great for some kids, but the concern is that US college admissions officers might not correctly weigh IB exam scores compared to AP scores. The IB is a European invention, and over there, getting a perfect score is rare. That philosophy has been transferred to IB exam scoring. Whereas if you don't get a 5/5 on an AP exam, you missed something. So I'm not sure the IB scores are as valued as AP scores, if you see what I mean. Students taking the full IB diploma are also locked into a list of courses, instead of being able to select their AP courses a la carte.

Now there's also the question of "big fish, little pond" vs "little fish, big pond" regarding college admissions: admissions officers consider applicant's course choices relative to what their school offers. The large range of advanced courses offered at WJ and WW would tend to push kids to take as many as possible, to prove they've taken advantage of the available selection. This makes for a high-pressure environment. But since there are fewer at BCC, students cannot be faulted for taking AP Calc BC AND multi-variable calculus, since most years the latter is not even offered, due to lack of demand (you could also ask yourself why demand is lower than at the other two schools).

But the bottom line is that they're all SOLID schools, where OP's kids will get a great education. I'm just parsing details because I know some of us here like that sort of thing

Anonymous wrote:Here is the make up of the school.

https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/regulatoryaccountability/glance/currentyear/schools/04427.pdf

People will say stuff like my neighborhood is diverse because I know a guy from England, and a woman from France and the Croatian family.

Anonymous wrote:Will be moving out of state to Bethesda for work near NIH. Have two high school age children. A future coworker expressed some concern that my children may feel like they don't fit in with their classmates/neighborhood . Should I be concerned as well?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:commute from hoard county and live there. Montgomery County has had it's day and it is never going back to the good ol days,

+1. MoCo on a clear downtrend. Go for NoVa.