Go to the tweens/teens forum and click on 10 threads about social problems.At least 9 of them will be kids in private schools. Academics can be supplemented at home. You can’t make up for social stuff as easily. I am in APS and my kid is in one of the “worst” middle schools. He has not reported anything alarming yet.

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this is why people bite the bullet financially and buy houses zoned to good schools.

Is it not possible for you to move?

That’s no guarantee either. Those schools have plenty of problems. This is exactly what we did when our kids our young. They are now teens and we have one in private and one in public. They are very different kids who thrive in very different settings.

Try the public first and switch later if it’s not working. We know plenty of families who switched between public and private, both ways and sometimes more than once. You don’t know what your kids will need in 5-10 years. They might be gifted in arts, math, a sport, robotics, a language, ….. the list goes on and on.

My kids went from a tiny, sheltered ES in FCPS to a rough and poorly rated MS. They survived those two years, made so many diverse friends they would have never met in private school, and love the high school (that is also poorly rated).

OP- definitely ask about current class size of the 6-8 grades at the parochial. At ours a lot of kids left for public in those grades if they didn’t plan to attend a Catholic HS. My son’s 8th grade class had around 20 kids total. We had moved by then.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We send our kids to private to avoid the large class size and give them all around a better school experience. So I would obviously go to private

Op - thanks. We are going to look at the open house this spring. It would be a huge adjustment for our oldest. She is with a lot of her friends now.

I keep going back and forth on whether it’s more beneficial to be with her neighborhood friends at school or be in a smaller school.

Where is she academically? Average, above, below?

Op - she is about average. Did not get into AAP in 3rd grade.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We send our kids to private to avoid the large class size and give them all around a better school experience. So I would obviously go to private

Op - thanks. We are going to look at the open house this spring. It would be a huge adjustment for our oldest. She is with a lot of her friends now.

I keep going back and forth on whether it’s more beneficial to be with her neighborhood friends at school or be in a smaller school.

Where is she academically? Average, above, below?

Anonymous wrote:We send our kids to private to avoid the large class size and give them all around a better school experience. So I would obviously go to private

Op - thanks. We are going to look at the open house this spring. It would be a huge adjustment for our oldest. She is with a lot of her friends now.

I keep going back and forth on whether it’s more beneficial to be with her neighborhood friends at school or be in a smaller school.

We send our kids to private to avoid the large class size and give them all around a better school experience. So I would obviously go to private

Whatever you do, stop looking at Greatschools. Their data is slow to update and it's often times inaccurate about basic stuff. Look at the test scores for the most recent year directly if that's important to you.

Anonymous wrote:Public elementary and private for middle school

Dumb. OP will practically have to homeschool her child (in addition) if she sends them to an underperforming elementary school yet expects them to get accepted into a good private for middle and high school. If the elementary is a 6/10, there is a high percentage of kids that are below grade level, meaning, if your child isn’t, they are not going to be learning much new material at school. Then there are the associated behavior problems

Anonymous wrote:Why don’t you let your kid try out public MS and take honors/AAP classes and go from there? Since diversity is important and they have good friend groups. I would probably use parochial as the nuclear option.

I would 100% switch their school to private now, then in middle/high school, switch them to public. But only if they are able to be AAP/magnet school tracked in public

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this is why people bite the bullet financially and buy houses zoned to good schools.

Is it not possible for you to move?

Op - to expand on this - we bought what we could afford (stretched it) about 10 years ago. We could probably afford a more expensive house now but we have 3 kids and a 2.4% interest rate. Seems foolish to move with such a low rate. We would need at least a 4 bedroom house and 3000 sq ft. That would probably be close to $1 million or more now. We bought our house for $700,000.

Public elementary and private for middle school

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this is why people bite the bullet financially and buy houses zoned to good schools.

Is it not possible for you to move?

Op - no we can’t move. We also love our neighborhood. If we moved it would be out of the DMV.

Honestly, this is why people bite the bullet financially and buy houses zoned to good schools.

Is it not possible for you to move?