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Do your kids go to public or private school? (1 Viewer)

Quez

Quez

Footballguy
The elementary school district we are in has always been an A, but the last grade it dropped to a C.  My kid is only 4, so we have one more year at the church preschool before it's time to go to kindergarten.  I checked out the tuition of a few local private schools, and it's like 14k a year!  I went to private school from 5th-12th and it was only like 5-6k back then. The cost of living in FL is pretty low, so I'm sure these numbers are nothing compared to the top schools in NY, Chicago, San Fran, DC, etc.  The highest priced private school around here is like 22k a year.

I'm a little concerned as well about how the local school dripped 2 grades.  After digging in, it appears 45% of the students are on free lunch.  I know they have a "School choice" program where parents can apply to have kids go to a different school, so maybe there is more bussing in?  The median home value in the school boundary is above average. I don't get it.  Maybe the common core is making the kids do worse on the test?  I have no idea.

 
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My kids does public and we have no major issues with his education.  We are in the burbs in a county that is about middle income level with a lot of parental involvement so we are doing okay.  There is a local private school that has a wonderful rep but at the prices they charge I figure my kid can start on his career path to middle management and forgo the competition for upper management.  Works for me.

 
Ours are in public, but we have a pretty good district. But, I also cannot afford private school. We moved into our district mainly for the schools. 

 
Public. 

ETA:  I chose Lexington as the town to live specifically for the school system, which is always ranked in the top 10 statewide out of over 1,400 districts. 

 
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My daughter is in Private school, but I am not so sure I will be able to send both of my kids there after my son starts Kindergarten next year :(

 
Daughter's going into 1st grade. Public for elementary. Middle and high school zones are a lot bigger and stretch into not as nice of an area as our elementary zone. There's also a big debate about more section 8 being offered in the middle and high school zones. 

 
avoiding injuries said:
Daughter's going into 1st grade. Public for elementary. Middle and high school zones are a lot bigger and stretch into not as nice of an area as our elementary zone. There's also a big debate about more section 8 being offered in the middle and high school zones. 
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This is kind of what I was hoping to look at.  Public for Elementary, as it has always been a good school, then look at private for middle.

 
tried private (Jesuit) early on, then switched to public for the past four years, where she remains.

she had some discipline problems at the first school, and I disagreed w/the techniques used to assist her. 

she got much better care in the public system, and has been model student ever since. 

 
Private.  Our public schools are excellent (people actually move here to be in these districts), but we chose private because of smaller classrooms and more individual attention.  It's worked out well.

 
Public through 7th grade in a pretty solid school district (Cherry Creek School District in Colorado).  Home schooled now due to time commitments to Dance.(She trains 40 hours per week so cannot waste time, and public schools waste time.)  She's working a grade ahead, in all advanced classes, and has never received less than an "A".   Good and smart kid, nothing like her Father, or should I say nothing like me, the Father thing was a presumption, it could be that Foos is the Father, or maybe GM, or Beer 30, or BM....

 
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My kids go to public. 

The public school I work in just started offering tuition for students who want to go there. 14,000 a year. We have some excellent athletic teams  I imagine anyone who pays that money is sending their kids there for sports. 

It's a good high school, but 14,000 isnt that off a place like Don Bosco down the road. 

My son, who is 6, is already asking to go there so he can play hockey for them.

 
AcerFC said:
My kids go to public. 

The public school I work in just started offering tuition for students who want to go there. 14,000 a year. We have some excellent athletic teams  I imagine anyone who pays that money is sending their kids there for sports. 

It's a good high school, but 14,000 isnt that off a place like Don Bosco down the road. 

My son, who is 6, is already asking to go there so he can play hockey for them.
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Paying to go to a public school?

 
Public schools for both of my kids.  We moved a two years ago and our old school district was a primary concern.

 
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It's worth really examining what the school grades are based on. It could be as meaningless as a one year blip in test scores. This happened in the school where my wife worked when two genius twins graduated. 

 
Private for K-8.  Wife started working there early on, so that was a break in the tuition.

Public for high school.  It's not the greatest for average students, but they have a lot of CIS and accelerated opportunities.  If you are willing to work you can get a whole year of college work done (depending on acceptance of those credits, but they are accepted at most public universities in the state).  Average students are going to have a tougher time, so I would worry if my kids fell into an "average" group, but I would consider private high school on a case by case basis for my kids.

 
randall146 said:
It's worth really examining what the school grades are based on. It could be as meaningless as a one year blip in test scores. This happened in the school where my wife worked when two genius twins graduated. 
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Hard to believe two kids could make that big of a difference.  Small school or something?

 
Private for two kids. $45k per year which includes transport and a hot lunch every day (no more packing lunches ?)

They spent two years in public school  

It is an investment in them. My life might would be more comfortable without this bill but here the difference in schools is night and day. 

 
My kids were in private school in IA, but when I moved to IN they started going to public schools.  We are in an excellent school district, so no need to fork over the $$ for private.

 
ChiefD said:
Ours are in public, but we have a pretty good district. But, I also cannot afford private school. We moved into our district mainly for the schools. 
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:yes:   same. We have friends in our district who home school and others who send their kids to a private school but IMO that's a waste of money here.  All 3 schools - HS, Middle and Elementary, earned A+ ratings.  Our middle school is #3 out of 1,106 in the state, high school just opened up but the partner school is #5/1,106, and our elementary school is #15 out of roughly 4,000.

 
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Bull Dozier said:
Private for K-8.  Wife started working there early on, so that was a break in the tuition.

Public for high school.  It's not the greatest for average students, but they have a lot of CIS and accelerated opportunities.  If you are willing to work you can get a whole year of college work done (depending on acceptance of those credits, but they are accepted at most public universities in the state).  Average students are going to have a tougher time, so I would worry if my kids fell into an "average" group, but I would consider private high school on a case by case basis for my kids.
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That's what we're thinking as well.  So many advanced courses to take.   Each county in NJ has a public science and technology school where in addition to the liberal arts classes you take with the rest of the general population, you take advanced science, computer, mathematics and engineering classes.  They only accept a small number of kids so your kid needs to know his/her stuff to get accepted.

 
Long Ball Larry said:
johnnycakes said:
Public. 

ETA:  I chose Lexington as the town to live specifically for the school system, which is always ranked in the top 10 statewide out of over 1,400 districts. 
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What? There are 1400 school districts in Massachusetts?!
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MA is weird (in many ways  ;)  ) in that each town is it's own district, rather than by county. This is especially strange when it comes to calling days for snow. Growing up near Boston, in a town called Hingham, our Super was a POS, and was hard to call days, so there were days when every town surrounding us would have a day off, but not us. This was of course better in June when we would get out earlier...but in Feb as a student, you just wanted the days called!

 
randall146 said:
It's worth really examining what the school grades are based on. It could be as meaningless as a one year blip in test scores. This happened in the school where my wife worked when two genius twins graduated. 
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I think they do some test or something.  There were scores for like reading, math, science, and maybe 1 other category.  It may be the testing method, as I have heard criticism.  Maybe it's common core?  Maybe it's more kids from lower socioeconomic households taking advantage of the "school choice" program?  I just read it today, so I will have to ask around.  

 
Hooper31 said:
A? C? What are these grades based on? 
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This is a good question.  In my state, schools get rated on all sorts of metrics (like completion rates) that, while they're important, they're not really important to me in any immediate sense.  I mean, sure, a school with a really crappy graduation rate probably has some sort of problem, although it's hard to tell exactly what.  Maybe they have crappy teachers, or maybe they're just in a bad neighborhood with kids who were always dropping out no matter what.  Who knows.  

But that's not most schools.  Assuming the graduation rate, mean test scores, or whatever is over some minimum threshold, marginal changes in those numbers don't mean much.  They certainly mean a lot less than hard-to-quantify things like "Can my kid take AP Calculus, and do kids who take that class generally pass the AP exam?" or "Can my kid take four years of German or does the curriculum stop after two years?" or "What kinds of colleges are the 'good' students from this school getting into?"  Unless the school is a dumpster fire on some critical dimension or another, that stuff is what really matters to me.    

 
VandyMan said:
Hard to believe two kids could make that big of a difference.  Small school or something?
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Somewhat small, but many kids don't take the test, and these two kids were just so much smarter than everyone else. Weird but true. 

I'm not saying that's what happened in OP's situation, just suggesting he look into the grades before giving them too much weight. 

 
People obsess over school rankings. But that ranking is totally irrevelant to your individual student. It's more a reflection of the people who live in the district than specifically the efficacy of the school itself. 

Your kid will do well or poorly based on parental involvement, I ate temperament and skills, peer group influences and expectations of his or her immediate community (friends, sports, church etc...basically is education valued in their personal circle). A high achieving kid will do great in a top tier or middle tier school - probably all the same honestly. 

 
NYC does the grade thing for schools too... we found that most of what they were graded on wasn't relevant to us, so minimized the grades relative to other criteria (recommendations from trusted sources, at the top... recommendations from strangers were relatively meaningless). IMO and experience, you'd be well served to really research the schools available to you, regardless of their grades. 

our kids are 9 (going into 4th) and 5 (going into K). daughter just wrapped up private pre-k. private school in NYC is around 40k starting at K. 40-freaking-k. two kids = 80grand plus all the rest of the nonsense (field trips, teacher "gifts", etc, etc). 

our oldest fortunately tested into the gifted and talented program in the city, which gave him access to better public schools outside of the neighborhood. so far, his school has been fantastic across the board: he's learning the fundamentals well and getting a ton of enrichment programs with an emphasis on performing arts (his principal used to be on broadway). his little sister just got the needed score to as well- so she'll be joining him there. 

 
We moved to our current location because they are the best in the state.  As such our property taxes are higher, but I'd rather pay that slight increase than a private school which we would have done before our move 

 
Ditkaless Wonders said:
Public through 7th grade in a pretty solid school district (Cherry Creek School District in Colorado).  Home schooled now due to time commitments to Dance.(She trains 40 hours per week so cannot waste time, and public schools waste time.)  She's working a grade ahead, in all advanced classes, and has never received less than an "A".   Good and smart kid, nothing like her Father, or should I say nothing like me, the Father thing was a presumption, it could be that Foos is the Father, or maybe GM, or Beer 30, or BM....
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Please excuse my stupid question but I don't have kids.  If you daughter wanted to go to a top tier school like a Stanford, Duke or Ivy could she get in being home schooled?  I assume is she scores well enough on her SAT/ACT's that is the litmus test but what if she is borderline?  How about a good school that is second tier say a USC. Michigan or UVA?  Just curious. 

 
No kids here but it would most likely be public if I had them. 

I cringe when I hear what some people pay for private school.  I agree that the public vs. private debate will vary greatly depending on the area but in my experiences, a lot of how a kid turns out (dumb, successful, a jerk, ######, etc. etc.) was more so on the parenting than the school they went to.

 
sbonomo said:
Please excuse my stupid question but I don't have kids.  If you daughter wanted to go to a top tier school like a Stanford, Duke or Ivy could she get in being home schooled?  I assume is she scores well enough on her SAT/ACT's that is the litmus test but what if she is borderline?  How about a good school that is second tier say a USC. Michigan or UVA?  Just curious. 
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The home school is certified by the Cherry Creek School District.  She covers the same material and takes the same testing as kids in the school. Has there been some stigma in the past, yes, but less so now, and frankly, like her father, she crushes standardized testing, like the SAT's where I was a National Merit Scholar.  She was a year ahead, and taking the advance placement classes through Middle school in a well-rated school system so she has some history in the well-rated school district in regular enrollment, and this home school enrollment is done through the District.  This is not some religious or separatist movement home schooling.

Me, I was accepted for admittance to Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Notre Dame, Duke, MIT, and the University of Rochester,  I suspect she would be as well.  Stanford, well they put me on their waiting list having already accepted two students from my High School and explaining that their diversity favored not accepting more students from the same High School absent compelling justification.  The two that were greenlighted were top rated High Schoolers in gymnastics and tennis, a big thing there I guess.  They really liked those sorts of activities.  It always bothered me.  Stanford was the only place to not accept me outright. (Both the other kids accepted by Stanford were also National Merit Scholars so them preferring the top High School athletes over a stoner was probably a no brainer.)

I admit I have some trepidation about the less than regular path my daughter is taking.  I worry some Admission Offices may still harbor some doubts about the home schooling thing.  Still, given how much time she devotes to dance it was the only way to make the schedules work.  I hope her achievements there will outweigh any perceived reduction of educational challenge in the record she accumulates.  In the end, who knows?  Maybe we have Admission Officers here who could speak to the matter.

 
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Public.  Reason I moved to Thousand Oaks/Westlake.  Though people still pay a ransom to send their kids to Oaks Christian.  It's like paying for college several times over.

 
eoMMan said:
No kids here but it would most likely be public if I had them. 

I cringe when I hear what some people pay for private school.  I agree that the public vs. private debate will vary greatly depending on the area but in my experiences, a lot of how a kid turns out (dumb, successful, a jerk, ######, etc. etc.) was more so on the parenting than the school they went to.
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Unless there are no good public alternatives I think private school is a tremendous waste of money.  I would rather use the 20 plus k to take the kid around the world every year, far more valuable imo.

 
Two kids, public with a caveat, both are in separate magnet programs. Older daughter is in middle school in a Spanish immersion program, younger daughter is in a G&T accelerated cluster. 

 
sbonomo said:
Please excuse my stupid question but I don't have kids.  If you daughter wanted to go to a top tier school like a Stanford, Duke or Ivy could she get in being home schooled?  I assume is she scores well enough on her SAT/ACT's that is the litmus test but what if she is borderline?  How about a good school that is second tier say a USC. Michigan or UVA?  Just curious. 
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https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=39384

When high-achieving homeschoolers reach that threshold, many look to top-tier colleges and universities. In competing for admission, they want the same sort of academic recognition enjoyed by their more conventionally educated peers, even though they're short on formal credentials.

Among the nation's elite universities, Stanford has been one of the most eager to embrace them. Despite the uncertainties of admitting students with no transcripts or teacher recommendations, the University welcomes at least a handful every year. Stanford has found that the brightest homeschoolers bring a mix of unusual experiences, special motivation and intellectual independence that makes them a good bet to flourish on the Farm.

The University's special interest in these students originated, in large part, with a single admission officer. Jonathan Reider, '67, PhD '83, is a national expert on college-bound homeschoolers. He spent 15 years at Stanford as senior associate director of undergraduate admission and as a lecturer in the Structured Liberal Education program. Though he left the Farm last summer to direct college counseling at a San Francisco high school, his enthusiasm had spread and become institutionalized.

For the past two years, for instance, the University has tracked every application from a homeschooled student. These forms get flagged with a special code that lets reviewers find them among stacks of applications and helps admission officials chart emerging trends. Many top schools do not do this, including Harvard and Yale.

"I don't think anyone has caught on to the fact that these are such interesting kids," Reider says.

The latest Stanford numbers show a rise in homeschooler applications. In 1999, the first year of tracking, 15 applied. Four were admitted, and all four enrolled. In 2000, there were 35 applications, more than double the previous year's. Nine were accepted, and five, including Butler, started classes on the Farm this fall.

That's a tiny subgroup, just 0.2 percent of the applicant pool. So why is the University interested? Admission officers sum it up in two words: intellectual vitality.

It's hard to define, but they swear they know it when they see it. It's the spark, the passion, that sets the truly exceptional student--the one driven to pursue independent research and explore difficult concepts from a very early age--apart from your typical bright kid. Stanford wants students who have it.

Looking very closely at homeschoolers is one way to get more of those special minds, the admission office has discovered. As Reider explains it: "Homeschooled students may have a potential advantage over others in this, since they have consciously chosen and pursued an independent course of study."

Indeed, when he and his colleagues read applications last year, they gave the University's highest internal ranking for intellectual vitality to two of the nine homeschoolers admitted. And an astounding four homeschoolers earned the highest rating for math--something reserved for the top 1 to 2 percent of the applicant pool.

"The distinguishing factor is intellectual vitality," says Reider. "These kids have it, and everything they do is responding to it."

Does Stanford lure more of them than other elite schools? It's hard to tell when others don't keep the same statistics, but Reider has given the University a particularly high profile among families in the movement.
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