High school decision: Private, Parochial or Selective Public?

For what it’s worth:

The private school I went to, and the private school my kids went to until they didn’t, had classes of about 90 people in high school and ~75 in middle school. I never felt that was too small, and my kids never felt their classes were too small, either.

When they moved to a 600-student/class high school, that felt big to the 11th grader at first (she only knew one person in her class before she went there, and they weren’t really friends, and she said, “It’s so big I don’t register as the new kid who might be interesting. I’m just another person they’ve never met.”). But she found her people after 3-4 months, and that shrank the school to a very manageable size for her. My younger child, who started in 9th grade with everyone else, never felt it was too big. He had a cohort that went from class to class together in 9th grade, and by 10th grade people were sorting out by interests and activities. I think 220 students would not have felt that large at all, to either of them.

Will Lincoln Park’s IB program get me into a good school?

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: it will give you the opportunity to show “good” schools that you can shine in a rigorous program, which sets you up well for college admissions- but you will have to deliver the goods yourself.