Urban vs. suburban schools

Parent Cafe
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<p>At first I thought you were telling me that my race is unlikely to change at School B, and my reaction was “duh”, but then I figured it out.</p>

<p>The students of color are pretty equally divided Asian/Latino/African American, so maybe 10% AA? As I said earlier there’s also somewhat a divide in classes, so that while the school’s 10% AA, his honors classes unfortunately aren’t. </p>

<p>I don’t think the issue is my skin color directly, in the sense that kids are rejecting him because he has a white mom. Not that I don’t think that’s possible, but because I don’t know that many of them know that since he doesn’t socialize outside of school. It’s quite possible that he’s missing some kind of social knowledge that he’d have if he grew up in a black family, and that’s hindering him specifically with the black kids, but to be clear he’s not more or less successful with black peers vs. white vs. kids of other races. When I wrote that I was thinking more in terms of he’s aware that he doesn’t completely “fit in” and so he withdraws and doesn’t seek out social opportunities. But it’s just a theory. When I ask him he just says that they’re nice, and he likes them, and they like him but they aren’t his “friends”. </p>

<p>At his previous school, and on his sports teams, I’d say his friends are evenly divided between black and white and he does equally well with both groups.</p>

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<p>The “suburban/urban divide” is not uniform in all areas. For example, in the urban areas around here, there are rich and poor areas, as well as good and bad schools. The same applies to suburban areas. Ethnic diversity can be found in both urban and suburban areas, though there are pockets in both urban and suburban areas where one ethnic group predominates.</p>

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<p>School B in across the state line, in a state with less desirable state universities?</p>

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<p>School B is across the state line, and has one, extremely limited, instate option.</p>

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<p>Lack of instate options is a possible deal-breaker. </p>

<p>I think you need to consider whether your son having a small circle of friends and not being terribly social in terms of inviting people over is just who he is. </p>

<p>My S is an introvert, and he was not unlike that in HS. He rarely invited anyone over, but he socialized with kids from his sports teams and had a smallish but fairly tight group of friends. He was quite content.</p>

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<p>The state university situation is a definite factor. I think it’s likely I’d choose to pay tuition with that as a major reason why.</p>

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<p>I meant to add that, especially given the college situation and the other issues around finding a place to live that you have mentioned, if you do decide to do it I would start by paying tuition and not move.</p>

<p>I don’t want to attempt to practice psychology without a license, but have you asked yourself whether you might be putting undue weight on things that you can’t currently give him, despite being a great mother, namely a father and a black male role model in the household? Not that they aren’t important. But…</p>

<p>I have a lot of sympathy for your situation. It’s a tough choice.</p>

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<p>It’s hard to say what is best. Certainly the smaller school sounds attractive, but the commute does not. And moving doesn’t sound like a great idea to me. If you live in a safe neighborhood, know your neighbors, and have good relationships in the community, not worth leaving that for ??? If you can make it work without moving, that sounds best. I personally would not be all that worried about college if the kid is a good student. It sounds like he will get what he needs academically at the smaller school and also maybe be more free to be himself. Only you can really know if it will work for your family, though.</p>

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<p>Am I putting weight on it? Yes, I think that all kids benefit from having adult role models who share their attributes, and that given the barrage of negative messages that young black men receive about themselves they need it in particular. </p>

<p>I have always felt that there’s no school that can teach everything. It’s simply impossible for a school to provide everything, and that rather than asking “what’s the best school”, we should be asking, in part, “what can I offer and which school’s complement that?” I’m a teacher, I can supplement academics at home quite easily. I can also, if need be, pay for sport or arts activities outside of school. One thing I can’t do is be a black man. So if I believe that my kid needs a life that includes academics, and sports, and arts, and black men (that’s over simplifying but you get the idea) then maybe I should prioritize the thing I’m least likely to be able to provide during the hours he’s with me.</p>

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<p>Well, that certainly makes sense.</p>

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<p>You narrowed it down I think with the above post. As a comparison, we let our children choose after each one shadowed the high school. Surprise- the one we thought would attend the fine arts academy attended the academic magnet and the one that we thought would attend the magnet is attending the fine arts high school. Kids at that age do really have a sense of what they need. If the academics are acceptable enough, let him go for it.
The magnet kid is at a top design program in a top 25 university and I’m just as confident that the fine arts kid will find her right college also when the time comes to apply.</p>

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<p>Jane,</p>

<p>My D is biracial and I drive her 15 miles each way every day so that she can attend a small public school with private backing, that is almost entirely populated by minority students and that has no sports or arts program other than art class and the option to join other HS teams. It’s a 6-12 school housed entirely in portables. But EVERY SENIOR got into one or more colleges. Every one.</p>

<p>But the kids there thrive. D thrives. She has more friends now than she ever did in “good” schools with “great” academic programs and lots of EC’s. The kids in class with her GET her-something that never happened, even a little, in our district’s gifted, primarily white, program.</p>

<p>We are lucky that we do not have to pay tuition-our district’s money follows D to the district where the school is located. But if we had to pay, we would. We landed there after looking it at on a whim, like you and your S. We knew, SHE knew, that it was “home”. Don’t discount that gut feeling. I’d be happy to tell you more about what D has said about being a child of color in a predominantly white environment if you want to go to PM. CC might make it seem like it’s all about EC’s, grades and a host of AP’s but real life, and our kids’ happiness, is about a lot more.</p>

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<p>It sounds like you already answered your question…it sounds like in many ways option B is where you are leaning and it does sound like something that may draw him out of his shell, doing something he thinks he likes and being around teachers and students who more reflect who he is. </p>

<p>From your description, I think the biggest factor at B might be the commute and the college situation (assuming you can afford the tuition). Your son has already shown self motivation, he works hard to get the grades he does, so it is unlikely that a school that has kids who on average are not achieving as well will bring him down or make him go lowest common denominator (that can be a real concern, sometimes kids to be motivate need to be challenged by higher achieving students). Despite the current mania, I don’t think the lack of AP classes in B is going to kill him, I know the mania only too well with the Xap’s, the Y ecs to get into HYP, but it doesn’t sound like you or he want that path (and it sounds like A, like many suburban upper middle class schools do, does emphasize that). I am like you, I happen to think that choosing the path less well trod is worth it, we are doing that with my son, we homeschooled him, pulling him out of an academically top notch private school that also was liberal enough not to be cookie cutter college prep, in part so he could find his own dream (he got serious about music, pursuing it, and needed the flexibility of doing it). As long as you have trust in him to keep putting in the work, you can supplement the rest, you can get him involved in outside sports teams, he might meet friends at his new school who are on teams he could be involved in. Could he find that B is too limiting? I think he needs to find that out for himself, and I think even if theater tech is not his thing, the experience of doing that is going to be a valuable lesson, learning how to apply things to real world situations:).</p>

<p>I also happen to believe that whatever course you choose, he will do fine, because he has something incredible on his side, you. A therapist I worked with once described parenting (she had raised 4 of her own) and she said you could always tell the less then stellar parents from the good ones; the less then stellar ones when you talked to them had it all planned out, they knew everything and would tell you what great parents they were, whereas the good parents were the ones who every day looked at themselves and said “am I doing the right thing? Am I hurting the kid by doing that? What is best for him?Am I doing this for him or for me?” and agonize over it, whereas especially with really bad parents it doesn’t both them a bit. A lot of parents given the situation you gave me would immediately go for A, saying that ‘of course it was the better option, look at where the kids graduating from there go to, it shows it is the best choice’ without asking best choice for what? You are looking at this as a whole experience and looking at what would help him more. It isn’t that necessarily A would be a bad choice for any student, but rather that what A represents may not be a perfect fit for all kids, and you recognize that, you recognize he is his own person with his own needs. My son is a musician at heart, it is who he is, and to force him to instead pursue the path most high school kids do because that is the one leading to what most see as better outcomes wouldn’t in our opinion have done him justice, and that is what you seem to be saying.</p>

<p>I also believe in listening to your gut, and your seems to be saying give B a shot. Even if it doesn’t work out perfectly, in the end at least you and he both learned more about what will make him fly by seeing what doesn’t. About the only thing I would worry about is if he is there late, could you pick him up? If he were a couple of years earlier riding a bus at night would be no big deal, but to me a kid of 13 or 14 hasn’t developed some of the skills to handle that (some can, of course), the street smarts and such to handle it if something were to happen. </p>

<p>Again, I think given the kind of caring mom he has, he will do fine whatever path he takes, it may have its twists and turns and bumps, but that is life. My son is seriously heading into music, facing things I never had to, it is one of the most tenuous of fields to go into, but I have confidence that he is the kind of person who will find his way, and even if all those years, money and time spent supporting him doesn’t end up with him being a musician, that path in of itself already has indelibly changed him, and for the better, and I suspect it will be the same way with your son.</p>

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<p>If you are willing to move for him to attend School B (or had entertained that possibility), why not just move to a different school district in your state? You make it sound as if the only choices are School A and School B. </p>

<p>Some options that spring to mind are the performing arts academy at Blake HS [url=&lt;a href=“http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/blakehs/academy/academy_of_arts_and_communication.htm]Academy”&gt;http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/blakehs/academy/academy_of_arts_and_communication.htm]Academy</a> of Arts and Communications<a href=“which%20I%20mistakenly%20believed%20was%20a%20county-wide%20magnet;%20it%20is%20simply%20part%20of%20a%20consortium%20of%20three%20districts%20in%20the%20county%20so%20you%20could%20move%20anywhere%20in%20that%20consortium%20area%20and%20be%20eligible”>/url</a>, Eleanor Roosevelt HS (routinely in the top schools listings and very racially diverse), or your choice of any number of other schools in your county or nearby counties that might suit your son better than his current situation.</p>

<p>My initial belief was that I should find the “best” (most APs, best test scores, most NMF, most acceptances to top schools) school district and send my kids to that school. However, my kid was not an academic world-beater (although plenty smart), and I think she would have been both unhappy and overlooked had she gone to the HS up the road where it is routine to start AP classes in freshman year and to amass upwards of 10 AP classes/tests by the time of college applications. It wouldn’t have served her well. So, looking at whether the school you are considering has a squillion AP classes or the tippy-top SAT scores might not tell you whether that is the best school for your kid–but you already know that.</p>

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<p>I figured someone would figure out which schools we’re talking about. I’m pushing the edge of my comfort as far as his confidentiality right now, so I really appreciate that you didn’t name the actual schools (A and B) that we’re talking about. I’m sure you know, at least, the identity of B, but I’d rather this not be “googleable” in that way. </p>

<p>I’ve looked pretty extensively, and haven’t found another good fit. For him to move to a Consortium school like Blake or Blair (another school with a program that might be a fit), we’d have to move into the new district by November 1, and then go through the application process. There’s a good chance he wouldn’t get in, and then we’d be in a school without a theater program at all. </p>

<p>In addition, though, I think that size is a big part of what he’s reacting to. We’ve visited Blair, which about a thousand kids bigger than School A, and his immediate response was that it was too big. We haven’t visited Blake but it’s big too.</p>

<p>Roosevelt is a fantastic school, in a great area, but there are a variety of reasons from size, to details of their academic program, that I don’t think it would be a good fit for him. </p>

<p>I think that while race was a factor in why he liked B, it wasn’t the only factor. I think he liked the size, and the different feel you get from having only arts students in the building. B’s got a pretty unique “feel” to it that I know Blair and Roosevelt don’t have since I’ve visited, and I suspect Blake doesn’t either. He also likes the fact that everyone at “B” is new with no feeder schools.</p>

<p>There’s also the fact that I am pretty attached to my city, I made peace with moving shortly over the line, and have surprisingly come to love where I live, but Greenbelt or the areas served by the NEC (the areas you have to live in to apply to Blake) would not be my choice. To be honest, I think I’d rather pay tuition than live there.</p>

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<p>Curious Jane, I know nothing about your area. But in NYC, they have a separate high school admissions process for students who move to the district after the process is in play. They do auditions, the big test, etc., etc. in August. Of course there are fewer seats available but it’s a small enough number of students that I believe they can leave all schools open to these students if they meet the admisions criteria. Just saying that it might be the process where you live and nearby as well. </p>

<p>The commute doesn’t intimidate me as much, being a NYer whose kid took the subway to school (with me through grade 5) and now has a choice of 3 different subway lines and 5 different bus lines to get to school 2 miles away. I think a majority of high schoolers here use public transportation to get to school. I am glad that I have a car just in case but it’s not really necessary and most NYers don’t have one.</p>

<p>My kid is of different race than I am (white), and I know that it’s something she thinks about. We saw a college advisor last week and my daughter volunteered that she wants to go to a college with a pretty good amount of diversity.</p>

<p>Good luck to you and your boy! You’re being a good mom to listen to your son when he tells you what he wants.</p>

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<p>A program that small sounds like it could be godsend to a kid without a social niche. If there are 5 tech freshmen, it’s hard to imagine one kid being excluded.</p>

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<p>It doesn’t work that way here. Where we live, the vast majority of kids go to their local public school, or perhaps private. There are only a few programs with test requirements, and you have to be living in the district the year before to participate. </p>

<p>In the city where School B is located, there are more choices. Plenty of charters, which he could apply to but don’t interest him, and 5 magnet programs. 4 of the magnet programs require you to be in the city to apply, but aren’t interesting to him. The 5th is B which allows out of bounds applicants.</p>