School Advice

[jren]

I wouldn't hesitate to put my youngest in private, since that's what we're doing! LOL! Here, the private schools offer a much better education for elementary school than public, but by middle and high school things even out. Our DD is in private now and we gave her the choice to move to public for middle and will again for high school. There are some magnet schools around that she may be interested in by HS. For now, she's choosing to stay in private. We had our son in public for K and are moving him to private next year. We thought we'd give public a chance for him, since he has no educational issues like my DD had. Well, they are no longer teaching science in K, class sizes are too large, teacher was uninterested, lots of testing where the rest of the kids are put in front of a TV screen and shown movies, etc. DD was in K at this same school with the same teacher 5 years ago and it's really gone downhill since she was there. And this school gets a 10 rating on great schools website, and is supposedly one of the better schools in our area.

[Mommaof3]

Thanks for the advice everyone! Thankfully I have another year to think this through!

[llama8]

I live in a decent to good school district. We decided to start our oldest daughter in private catholic school this year for K and it was a fantastic decision. Even if I lived in a very good public school district, I think I would still be happy to send my kids to their Catholic school. The rigorous education and the caring environment that my daughter is exposed to is night and day compared to what I see my friend's children in the public schools going through. I also teach in public school and see what is going on with the state imposing testing on the students and public education has become a mess that I don't want my children to become a part of. I am hoping to keep my kids in Catholic school until they are college age.

I also think not all private schools are always better. You would have to research the one you are thinking of and see if it meets your needs and has all of the programs that you are looking for. If your daughters are doing very well and have great friends, I would probably let them stay in public and see how it goes.

[Mommaof3]

I live in a decent to good school district. We decided to start our oldest daughter in private catholic school this year for K and it was a fantastic decision. Even if I lived in a very good public school district, I think I would still be happy to send my kids to their Catholic school. The rigorous education and the caring environment that my daughter is exposed to is night and day compared to what I see my friend's children in the public schools going through. I also teach in public school and see what is going on with the state imposing testing on the students and public education has become a mess that I don't want my children to become a part of. I am hoping to keep my kids in Catholic school until they are college age.

I also think not all private schools are always better. You would have to research the one you are thinking of and see if it meets your needs and has all of the programs that you are looking for. If your daughters are doing very well and have great friends, I would probably let them stay in public and see how it goes.

Thank you for your response. The two schools we are considering are both very good. I would like to send him to the one in our parish, the only negative is it only has one class for each grade. The other school has two for each grade. Does your DD's school offer one or two classes per grade? I like the idea of more kids and not being with the same kids every year, but maybe that is a positive thing?

[jren]

Thank you for your response. The two schools we are considering are both very good. I would like to send him to the one in our parish, the only negative is it only has one class for each grade. The other school has two for each grade. Does your DD's school offer one or two classes per grade? I like the idea of more kids and not being with the same kids every year, but maybe that is a positive thing?

Not llama8, but wanted to chime in since our DD's current private school is one class per grade. We are moving her and my DS to a school with 3 or 4 classes per grade next year, so about 60-80 kids per grade. There were pros and cons to the one class per grade thing. For my DS, it was way too small, with only 9 kids in his grade. My DD didn't have as much of an issue with it since it was a bigger class with mostly girls. For our DS, he didn't have a lot in common with the few boys in his class, so didn't have a real peer group.

[Mommaof3]

Not llama8, but wanted to chime in since our DD's current private school is one class per grade. We are moving her and my DS to a school with 3 or 4 classes per grade next year, so about 60-80 kids per grade. There were pros and cons to the one class per grade thing. For my DS, it was way too small, with only 9 kids in his grade. My DD didn't have as much of an issue with it since it was a bigger class with mostly girls. For our DS, he didn't have a lot in common with the few boys in his class, so didn't have a real peer group.

Thank you for the input also, I know the one class school have 30 kids in them which seems like a lot to me...I am leaning more towards the two class school, only thing is it is not in our parish so the tuition is higher.

[llama8]

Thank you for your response. The two schools we are considering are both very good. I would like to send him to the one in our parish, the only negative is it only has one class for each grade. The other school has two for each grade. Does your DD's school offer one or two classes per grade? I like the idea of more kids and not being with the same kids every year, but maybe that is a positive thing?

My daughter's Catholic school has 2 classes per grade with anywhere from 20- 30 kids per class so 40-60 kids in each grade year. We liked this school, in particular, because there were more kids and it wasn't too small (but not too big either). I also found that since there are more kids, there are better extra-curriculars and programs.

We switched parishes to my daughter's current school to get in-parish tuition and join the community where she goes to school. It is super easy to switch your parish. We made a phone call to cancel at our old parish and made a phone call to join our new parish and get an envelope/ID number. (You do have older daughters, though, so I don't know if it will impact them in Religious Ed).

[Mommaof3]

My daughter's Catholic school has 2 classes per grade with anywhere from 20- 30 kids per class so 40-60 kids in each grade year. We liked this school, in particular, because there were more kids and it wasn't too small (but not too big either). I also found that since there are more kids, there are better extra-curriculars and programs.

We switched parishes to my daughter's current school to get in-parish tuition and join the community where she goes to school. It is super easy to switch your parish. We made a phone call to cancel at our old parish and made a phone call to join our new parish and get an envelope/ID number. (You do have older daughters, though, so I don't know if it will impact them in Religious Ed).

I would have a hard time changing parishes, I grew up in this one, had all my sacraments here, including my wedding. My kids have done everything there also and my older girls do CCD there. I think the tuition is $300 more a year at the out of parish one which isn't too bad but when you add it to the yearly tuition it adds up!

[AnnieW625]

Thank you for your response. The two schools we are considering are both very good. I would like to send him to the one in our parish, the only negative is it only has one class for each grade. The other school has two for each grade. Does your DD's school offer one or two classes per grade? I like the idea of more kids and not being with the same kids every year, but maybe that is a positive thing?

Not Llama8, but I have a third grader in Catholic school with only one class per grade and we/she is very happy there. We feel like the education is a good education and with the cost of aftercare at public school being $5 an hour it was going to cost us more to send Dd1 to a mediocre (our home school at the time) school with 3 hours of kindergarten and almost 7 hours of aftercare everyday than full day kindergarten and really reasonably priced aftercare. There are a few really tiny issues she is having with a couple of girls in her class, but they are all almost 9 now and we have talked about how playing in groups of 3 can be hard for some kids and she is now at the age where she is figuring out what true friendships are and that some kids are just harder to get along with. The only other downside of one class per grade is that I feel the middle school is a little small and I wish they could double up the size of the middle school, but at our school most if kids leave they leave in 6th or 7th grade for public middle school for sports or the real feel of traditional middle school, and I think that could be fairly daunting to go from a middle school of 80-90 kids to a public high school of 4500 kids (but that has been the norm for over 40 years and the kids who go to public are successful mainly because they go into the honors program that each of the public high schools in the district have). Our school has about 30 kids per grade, but there is an aide in grades pk to 3, which is great. I think DD2's class right now is on the smaller side because when I went to the new parent a few weeks ago I am 99% sure I was the only kindergarten parent there and the rest were there for the pre k class, and this current year's pre k class only has 21-22 kids, but I remember when I signed up there were only a total of 8 or so kids interviewing for kindergarten including 3 siblings (and now one of those siblings is moving and not coming), but the principal has been known to let kids in during the summer and even the first week of school so we could easily be at 30 kids, but I am ok with that.

We have a two class per grade Catholic school in a neighboring city as well (about 5 miles from our house), but the tuition is a more and they require more service hours (60 I think vs. 32 for ours) and they have fundraising requirements. One nice thing is my school might have the highest base tuition of the 8 or 9 1 class per grade Catholic schools that serve two cities with a total population of almost 600k, ours doesn't have a fundraising requirement so if I don't need gift wrap I don't have to buy it or I don't have to buy X amount of tickets to the Oktoberfest or parish fair if I am out of town those weekends. We also don't have a yearly book fee like many other schools have so in the end the costs end up being less.

Good luck with your choice.

Eta: we switched parishes when DD1 started kindergarten, but other than our kids being baptized at our old parish we had no real connection to the old church as we didn't grow up or get married in the area. I also honestly thought we would send our kids to that parish school, but then we visited both schools open house and got a better feeling from the other school, plus the fundraising and volunteer hour requirements at the old parish school were more, which made the current school a better deal.