<p>LOL, jonri, touch</p>
<p>Agree that high school is a long way away for a not yet born child, but threads meander. I was just responding to points made in the thread by others. </p>
<p>I don’t purport to know anything about Brooklyn Tech’s teams–and said so. I just happen to know one kid who is currently in high school who chose a different high school from which he thinks he has a much better chance of being recruited to play college baseball over Tech. I haven’t a clue as to whether he’s right. At least some sports are weaker --Hunter doesn’t even have a football team, for example. </p>
<p>Hunter doesn’t reserve “half” of the seats for elementary kids. It’s more like 20/25%. Usually 50 kids are admitted to the elementary school. Almost always, a few leave before 6th grade–families move, parents decide to move kids who are struggling, etc. So, there are usually something like 44-48 kids left by the end of 6th grade. Recently Hunter has gotten much more aggressive about discouraging the kids who are struggling to stay afloat from continuing, so some who do finish 6th grade are not allowed to continue. About 225 are admitted to the high school; the Hunter elementary school kids are included in that number. Some kids who get in choose not to attend. Some kids leave, especially after 8th grade. Some of those who leave are struggling and decide to move to their neighborhood schools. Some go to Stuy. Every now and then a Catholic boy chooses Regis. Some families move. So, by the time you get to graduation day, there are usually about 175-200 kids remaining. The class is bigger in 7th grade and then there’s attrition; it’s not uniformly 200 kid each year from 7th-12th. </p>
<p>It’s often the kids who didn’t get into Hunter’s “extended math honors” who transfer to Stuy. Their parents want a “do over.”(Hunter has 2 math tracks and it’s almost impossible to move out of the lower track into the upper.) In the past, some kids who wanted to do Intel projects transferred because Stuy had a course for that and Hunter didn’t–and wouldn’t give course credit for doing one. Hunter recently caved on that and started a class, so that probably won’t happen in the future. Stuy is just an incredibly nice facility and Hunter most definitely isn’t. The biggest reason though is geography. It’s easier to go to Stuy from Staten Island or Brooklyn than it is to get to Hunter. Cutting an hour a day or more off the commute is an incentive to transfer. Much more rarely, Bronx kids transfer to BxSci for the same reason. </p>
<p>Reality is that…as complicated as it can be…the high school selection process is a model of clarity compared to the elementary G&T and middle school processes. Among other things there’s one book with all of the over 300 high school programs listed in it and there’s a high school fair where you can go and ask questions of representatives from the schools. A fair number of good options have opened in the last 6-8 years too.
And, there’s often a very good, involved counselor who helps the kids and their families go through the process. That’s not the case for navigating the wilds of the elementary and usually the middle school process.</p>
<p>mathmom,</p>
<p>There you go again :)! </p>
<p>My offspring had a sane and relaxed childhood. Really. </p>
<p>I’m glad it worked out for your kids. Really. It also worked out for mine. Really. </p>
<p>As I said before, it’s different strokes for different folks. New York really is a city of neighborhoods. MANY of them are very family friendly. They are perfectly good places to raise kids. As I said before, a lot of the people who grew up in my neighborhood move back when they marry and have kids. They like it enough that they choose if for their kids.</p>
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<p>That’s only after Stuy moved downtown to Tribeca/Battery park. That happened sometime in the mid-latter part of my HS career. And yet, there were still plenty of Hunter kids going off to Stuy or the other SHS. </p>
<p>Main factors I gathered from those classmates was they wanted more of a STEM focus and more of a hardcore STEM nerd culture than what existed at Hunter. </p>
<p>Analogizing using LACs…they wanted more of a campus culture they perceived like Harvey Mudd’s or Olin…not Vassar or Amherst. </p>
<p>As I said…those perceptions weren’t reality…but they were commonly held by many parents/applicants.</p>
<p>This has been an amazing thread to read. I trust my brother and his wife very much to make the best decision for their boys - they have nurtured them with experiences and love and have sought to let them explore their own special interests in a very healthy way. Hunter sounds amazing and scary at the same time!! The 6th grader already has a 45 min+ commute as it is now so they and they both have offices that will allow them along with “carpooling” (subway pooling??) to make the travel work. As it is, this nephew travels with his mom at once a week after school for a special music opportunity he is involved in - so …and he is a happy , well adjusted kid! </p>
<p>Still, all this info on NYC schools is eye opening.</p>
<p>jonri, I don’t even know where your kids attended, I was just thinking about other CC parents and supercharged school systems in general. My oldest would probably have been happy as a clam at Stuy (though our Science Olympiad was pleased as punch the year we did better than them at States. 
)</p>
<p>abasket, by a month into 6th grade, my kid took the subway to school by herself, as do many, many middle school kids and maybe a majority of high school kids in the city. As for the relative attractiveness of Stuy vs Hunter, I think that the neighborhood of Stuy, in Battery Park City, is considered cooler than the neighborhood of Hunter, on the Upper East Side. But whatever, they are both excellent schools.</p>
<p>One great thing about raising a NYC kid is that she gets around by herself with her handy-dandy Metrocard. No worries about 16-year-old drivers: junior licenses are not valid within city limits. I find that it promotes a healthy independence in city teens.</p>
<p>And there are plenty of other great publics besides Stuy and Hunter!</p>
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<p>Unless you’re talking about really bad neighborhoods in Brooklyn, I can assure you that even the most expensive parts of Washington Heights and Inwood are less expensive than what people think of as the expensive parts of Brooklyn, never mind just about anyplace else in Manhattan. Renting an apartment in Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope or 100 blocks south of where I am now in a similarly nice neighborhood with similarly spectacular views of the Hudson River (or the equivalent) would easily cost twice as much as I pay, if it were even possible to find something like that. And it takes only about 20-30 minutes to get to midtown on the A train, and not all that much more than that to get downtown when I have to go to court in the morning. At least in my limited experience with Brooklyn, getting to midtown takes more than 20-30 minutes!</p>
<p>I’m fascinated with all this talk of Hunter Elementary School and Hunter High School and so on, given that I went to the former and my older sister to the latter. But that was a long time ago, and I’m sure things have changed. But I’m not sure that the quality of the education my son received at his public elementary school, middle school and high school in a small Northern New Jersey suburban town was all that much less, or that he was any less well-prepared for an “elite” college than I was; the main difference was that a much smaller percentage of his classmates, in grade school and later, consisted of kids who were high achievers academically. But I don’t think that the top 20% of his class was really any less accomplished than what I remember was the case at my own high school (not Hunter High but a private high school). And although Glen Ridge High School was hardly the perfect place for him in a social sense, and has unsavory aspects to its own history, and he might well have been happier at some hypothetical other school (being the only out gay kid from the time he was 12 wasn’t easy for him), I still think it was better for him as a human being than Horace Mann was for me. For a lot of reasons, none of them having anything to do with academics. Sometimes I look back and find some of the things that went on there almost impossible to believe. Based only on what I knew then about what was going on; never mind what I know now.</p>
<p>PS: I confess to thinking before my son was born that he was likely to be extremely bright, just because. But I certainly didn’t make any assumptions in that regard, and didn’t finally conclude that he was, until he was at least 3 or 4 days old.</p>
<p>mathmom, </p>
<p>It’s probably that I’m just defensive. Your post 61 implied to me that kids who attend exam schools can’t have sane, relaxed lives. Mine did. That’s all.</p>
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<p>CObrat, give it a rest, the “new” building has been in existence for almost 3o years.</p>
<p>Stuyvesant moved in 1992.
[url=<a href=“Stuyvesant High School”>http://www.stuy.edu/]www.stuy.edu[/url</a>]</p>
<p>There is also the unintended consequences of so much of the change in NYC schools. In Queens up until fairly recently, the school model has been K-6 with traditional junior high of grades 7-9 and then high school which is what it was when I graduated from high school in Queens in the dark ages.
My closest friend retired from one of the most highly regarded junior high schools in Queens a few years ago. With the changeover to grade 6-8 middle schools and the pressure to get into a competitive high school, virtually their entire 9th grade has disappeared except for those students “left behind” whose parents did not think far enough ahead to have them select schools to match with… because the enrollment in the school has signficantly decreased, so has the funding…with the funding decrease the principal’s budget has become very tight, with the very tight budget come the cuts…enrichment classes out the door. With the enrichment classes such as the elective law class my friend taught for years out the door, the school becomes less attractive to incoming students and their families who might opt to try to get their students into a 'hotter" school" and so on and so on… so there you see the life cycle of the school.</p>
<p>Another law of unintended consequences are the small enrollment special interest schools in which there are not enough kids interested in studying that special interest because kids “matched there” or those interested in studying the special interest created by the visionary principal and staff… however the visionary principal and staff retire three years into the life cycle of the school and are replaced by people who don’t share that vision. </p>
<p>While it is a plus in the small school movement that faculty and staff get to know every student, those students often feel they are missing out on what makes high school high school - sports, yearbook, school play, orchestra/ chorus, service clubs, etc… Sometimes in the large campus that was once a large high school but now houses 10 individual small schools - there are building teams or building orchestras… but not 100% across the board… and libraries in those schools frequently go unused because none of the librarians are faculty members at the small schools, not in their budget lines…</p>
<p>And I can go on and on… yet every day many children go to fine neighborhood schools and many go to elite specialized schools and excel and do perfectly fine while sadly others fail to be educated to graduate and become productive members of society</p>