<p>Not in my state, but TJ is well known and highly regarded: [TJHSST</a> Splash Page](<a href=“http://www.tjhsst.edu/]TJHSST”>http://www.tjhsst.edu/)</p>
<p>I have two sons, one who just graduated and one who is a sophmore in an environmental science magnet school in NJ. Was a home run for our children - no regrets at all. The one drawback - no sports whatsoever - is more than compensated with the numerous academic teams and competitions. The average SAT score at my sons school is 400 points higher than our home school district. And my son scored significantly higher than that. He was challenged throughout his four years and loved every minute of it. There is no question that the work load was tremendous. When I say my son had some (not numerous) but some nights that he had to stay up to 3 in the morning just to complete the days homework, I am not lying. His papers normally ran 15 - 20 pages in length with hours and hours of reading and research. ALL I can tell you is that my eldest is currently attending Northwestern (was his top pick after he was waitlisted and then rejected by MIT) and he is doing fine. Averaging A’s in all his classes which include Calc, Physics, Chem and Sociology. And that on the Northwestern quarter system, so I’m happy. He was prepared. His “harder” high school prepared him for college. He has heard from his other classmates and the same is true for them. They feel prepared. And many of these students are in top schools like Harvard, Brown, Cornell, Stanford, etc.</p>
<p>My youngest, the sophmore, is just starting the feel the “pain” as his homework load is increasing sharply this year. For most of the bright children that attend this school (under 200 students total), it’s about time management. All of the kids are pretty smart or else they wouldn’t be in the school - it’s whether they have the determination and organization to tough it out over the four years. They loose about 5 kids each freshman class and 3 in sophmore year. They normally start with 60 students freshman year and end up graduating 48 - 52 kids. I’m sure that is the same at all of these types of schools.</p>
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<p>This article ([National</a> Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science and Technology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSSSMST]National”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSSSMST)) lists many of them, with links so you can find out more. It appears that the majority of states now have some kind of math/science/tech magent school.</p>
<p>If you’re interested in moving to an area because of the availability of a math/science or other magnet program, be VERY careful.</p>
<p>First, realize that the process of admission to many of these programs starts very early in eighth grade.</p>
<p>Second, there are strict geographic restrictions on eligibility for these programs, some of which may come as a surprise. For example, most kids in Northern Virginia are eligible to apply for Thomas Jefferson, but those who live in Alexandria or Manassas are not. Similarly, on the other side of the Potomac, only kids from some parts of Montgomery County, Maryland, are eligible for the highly respected magnet program at Blair High School; the others can only apply to a new and mostly unproven math-science program at a different school (Poolesville). In Montgomery County, the geographic eligibility for Blair was changed a few years ago. Other systems may make similar changes without warning.</p>
<p>Also, make sure that your child meets the academic requirements for admission. Students who don’t won’t even be able to take the test. For example, for the IB magnet in Montgomery County at Richard Montgomery High School, students MUST have completed Level 1 or higher of French, Chinese or Spanish (or be a native speaker of one of these languages) to be considered for admission. A student who has studied only German or Russian or Japanese would not be eligible, no matter how advanced the student’s knowledge of the language. Because of the structure of the program, there can be no exceptions to this rule.</p>
<p>And of course, please realize that your child may not score high enough on the test to be offered admission to the magnet (something that may be more likely if your child has come from a different area and studied a different curriculum than the others taking the test). What other high school options will you consider if that happens?</p>
<p>My son’s high school is on that list (NCSSSMST), as are the other two schools in my district with the science/tech program. My message now to parents with bright kids is to go to another district!</p>
<p>ihs76</p>
<p>I have some tips for you.</p>
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<li>Do not move to the deep south.</li>
<li>Pick a state in the Northeast like New York or Massachusetts.</li>
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<p>"Some students, however, opt for career paths where people often go to work right after completing their bachelor’s degrees (e.g., engineering) or where it is customary for people to work for a few years after obtaining their bachelor’s degrees before going to graduate school (e.g., students interested in business who intend to eventually obtain MBAs). For these students, attending a lower-ranked undergraduate institution may be a significant impediment to their career plans. "</p>
<p>I am sure that someone’s alma matter for undergrad won’t matter as much as other factors like interviews and other things on the resume when applying for a job in Engineering. That is what I was told by a teacher.</p>
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<p>Why not? I know that public schools in the South are generally not great, but some of the math/science magnet schools are well-funded and have faculty members with advanced degrees in their fields and college teaching experience.</p>
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<p>Your alma mater matters for your first job; not so much after that. Remember that the most desirable employers can’t recruit from every school, so they focus a manageable few with good reputations. If you want to be an engineer for Texas Instruments, but they don’t recruit from your school, you’ve got a bit of a problem.</p>
<p>“Why not? I know that public schools in the South are generally not great, but some of the math/science magnet schools are well-funded and have faculty members with advanced degrees in their fields and college teaching experience.”</p>
<p>I go to the top school in the state of Georgia. We still have a lot of students who don’t even care as much for their education and throughout the state, most kids only care about sports and music, there is not as much of a focus on education in Georgia as there is in Massachusetts and New York. Also, the area is not a good place to live in either, Georgia has tons of places which are not well funded and it is a bad state to raise a kid in. Did I forget to mention that it indeed has tons of racism?</p>
<p>I have lived in this state for about 5 years. Massachusetts and New York beat it by a landslide.</p>
<p>my son’s school is in the south and its a great school! About 65-70% of the teachers are PHD level, others Masters. There are good schools and bad schools everywhere,</p>
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<p>I suppose that’s true, but one advantage of the South is that the competition to get into the best schools is not as tough. If you’re a serious student but not a genius, that can be a big advantage.</p>
<p>Of course, as some have already pointed out, the difference between residential and non-residential schools has to be considered as well.</p>
<p>Speaking for my family, moving from the northern Chicago suburbs (where the public schools are among the best in the country) to a small city in a rural state has been a boon for my kids’ education. Good as the schools may have been in the 'burbs, they were still large public schools with the usual cookie-cutter mentality, and my kids were just cogs in the machinery. Here they get special attention, projects, and appreciation from teachers who don’t see a lot of really talented, hardworking kids. Big fish in a little pond, as they say. And our new state is putting a lot of money into magnet and charter schools in order to shake its reputation for having second-rate schools.</p>
<p>MY DD goes to a county magnet school for health sciences in NJ. There are 10-15 students in each of her classes; the teachers are wonderful and really get to know everyone; the internship and service opportunities built into the curriculum are fabulous; and her fellow students are, for the most part, just really great, focused kids. Her school is consistently among the top 5-10 public schools in the state for SAT scores (most of the schools on that list are county magnet/vocational schools like hers). She works hard.</p>
<p>The downsides: no sports programs or large-scale arts and music programs; limited foreign language offerings; long bus ride (she’s up at 5:30); many of her friends live 45 minutes away and we’ve all learned to carpool extensively.</p>
<p>The curriculum is quite rigid, with an emphasis on lab sciences, and there are hardly any electives or opportunity to explore different disciplines outside science and math. I am actually hoping that she will attend a LAC or a university with varied gen ed requirements so that she can explore the humanities in college to a greater extent than she can now. Some of her friends wish to get into condensed B.A./M.D. programs, but I think that would be a mistake for her. We want her to be able to take an Art History course or a course in Greek tragedy instead of just knocking down credits toward a dual degree.</p>
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<p>At our school (and district), magnet classes must be made up of 70% magnet students. But the school can place non-magnet students into those classes. Access to high-end classes is an advantage to the school at large. Class rank is not really an issue, because anyone who wants them, can get high-end courses. The sad fact is, very few kids who are not in the magnet are applying to colleges where class rank matters. As for ECs, more magnet kids are involved, because more of them want to be involved. But nothing is closed to the non-magnet kids and makes an effort to make sure they can access those activities.</p>
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<p>I think there is some truth to that. There is one magnet near us for students who are identified as highly-gifted. I wouldn’t send my son there because I think there college admission rates are not what they should be due to very hard grading. These same kids would have a better GPA in another magnet program or public school program. My own kids did very well in college admissions, but they were ranked very high – and if you’re high in a school with strong students, that says something to colleges I think.</p>
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<p>I think if they can do the work in the math or science courses, they will be fine. Two of my kids were real humanities kids – my current high school student is very strong in humanities, likes science but doesn’t care much for math. But he’s good at the subjects he likes less and it won’t hurt his GPA at all. If he wasn’t strong in those subjects, I don’t think it would serve him or the program well for him to be there. He is getting plenty of humanities – took AP Art History last year, AP World this year, will take AP English, US History, etc. And if he doesn’t take much math in college, he will at least have had a strong background. My kid who was in a science magnet ended up at a top LAC – I think most colleges are really looking at the overall picture as opposed to the name on the program.</p>
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<p>Our students who go on to public university get a lot of credit and get placed accordingly. The higher-tier the private school, the less they care what the kid took in high school. Most private schools may place, but they are not giving much credit. Cal Tech doesn’t care how high a kid went in math – they all start at the same level there.</p>
<p>“I suppose that’s true, but one advantage of the South is that the competition to get into the best schools is not as tough. If you’re a serious student but not a genius, that can be a big advantage.”</p>
<p>True but your kids will have tons of bad influences and will run into a lot of trouble for no reason. Don’t believe that after 200 years the south will change, there is still tons of racism and I have found it hard to fit in here. I miss New York, I went there for middle school and I made tons of friends as opposed to living in GA where I only have a few friends. Most people tend to keep their kids away from my “type”, I am a South Asian btw.</p>
<p>If you want you can message me about this.</p>
<p>“Your alma mater matters for your first job; not so much after that. Remember that the most desirable employers can’t recruit from every school, so they focus a manageable few with good reputations. If you want to be an engineer for Texas Instruments, but they don’t recruit from your school, you’ve got a bit of a problem.”</p>
<p>As long as you go to a regionally accredited University you are good. I mean I know people who go to Savannah State and they have decent jobs graduating from there.
If you are even at the lower end of the class rank at the magnet school I attend, you can still attend a decent university.</p>
<p>Yes there are scholarships for children that attend these math/science magnet schools. My son was offered a full tuition scholarship to Rose Hulman Institute of Technology - the recipient of the scholarship had to be a graduate of a Math/Science High school.</p>
<p>I gather what everyone is talking about is a regional magnet school, with strict admissions requirements.</p>
<p>Our nearby large city has several “magnet schools” in their district–for languages, technology, math/science, etc. They are not selective at all and I have not noticed any Natl Merit scholars coming out of them. I wonder if they are better in any way than just going to the regular public HS.</p>
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<p>I’m sorry that you have experienced that. We have not encountered any problems where we live. (I’m not saying where, by the way, because I’ve already posted a lot of identifying details on CC.) I agree that the South still has a lot of antiquated attitudes about race.</p>
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<p>I don’t know about “strict,” but yes, I was thinking of schools with competitive admissions. You don’t have to be a genius to go to my son’s high school, but there is still an application process that includes submitting grades, test scores, and recommendations. I think the admission rate is fairly high, but I don’t know exactly what it is. I think the student body is self-selecting; bad students don’t seem to have any interest in it.</p>
<p>Not a parent, but I’m a HS senior at a public math/science charter school. I’m not a math/science person at all, though–attended TASP, planning to major in English–so I can’t speak for math/science opportunities. We do get students into MIT, but mainly girls; we do best with Penn, the closest top school geographically. Colleges recognize our rigorous academics and we do the best of any public school in placement, but comparing to a second-tier top boarding school in the same state, the private sends many more people to LACs. 99% of our graduates go to a 4-year college, but about half of that is to the state flagship (and in my state, there’s no real non-flagship options).</p>
<p>The teachers are hit-or-miss, but no truly bad teachers and some real gems. One of my English teachers, who is much loved, told me privately that she loves her job and would never leave for another school except for a place like Boston Latin. Academically, the opportunities are definitely skewed toward math and science… history and fine arts take a big hit. We are in the same building as an arts magnet HS, so my school doesn’t actually have a fine arts department, and cross-registration can get kind of messy. Language training is also hit-or-miss, depending on what language you choose–honors French and Latin are excellent, Spanish at any level is pretty bad. We had a USABO gold medalist last year, some physics ones in the past, but no Intel/Siemens and my (very good) GC didn’t know what TASP was (admittedly it is more humanities-oriented).</p>
<p>As a charter school, we have a lot more freedom to deviate from district mandates. For instance, the teachers are not unionized, we have more days off (never counted, but that’s the general consensus–more half days), and weird class period lengths.</p>