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You're going to be hard-pressed to find someone on this board who has direct experience with both HPISD and one or more of the private schools. Generally, if you have a good experience in the school, you don't move from private to public or vice versa.
So while I have direct experience with HPISD, my private school experience is anctedotal from friends who were private school only and classmates who left the privates for HPISD.
Our family was in the same position when we moved to Dallas in 2001. We chose the parochial school option and are very happy with our decision. We currently have children at Ursuline, Cistercian and St. Monica and could not be more pleased with both the education that the children received at St. Monica and the way we chose to allocate our family resources.
Our decision to go the Catholic school route has enabled our high school age kids to have a much broader range of college options than they would have had if we had chosen to purchase a house in the Park Cities or send them to St. Marks/Hockaday. The difference in price between a Catholic parochial school and Catholic high school education vs. a St. Mark’s or Hockaday education works out to almost $200,000 per child and the difference between a house in North Dallas and a similarly sized house in the Park Cities at the time we were purchasing was in excess of $600,000. You might find that your children feel a little bit poor if they live in the Disney streets and go to St. Marks or ESD – the level of wealth at both of those schools and at Hockaday is astonishing – though certainly there will be students who are less wealthy at either school.
In terms of academic rigor, we have found St. Monica to be great. St. Monica’s standardized test scores place it within the top ten percent of schools in the state of Texas. It is a Blue Ribbon school. Ten percent of the St. Monica 8th grade class of 2006 (who are seniors in high school this year) went on to be recognized as either Semifinalists or Commended students in this year’s National Merit competition. I don’t think there are any elementary schools in HPISD that can make that claim. Year in and year out, St. Monica has the most boys who make it through the demanding selection process to become part of Cistercian’s entering class. (Lamplighter comes pretty close, but more boys apply to Cistercian from Lamplighter than from St. Monica because every child at Lamplighter needs to find a new school in fifth grade while many of the academically strongest boys in the fourth grade class choose to stay at St. Monica because they have family connections at Jesuit.) St. Monica has an extremely strong acceptance rate for high school at Jesuit and Ursuline.
The schools you are considering are good schools and a child can get a great education at any of them. Lamplighter is a really neat school with a unique approach to elementary education. St. Mark’s has top notch academics – in Dallas only Cistercian has a better academic reputation. I don’t know much about ESD other than that they are constantly improving their campus – they have lots of big money donors -- and that it has a reputation of being a good fit for the kids in the North Dallas Catholic and Episcopalian parochial schools whose parents don’t want to send them all the way over to Bishop Lynch. (My Ursuline daughter would also tell you it is a party school – but you may want to take that with a grain of salt – there are lots of rivalries in high school.)
Best of luck in your decision.
This is the response that we were hoping for...thank you! Very helpful. As Catholics, Parochial schools would be great, we both went that route growing up. We were worried about the rigor pre-high school. We know that Cistercian and Jesuit would be wonderful for our boys...concern was about what you do until then. Had heard that St. Monica was a bit on the large side, and were concerned about class sizes and teacher ratios. Thought that maybe St. Rita was a bit smaller and/or more selective. Its great to hear the contrary from someone who has first hand knowledge. Is it difficult to get into St. Monica? Does it start in Pre-K or K? Where do most of the families live with kids there? We will do some more research. Thanks again.
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Originally Posted by SMS_Parent
Our family was in the same position when we moved to Dallas in 2001. We chose the parochial school option and are very happy with our decision. We currently have children at Ursuline, Cistercian and St. Monica and could not be more pleased with both the education that the children received at St. Monica and the way we chose to allocate our family resources.
Our decision to go the Catholic school route has enabled our high school age kids to have a much broader range of college options than they would have had if we had chosen to purchase a house in the Park Cities or send them to St. Marks/Hockaday. The difference in price between a Catholic parochial school and Catholic high school education vs. a St. Mark’s or Hockaday education works out to almost $200,000 per child and the difference between a house in North Dallas and a similarly sized house in the Park Cities at the time we were purchasing was in excess of $600,000. You might find that your children feel a little bit poor if they live in the Disney streets and go to St. Marks or ESD – the level of wealth at both of those schools and at Hockaday is astonishing – though certainly there will be students who are less wealthy at either school.
In terms of academic rigor, we have found St. Monica to be great. St. Monica’s standardized test scores place it within the top ten percent of schools in the state of Texas. It is a Blue Ribbon school. Ten percent of the St. Monica 8th grade class of 2006 (who are seniors in high school this year) went on to be recognized as either Semifinalists or Commended students in this year’s National Merit competition. I don’t think there are any elementary schools in HPISD that can make that claim. Year in and year out, St. Monica has the most boys who make it through the demanding selection process to become part of Cistercian’s entering class. (Lamplighter comes pretty close, but more boys apply to Cistercian from Lamplighter than from St. Monica because every child at Lamplighter needs to find a new school in fifth grade while many of the academically strongest boys in the fourth grade class choose to stay at St. Monica because they have family connections at Jesuit.) St. Monica has an extremely strong acceptance rate for high school at Jesuit and Ursuline.
The schools you are considering are good schools and a child can get a great education at any of them. Lamplighter is a really neat school with a unique approach to elementary education. St. Mark’s has top notch academics – in Dallas only Cistercian has a better academic reputation. I don’t know much about ESD other than that they are constantly improving their campus – they have lots of big money donors -- and that it has a reputation of being a good fit for the kids in the North Dallas Catholic and Episcopalian parochial schools whose parents don’t want to send them all the way over to Bishop Lynch. (My Ursuline daughter would also tell you it is a party school – but you may want to take that with a grain of salt – there are lots of rivalries in high school.)
Best of luck in your decision.
St. Monica is also the only one of the three schools (St. Monica, St. Rita and CKS) that still tests students for admission into grades K- 8. All prospective St. Monica students entering grades K – 8 are required to test including students who have attended the St. Monica preschool. The preschool does not require admissions testing.
Both St. Rita and Christ the King accept applicants until their classes are full in the order specified by their registration priority system. At the time that we were looking at schools, Christ the King in particular gave great weight to the length of time that the students’ parents had been registered parishioners. As a result, for many years it was very hard for a student who had not been baptized at Christ the King Parish to gain admission to the school. In contrast, although St. Monica tries very hard to meet the needs of its parishioners, St. Monica declines applications from students it does not believe will be academically successful based on their testing, observation/personal interview and academic records (if the student is old enough to have an academic record).
Class sizes at St. Monica tend to be slightly smaller than at St. Rita or Christ the King. Christ the King has two classes of 25 students per grade while St. Rita has three classes of 25 students per grade. (The number at both schools is 22 in Kindergarten). St. Monica has four classes per grade -- so St. Monica's average class size is 18 students in Kindergarten, 20 students in 1st grade and 22 students at other grade levels. (And in middle school math there are actually five classes per grade -- so middle school math classes average about 18 students.) The faculty to student ratio at St. Monica is 1:11.
St. Monica has both a preschool and a K-8 school. Neither St. Rita nor Christ the King offer preschool. St. Monica's preschool offers a three year old program, a four year old program and a Developmental Kindergarten. The Developmental Kindergarten is available to students who barely miss the cutoff for Kindergarten or whose Kindergarten testing indicates they are not yet developmentally ready for Kindergarten – usually these are students who barely make the age cutoff for Kindergarten. The presence of the Developmental Kindergarten program allows St. Monica to keep it Kindergarten class sizes low and ensures that the students in Kindergarten are all within a roughly similar level of developmental readiness for the reading and math skills that they will encounter in Kindergarten.
The largest portion of the St. Monica student body lives within a two to three mile radius of the school – though there are families that commute to St. Monica from as far away as Frisco. Zip codes 75229 (which includes the Disney Streets), 75244, 75230, and 75220 send the most students to St. Monica. The vast majority of students live in the area bounded by Northwest Highway, LBJ, Marsh Lane and Hillcrest Road.
We are facing the same issue than you are. We are moving from the SF Bay Area to Dallas this summer. Both of our boys are going thru the admissions process at St Mark's, one for 1st and the other for 3rd. There are 160 applications for 1st and only 32 will get accepted. There are 30 applications for 3rd and only 2 will be accepted. You kid either has to come with a huge donation or be a genius.
We will be renting in HP were they can attend teh public schools for a year. That will give us time to really deside where we want to live and what school we want for them.
This is the response that we were hoping for...thank you! Very helpful. As Catholics, Parochial schools would be great, we both went that route growing up. We were worried about the rigor pre-high school. We know that Cistercian and Jesuit would be wonderful for our boys...concern was about what you do until then. Had heard that St. Monica was a bit on the large side, and were concerned about class sizes and teacher ratios. Thought that maybe St. Rita was a bit smaller and/or more selective. Its great to hear the contrary from someone who has first hand knowledge. Is it difficult to get into St. Monica? Does it start in Pre-K or K? Where do most of the families live with kids there? We will do some more research. Thanks again.
It is. That doesn't mean it's a particularly great school. St. Rita is probably one of the three best parochial schools academically (St. Mark and Prince of Peace in Plano are also pretty good) but it's nothing amazing. This is one reason Cistercian is so successful--the parochial schools aren't very strong academically, so the parents of the smartest feel compelled to switch them over to CPS. If you're looking for an academically outstanding private school in Dallas, you'd want to look at Lamplighter, St. Mark's/Hockaday, Greenhill, and perhaps Good Shepherd.
Jesuit/Ursuline and Cistercian are excellent schools and are far better than their parochial feeder schools, in my opinion as a Jesuit alumnus who didn't attend parochial schools but knows the alumni of many. The parochial schools do an all right job preparing their kids for Jesuit but overall the alumni of non-parochial schools (Good Shepherd/magnet schools/suburban public schools) are a lot more likely to end up in honors/AP classes than parochial school alumni are. Perhaps it might just have been my year, but the St. Rita/St. Monica/CKS/PoP kids just were not as well prepared as non-parochial school grads (St. Mark the Evangelist in Plano is a notable exception).
I would personally go the private school route, simply because I believe that private schools are a better environment than HPMS/HPHS, which is just too large, too competitive extracurricularly for kids who don't excel in everything, and more importantly, of the HP kids I've known, very few were not stuck-up spoiled brats who thought they were god's gift to earth There definitely are exceptions to this rule, but all-in-all the private schools do much better at producing well rounded and socially conscious alumni who have a better grasp of the world outside their small community.
I'd look at Lamplighter, St. Mark's, Greenhill, and Good Shepherd (especially if you want your kids to end up at Jesuit or Ursuline) which are all excellent grade schools and produce very well rounded products who are attractive to private high schools and top universities.
We currently live in HP and perhaps i can help a little bit as we have the unique (and unusual) perspective of having started our kids at private schools and switched out to the HPISD schools. We also have one child who goes to the Plano ISD schools because of athletics, so we have seen all three. Our children went to Lamplighter from pre-school until my oldest was going on to 4th grade. I had 4 kids in the school at the time we moved. I would say that academically, HPISD is probably as good as most of the private schools. Our experience at Lamplighter was quite disappointing and i really wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but that was simply our experience. The academics are simply not very strong and when we looked at Greenhill for third grade (frustrated by 4 kids just not learning as much as i would have expected), I was told by a board member I knew that they had experienced a number of problems with Lamplighter kids being behind.
Everyone we know with kids at Hockaday and St Marks speaks very highly of both. My brother went to St Marks and got a very good education. The only downside i can think of to these schools is that if you are not at the top end of the graduating class, it can be a little difficult to stand out with respect to college admissions as many of those kids apply to all the top schools. Greenhill is also very good academically, and from what i hear, a lot of work. I don't know a lot about the catholic schools, but our friends with kids in them speak highly of Ursuline, Cistercian, St. Rita's and St Monica's.
Highland Park is good, but not without its issues - most of which have been mentioned. There is an incredible amount of wealth in the district, and the pressure to "keep up" materialistically gets old. My youngest daughter has struggled a lot with "she has lake houses in Austin.....she went to New York to go shopping" etc. I really don't like that but that being said, my middle daughter, the tomboy, blows it off and seems to be doing fine socially. HP is very good if your kid has some learning struggles - they identify it early in elementary school and provide a lot of help. My son needed a little extra work learning to read, and they were right on top of it.
Interestingly,we have had to rent a (very) cheap apartment in Plano so that my oldest child can have the off-campus PE she needs to do her athletics. HP was TERRIBLE at working with us for this. The high school in particular. Because of her athletic schedule, she needed 2 periods of off-campus PE to make it work, and the Plano high schools were very good about that. She takes all Honors/pre-AP classes there(Shepton High) and her classes have actually been harder than what I've seen coming out of HPMS. I've also noticed that SAT score-wise, Plano West is almost on top of HP and Plano West is more diverse. They also have a higher AP test pass rate than HP, because HP pushes a lot of kids into AP classes that really might be better in regular classes. So that was interesting. Its certainly more diverse (although the west side of Plano is not as diverse as the rest) but its been a good experience for her and the teachers have been very responsive and helpful.
I don't know if this is helpful but if you have other questions, feel free to ask. I was actually on the forums because we are possibly moving to Philadelphia in the summer, and I am trying to figure out what a good place to be might be.
Its very interesting to hear all these opinions...in some case conflicting ones. We were/are leaning toward private school instead of HPISD Park Cities residence. We had heard very good things about Lamplighter as a starter school feeding into the best private upper schools....interesting to hear differing perspectives on that. Sounds like our best approach is to focus on what will be the best K-8 program for our boys, giving them the best chance of ending up at our private school of choice later. Any opinions on ESD?
Last, re: St. Marks only letting in those with deep pockets or geniuses.... i.e. the admissions process there. My husband has colleagues with boys there, and they all swear that the school is notoriously merit focused. Famous local Dallas wealthy types not able to get their kids in...or parents with boys there who give freely to capital campaigns cant get in their second boy, etc. We have no first hand knowledge, but trust these friends when they say that you just cannot buy your way into there. Low admission rates yes, very selective yes... the grades to get in there are 1st or 5th I think... dont even bother with the other grades from what I understand. But we have also heard that Cistercian is much more selctive than St. Marks (?)
St Marks is a good school - they also recommend that you hold boys back w/Jan through August birthdays. There were a couple of the boys on my son's hockey team, the parents mentioned this. I was surprised they were holding back way into January. Not sure where your boys bdays fall in the calendar but it's something that you might want to ask about.
Where do you live? Are you able to make the numerous visits and interviews for these schools? Spring is coming up and thats when they like to lock in next fall's class.
St Marks is a good school - they also recommend that you hold boys back w/Jan through August birthdays. There were a couple of the boys on my son's hockey team, the parents mentioned this. I was surprised they were holding back way into January. Not sure where your boys bdays fall in the calendar but it's something that you might want to ask about.
Where do you live? Are you able to make the numerous visits and interviews for these schools? Spring is coming up and thats when they like to lock in next fall's class.
Good luck!
April and January birthdays. Had heard the same thing...was definitely expecting it for the April birthday. We are looking at admissions for 2011, not 2010. Most of these places are past deadlines for admissions this year... at least the private independent schools.
thanks again
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