Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Regions Cambridge MA public schools

Does anyone have any info on or experience with the Cambridge (or Somerville) Public schools at the elementary level? Can they accommodate HG kids? Are they flexible?

We are hoping to avoid the suburbs and private school is not an option.

Thanks!
Ul.H

We live in a Boston suburb, where our three children attend public school. Sorry, but what little I have heard about Cambridge public schools has not been favorable. It's my impression that many parents who work in Cambridge but have the means to send their children elsewhere often do so, either by sending their children to private school or buying a home elsewhere. Within Boston, Brookline has a good reputation.

If you joined the MA Gifted mailing list https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/MAGifted/info and asked your question there, you would probably get some replies.

There is school choice in Cambridge, but I have a relative who works at Harvard and moved from Cambridge to Concord due to the schools. So my guess is that it's very limited with what Cambridge (or Somerville) public schools can offer at the elementary grades. There's a number of families who either send their gifted kids to private school or un/homeschool them or move out to the suburbs (ie. Lexington or Concord) as a result.

Cambridge Rindge and Latin may be an option for high school, but not sure what you do until then. There is a new Sudbury Valley type of school in Cambridge that recently opened, but no idea on the cost or other pertinent details (and can't remember the name at the moment either, grrr...). Sudbury Valley is located in Framingham and is probably too much of a hike for you.

Private schools in MA can be expensive and don't/won't necessarily accommodate hg/pg crowd based on my experience. Acera School now in Winchester (http://aceraschool.org/) and The Birches in Lincoln (http://www.birchesschool.org/) are newish and there's no guarantee that they'll work for you and your child.

The recent Boston suburbs? thread may be of interest.

Thanks all. I feel the unfortunate pull out to the suburbs. It's interesting that few people have 1st hand experience with the Cambridge Public Schools. There must be quite a few bright kids given the location.

Acera School sounds great -- does anyone have any experience with it?

My children don't go Acera, but I have mentioned it on this board, so sometime people ask me about it in private messages. I asked a colleague (very bright as is her husband) who has sent her son to the school for a few years if he will be continuing this coming academic year, and she replied as follows:

"Yes we are. We continue to be impressed and pleased that the school has accommodated his learning curve beautifully. He gets the academics he needs during the school day, so we don't have to supplement after school and he can just be a kid at home. He also has a good social circle with other kids who share his interests and intensity.

We like it well enough that my daughter will also attend next year."

Of course, that's a sample size of one, and there have been parents who tried it and then left.

About 3 years ago, I spoke with the founder/co-director for my 2e/pg son (who was then 5.5-yrs-old). I told her what happened to ds at gifted school #1 north of Boston.

At that time, we were debating what to do and considering sending ds to Acera or gifted school #2 north of Boston. The founder/co-director didn't quite grasp why ds's school wouldn't/couldn't accommodate him. I asked her about the math curriculum and some other details; I wasn't very happy with her answers or responses to my questions. She told me that they use Singapore. At the time, the school was only a year or two old; at the time I believed that we needed a teacher/school with more experience.

I'm not saying that Acera is a 'bad' school or choice. I'm saying that it can be difficult to know ahead of time whether Acera or any of these gifted schools or suburbs can be a good fit for a hg/pg child. There's a lot of variables with schools (teachers, curriculum, other students, ability to accelerate or self-pace, and on and on) - much not within a child's or parent's control. It's hard to know how your child will respond/react until they are placed in that setting/environment.

They are suburbs and about 30 minutes outside of Boston, but you should consider Lexington and Weston. Both school systems are excellent at the high school level, and likely quite good at the elementary level. Both towns are pricey though, with Lexington being the better value of the two.

Closer to Boston, possibly cheaper, but subjectively a notch below those two school systems is Belmont.

There are lots of bright people in Cambridge. However, many of its professors live in towns like Lexington and Newton.

The following statement from the Weston high school math department turns me off. It basically says that the only way to learn math is through their courses, which is rubbish -- but which protects their turf.

http://www.westonschools.org/index.cfm?pid=12416

Harvard faculty typically don't use the Cambridge public schools. That's anecdotal based on acquaintance with 10+ faculty members. Those who live in Cambridge go private, but the faculty are increasingly priced out of Cambridge itself.

We have personal experience with Brookline and Newton. Newton uses Everyday Math (or did 5 years ago). Ugh. Brookline has wonderful educated teachers but has no programmatic accommodation for gifted. Individual teachers may be wonderful about a gifted kid. Or not. We had both.

The Weston snippet, I suspect, is aimed at the many, many parents who use Russian math (it's a freestanding after-school program with actual tests! gasp! and rankings of the kids! double gasp!) to supplement the school-based math, which is increasingly aimed at the 25th percentile so that they can pass the MCAS. Gifted and advanced kids receive no in-school acceleration in math (our experience in Brookline and Newton), and so parents send kids to Russian math. The context is that long division (long division!) is considered very challenging (!!!) for fourth graders in the schools. Sigh. There's a large educated population in both towns, and many STEM people, including from the former Soviet Union, so there's also a large population dissatisfied with the low level of math in the schools and open to the Russian math approach. So what happens is you have kids, say, 10 and doing pre-Algebra or Algebra via Russian math, and the schools make them sit in grade-level classes.