Looking for the skinny on Silver Lake Regional High School (Plymouth: buying a house, buying)

[julietd]

We're looking at buying a house from out of state in Kingston, MA, which uses Silver Lake Regional High School. We found a great house in a great location but I've gotten conflicting information about the school, both in terms of drugs and academics.

I understand that there is some history between Pembroke and SLRHS, that Silver Lake was spun out from Pembroke, and that there were problems with Silver Lake's compliance with special ed regs at one point.

We have two kids who are high performers both academically and athletically (swimming). Are we making a mistake picking this town?

Any information and/or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Long distance evaluations are really hard!

[kaioak36]

Not sure what town you're moving from but Silver Lake High School isn't one of the better high schools in the state. If you can afford Duxbury, Hanover or Marshfield instead, I highly recommend it. Plymouth would be a worse choice than Silver Lake/Kingston. A lot of people in Kingston who can afford it send their kids to private schools.

[julietd]

Can you give me specifics about why it's not a good school? All I can find is hearsay and old test data.

[ScituateAl]

Go to the Patriot Ledger website and do a search...I think they must have an archive. Silver Lake was making the news a bit more than it should have a few years back. I forget if the issue was about drugs, sex, etc. but there seemed to be trend.

Not that standardized test scores are a perfect measure of anything, but the MA DOE site does list annual MCAS test scores by grade and year and should include 2008 schores.