West Plano feeder schools to PWHS / size of PWHS (Dallas: neighborhood, middle schools)

[europeanone]

We will be relocated to Dallas this spring and have very little time to select a neighborhood to settle in. We would like to settle in a neighborhood that the kids will stay through high school...therefore the feeder school is a large focus for me. So...in looking at the feeder charts it appears that Rice, Robinson and Renner all feed into Jasper/Plano West HS. Rice has a bit too many Asians for my taste (and I'm Asian!) so I would like opinions on Jasper versus Renner. Are they both in the West Plano area? Does one outperform the other or have resources that the other doesn't? I am aware of the possible future realignment of Jasper feeding into another high school, which is why I am focusing more on Robinson and Renner.

My second question relates to Jasper and Plano West HS themselves. What do people who are in the district think about the size of the school? There are many positives but how about the negatives: kids who would have ranked higher in a smaller school rank lower in such a large school...and how this impacts college admissions, for example?

Thanks all in advance for your input. We are a little anxious about having to make a decision about a district in such a short time (within weeks, for all intensive purposes).

[PISDstudent]

I'm a senior at Plano West, and went to Renner, so hopefully I can help a bit.

Jasper is a 9-10 high school, not a middle school (Plano ISD splits grades 9-12 into 9-10 high schools and 11-12 senior highs). Renner, Rice, Robinson, and Frankford Middle Schools all feed to Plano West Senior High. Renner and Frankford feed to Shepton High for grades 9-10; Robinson and Rice feed to Jasper High School for 9/10. Jasper was just realigned to send all of its students to Plano West, so another realignment isn't likely anytime soon.

Generally speaking, Renner and Robinson serve West Plano, Rice serves the far northwestern edge of Plano ISD, and Frankford serves City of Dallas areas that fall in Plano ISD.

Jasper High is a very good school, but it's intensely competitive. Renner Middle School (which serves west Plano) and Shepton high school are less competitive. They still offer pretty much the same resources that you would find at Rice/Jasper, just with a smaller (but still large) group of high achievers. In the end though, whether you go to Jasper or Shepton, you will still have to face the same group of kids at Plano West, and your rank there is what counts.

Plano West will be quite large; graduating classes will be somewhere around 1600 kids, making for 3200 in the whole school. Colleges are aware aware of your class size however, so your percentile (as opposed to your raw rank) is more of what they look at. There still is competition to be at the top, but that's due to a large portion of high achievers in the class, not class size. I like the large school though,and also the fact that it's only grades 11-12. Not only do you have more resources, but it's just a more enjoyable place to be than a smaller 9-12 school. You have more freedom, a larger pool of people to choose friends from, and just more things to do at school as far as clubs/activities are concerned.

[Big G]

Jasper has already been realigned. It's unlikely any further changes will be made. The district plans to rely on magnet programs to balance enrollments going forward.

As far as school size - it's very important to realize that the huge schools are in place ONLY for grades 11-12.

For example, quite a few of the 44 (!) PISD elementary schools have enrollments less than those of extremely rich and well-regarded Highland Park ISD. And, due to the separation of the 9-10 kids, PISD kids' first two years of HS are in schools with fewer kids (1000-1700) than they would have at Highland Park HS, or most of the Frisco ISD high schools.

The (biased) way I see it, for 11 of the 13 years of education, PISD actually can be viewed as providing a SMALLER environment than the "gold standard" of HPISD.