Winter Garden/Windermere public schools (Seminole: best schools, college, income)

[bellhead]

Originally Posted by bmw335xi

Trinity Prep
Lake Highland Prep
-
Windermere Prep

These three are the best IMO with trinity and lake highland having an edge over windermere.

It looks a lot like Ga. Do K-8 and then transfer for High School to one of the private schools.

[bmw335xi]

Originally Posted by bellhead

It looks a lot like Ga. Do K-8 and then transfer for High School to one of the private schools.

Trinity starts at 7th grade, one of my good friends graduated from there. He’s now studying medicine at Emory. The other two are all years, but yeah that seems to be pretty popular.

I went to a mixture of public and private schools growing up. I ended up graduating from Dr. Phillips High. In terms of education, if the student is proactive, they will do fine at the good public high schools academically. The main difference between public and private are the students from my experience. In private most of the students come from “good” households and it shows in the students, while public I’d see students who I could tell come from low life families with no class, manners, respect etc. There are penalties for bullying, disruptive behavior etc, so you see more of it. This tends to be more apparaent as you go from elementary to middle to high.

However, at Dr. Phillips High, one thing I didn’t see was bullying. The school was so big that it had more of a community college feel, where there weren’t the typical “popular guys, popular girls” that ran the school, which was nice because I moved from Australia my junior year. The public middle school in Seattle I went to had a lot of bullying, but it was a small school.

[EileenRE]

Windermere High School is a great option as it's new and all the new communities that are being built in the area of Windermere and Winter Garden will be attending as Growth is HUGE in this area. https://windermerehs.ocps.net Here is the Map to see if you would moving into the Windermere HS District. https://www.ocps.net/UserFiles/Serve...0HS%202017.pdf

I have several clients building all around this area specifically for the new growth and new schools for the children.

If you are looking for Private Schools as @Bellhead has mentioned yes all three of the above Private Schools are great. However, Windermere Prep would be closer to this area obviously. Trinity Prep is in Winter Park and I have several friends/clients who have sent their children here and loved it. Lake Highland Prep is downtown. So depends on if distance is an issue. If you are looking to go private you might want to live closer to one of the Private Schools. However, Winder Garden/Windermere does have lots of options on both Public and Private.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Priv...E,lf:1,lf_ui:2

https://www.greatschools.org is also great for researching.

My children attend Faith Christian Academy which is on the East Side of town 417/408. If you wanted to go the parochial school route there is Master's Academy in Oviedo which is always highly rated.

Yes I also agree with @BMW335xi that the Private vs Public debate will also depend on your child. Many of my friends who have their child in public school are fine as they make sure they are in all IP classes (when possible) are involved in sports, arts, etc. If they are with the High Achieving Students and or focused on their sports or fine art activities they have a solid disciplined group of students they are with and they will be fine no matter what the School Rank is.

[bmw335xi]

If money isn’t an issue, Maya Transportation offers shuttle service to the main private schools, I don’t know the pricing but I see them around Dr. Phillips. So if you want to live in Windermere or Dr Phillips (example), they will pick your kids up from your home and drive them to whichever school, it’s basically a 3rd party private school bus contract they have with the main schools.

[ClC053103]

In the Windermere area, the most common private schools people attend are:

Windermere Prep
Foundation Academy
The First Academy
Holy Family (the parochial K-8)
Bishop Moore (the parochial high school)
Lake Highland Prep
Montverde Academy

The last three are a longer drive, though I have neighbors with kids at TFA that also joke that TFA stands for "too far away". I don't know a single Windermere family that attends Trinity or Masters- that would really be a haul from here. As for which are the "best", I guess it depends on your student, though I have seen trends. When I moved here 2 1/2 years ago, Windermere Prep was the hot school. Then, it was TFA. Now, Foundation is gaining in popularity and getting a lot of transfer applicants from TFA. Lake Highland is always a good choice, but you have to want to spend the extra $ for Maya's Transportation or spend hours a day commuting your student there.

For Winter Garden, the above list applies but also Real Life Christian (in Clermont).

[bellhead]

Originally Posted by bmw335xi

Trinity starts at 7th grade, one of my good friends graduated from there. He’s now studying medicine at Emory. The other two are all years, but yeah that seems to be pretty popular.

I went to a mixture of public and private schools growing up. I ended up graduating from Dr. Phillips High. In terms of education, if the student is proactive, they will do fine at the good public high schools academically. The main difference between public and private are the students from my experience. In private most of the students come from “good” households and it shows in the students, while public I’d see students who I could tell come from low life families with no class, manners, respect etc. There are penalties for bullying, disruptive behavior etc, so you see more of it. This tends to be more apparaent as you go from elementary to middle to high.

However, at Dr. Phillips High, one thing I didn’t see was bullying. The school was so big that it had more of a community college feel, where there weren’t the typical “popular guys, popular girls” that ran the school, which was nice because I moved from Australia my junior year. The public middle school in Seattle I went to had a lot of bullying, but it was a small school.

My daughter graduates from Emory undergrad this year & it looks like she is going to UF Florida Law school unless she gets in to Emory Law where she is currently waitlisted.

I'm mainly looking for the suburban high school with AP classes & outstanding facilities. Low teacher to student ratio & a good diversity mix by this I want to see the school at what the US is nationally not 100% white/not 100% black... But 60% white/40% other.

[WithDisp]

Originally Posted by bellhead

I'm mainly looking for the suburban high school with AP classes & outstanding facilities. Low teacher to student ratio & a good diversity mix by this I want to see the school at what the US is nationally not 100% white/not 100% black... But 60% white/40% other.

Those are very specific numbers.

[bellhead]

Originally Posted by WithDisp

Those are very specific numbers.

There is lee way with the numbers but it's pretty self explanatory what I'm looking for which is diversity on par with the national diversity of the US.

[WithDisp]

Originally Posted by bellhead

There is lee way with the numbers but it's pretty self explanatory what I'm looking for which is diversity on par with the national diversity of the US.

The National Diversity of the United States is absolutely not reflected in the vast majority of K-12 schools.

Orange County Schools Demographics vs Orange County Demographics
HISPANIC 41% - 27%
WHITE 27% - 46%
BLACK 25% - 20%
ASIAN 5% - 5%

While OCPS is incredibly diverse, it's fairly clear an abundant number of White children are not participating in the public school system, thus making private schools overwhelmingly White.

[bellhead]

Originally Posted by WithDisp

The National Diversity of the United States is absolutely not reflected in the vast majority of K-12 schools.

Orange County Schools Demographics vs Orange County Demographics
HISPANIC 41% - 27%
WHITE 27% - 46%
BLACK 25% - 20%
ASIAN 5% - 5%

While OCPS is incredibly diverse, it's fairly clear an abundant number of White children are not participating in the public school system, thus making private schools overwhelmingly White.

It's a failure of the school system as a whole, in the past there always was one or two private schools per school system. These schools were usually overwhelming white & wealthy or upper middle class plus in cities with large catholic populations usually one catholic system, & may a small private christian school. What has happened over the last 25 years is a there has been funding gap & upper middle class parents starting pulling their kids out of the school system & placing them into private schools or to move into exurb school systems where more funding could be dedicated to the school system. A good example of this is the Chicago suburb Naperville, all 4 high schools are in the top 150 overall but property taxes are over 15k a year for a single family home. A large overwhelming majority of these upper middle class parents are white, which explains why you have the demographics listed above. Another trend which has emerged are more magnet schools, which takes your best & motivated students out of traditional high schools & hurts test scores system wide for a large majority of the school system. Magnet schools give options for the lower income students in these large systems & placate motivated parents in low income areas.

To counter this large school systems go to open enrollment where you are busing kids an hour and half one way in order to meet diversity guidelines & to appease parents who want their children to go to the best schools in the system, but cannot afford to live in those areas. So you have an area like Windermere for example an upper middle class suburb where 20% of all students are bused in. I don't know if this is accurate or not I'm just stating this on past experiences. Another option is home schooling & charter schools. Home schooling works sometimes very well & other times not at all. Instead of having a professional with 7 years of training & years of experience teaching children now we are relying on the motivation of a teenager & a parent to complete assignments. Charter schools to me are used car salesman looking to get a cut of the education pie & make money on it.

There are fixes to this & the biggest one is to increase funding & lower teacher to student ratios, which is why I asked about it above. For the record my son will identify as hispanic on the census, but he looks white so the hispanic/white numbers are skewed quite a bit. A better question for education should be what is the education level of your parents? Non-college education parents students have lower grades & test scores than college educated parents.