Date: March 3, 2017
Location: Mirza Residence
Interview type: Interactive
Team Participants: Interview conducted by Faisal individually.
User characteristics:
- Married, mother of three boys ages 14, 16, 19
- College educated
- Runs a bed and breakfast
- Husband is professor at University of Notre Dame
- When and How did you come to the decision on which high school to send your children?
- Discussed it as a family
- Looked at what each school had to offer. We had heard about Penn, so there was the option to go back to that. But we had a few reasons to try something different. We were deciding between Clay, Adams, Riley, Washington, and St. Joe. We made the decision on public school partly because of the cost factor, and they had attended public school in California and we had a good experience with it.
- Adams stuck out because of the IB program and its diversity. Penn was large but didn’t really have competition in the district because its only one high school. We thought it might be difficult to get into certain classes. We had heard good things about Adams from Notre Dame faculty that my husband worked with.
- The sports program at Adams was good for cross country and track. It was competitive and that was important to Momin.
- Additionally, Adams had good extracurricular programs in Model UN, Mock Trial and those things were important to Momin’s little brother Sami.
- We felt that the IB program was well-rounded, challenging, and good preparation for college.
- To be honest, for Clay, it was a minor thing, but the “Colonials” mascot kind of turned us off.
- One thing we kept in mind was that test scores and numbers could be misleading with regard to the quality of the school in the sense that Penn is a very good academically but it is feeding a very specific demographic and is therefore not as diverse because it is predominantly white and middle class.
- We wanted them to be exposed to more diversity. You learn life lessons from people who don’t think like you or believe the same things that you do.
- How did you do your research?
- My husband did a lot of the groundwork on the internet. He surfed the school’s websites to see what options they had.. where the district boundaries were and what schools served what neighborhood. Mom used athleticnet.com to look into the track timings of the high schools in the area to see where he could fit in and be competitive. After we were kind of settled on Adams, I made a few phone calls to the IB director to get other logistical things figured out.
- How do you feel now?
- Happy with the decision to send them to Adams. Moving was difficult, obviously. But I don’t think I regret not sending them to Penn or another place.