New to looking at Capitol Hill DCPS. Any majority high SES schools?

[Anonymous]

Stay around Cap-Hill neighborhood, you make Ward 6 so diverse, what would the housing projects do without you? It is your neighborhood, that I walk through to get to my apartment dwelling, I feel safe. You make the walkable neighborn safe for my FARM child who's attending the neighborhood schools in our Ward 6 community. Happy Holidays.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Stay around Cap-Hill neighborhood, you make Ward 6 so diverse, what would the housing projects do without you? It is your neighborhood, that I walk through to get to my apartment dwelling, I feel safe. You make the walkable neighborn safe for my FARM child who's attending the neighborhood schools in our Ward 6 community. Happy Holidays.

?
What are you saying PP?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

FWIW, BASIS seems to have become a de-facto "feeder" for the better Capitol Hill schools like Brent and St. Peters - though it needs to be at 5th grade. I believe BASIS won't be accepting many if any at the higher grades.

Considering it just opened, BASIS can't possibly be a de-facto feeder for anything. It's impossible to say whether it will be a good school.

From what I've seen, that's already a done deal. Like it or not, BASIS has already gotten the cream of the crop coming out of the Capitol Hill elementary schools.

[Anonymous]

I am saying stay around Cap-Hill neighborhood, keep the thought process that you're helping Ward 6. We love the punch and judy show of accomplishments. It makes "us" feel warm and fuzzy all over. We are all saying in our inner circles, that Ward 6 schools need to improve. So, we just wait for the Cap-Hill embrace our cause and before you know it, we have all the bells and whistles.

So in nutshell, we want the Cap-Hill whites to keep doing what they're doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am saying stay around Cap-Hill neighborhood, keep the thought process that you're helping Ward 6. We love the punch and judy show of accomplishments. It makes "us" feel warm and fuzzy all over. We are all saying in our inner circles, that Ward 6 schools need to improve. So, we just wait for the Cap-Hill embrace our cause and before you know it, we have all the bells and whistles.

So in nutshell, we want the Cap-Hill whites to keep doing what they're doing.

Question is, what is YOUR proposal for improving Ward 6, as opposed to talking about "Cap Hill whites"?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:housing vouchers are one way to increase availablity of low income housing in an area without having to actually add new buildings.

Yes, of course if you give people housing vouchers, there's a chance they'll take them to the suburbs, and DC politicians certainly don't want that to happen.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

FWIW, BASIS seems to have become a de-facto "feeder" for the better Capitol Hill schools like Brent and St. Peters - though it needs to be at 5th grade. I believe BASIS won't be accepting many if any at the higher grades.

Considering it just opened, BASIS can't possibly be a de-facto feeder for anything. It's impossible to say whether it will be a good school.

From what I've seen, that's already a done deal. Like it or not, BASIS has already gotten the cream of the crop coming out of the Capitol Hill elementary schools.

I know from Brent's 4th grade last year, a majority that left went to Basis. There were only 3 that went to Latin. Not sure how the numbers looked from other Hill schools. Will Basis continually draw that many from future classes, I think it depends on how parents and kids feel about the experience at the end of the year. It was a new shcool last year and a much better shot of getting in through the lottery than other schools since it was new. If it does well, it will continue to be on the list of schools that people apply to, but it may not be as easy to get in.

[Anonymous]

Demand for Basis by Hill parents will grow and grow, even if the STEM curriculum and fairly narrow focus aren't a good fit for many of the kids. Soon enough, as at Latin, the problem will be that a lottery will create a long waiting list come May, and a great deal of uncertainty about who can attend in the fall and when (Still spots during the first week of school? Should we pay a deposit and a private not knowing if spots will open by Labor Day? Should we move to the burbs over the summer?).

Many Hill parents want a definite majority high SES middle and high school sequence, though they many not admit it to avoid being called snobs, racists, whatever. The Hill is already majority high SES without schools mirroring this reality, other than Brent and SWS, for political reasons. Parents should lobby to end Rhee's elementary to middle feeder, regardless of where a family resides, since it means that the 2 Hill DCPS middle schoolls and 1 high school serve Wards 7 and 8 far better than Ward 6.

What a ridiculous situation when money is being poured into Stuart Hobson although three-quarters of its students are OOB and at least half don't reside on the Hill. SH's demographic won't much change anytime soon, not when most of the little kids in the feeder elementaries aren't Hill kids. Payne and Ludlow-Taylor should be shut so the ES middle school cohort isn't spread so thin around the Hill. The Stanton Park neighborhood north of the park could be folded into Maury without a fuss to ensure that another majority high SES emerges.

We don't want public schools that are ALL high SES around here; we want neighborhood schools almost all neighbors feel comfortable with from preS 3 to through 12th. Tell Wells to get a plan.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Demand for Basis by Hill parents will grow and grow, even if the STEM curriculum and fairly narrow focus aren't a good fit for many of the kids. Soon enough, as at Latin, the problem will be that a lottery will create a long waiting list come May, and a great deal of uncertainty about who can attend in the fall and when (Still spots during the first week of school? Should we pay a deposit and a private not knowing if spots will open by Labor Day? Should we move to the burbs over the summer?).

Many Hill parents want a definite majority high SES middle and high school sequence, though they many not admit it to avoid being called snobs, racists, whatever. The Hill is already majority high SES without schools mirroring this reality, other than Brent and SWS, for political reasons. Parents should lobby to end Rhee's elementary to middle feeder, regardless of where a family resides, since it means that the 2 Hill DCPS middle schoolls and 1 high school serve Wards 7 and 8 far better than Ward 6.

What a ridiculous situation when money is being poured into Stuart Hobson although three-quarters of its students are OOB and at least half don't reside on the Hill. SH's demographic won't much change anytime soon, not when most of the little kids in the feeder elementaries aren't Hill kids. Payne and Ludlow-Taylor should be shut so the ES middle school cohort isn't spread so thin around the Hill. The Stanton Park neighborhood north of the park could be folded into Maury without a fuss to ensure that another majority high SES emerges.

We don't want public schools that are ALL high SES around here; we want neighborhood schools almost all neighbors feel comfortable with from preS 3 to through 12th. Tell Wells to get a plan.

I think you overstate the case by saying "majority high SES". I'd be happy if my child had a middle-school option that wasn't 90+% FARMS.

[Anonymous]

+1. The uncertaintly inherent in the search for majority high SES schools goes up the chain of course, hurting the Hill. We're in 3rd grade at Brent already quietly looking at privates and suburban middle schools because we have no idea if Basis or Latin will work out for us.

I'm not impressed that Latin's high school is only around 1/3 as white/high SES as its middle school and expect similar demographics at Basis' future high school.

Kids make friends in middle school and tend to want to stay with them for high school. We'd rather not ask our shy older child to make a new set of friends somewhere between 8th and 12th grades because the upper grades at Basis or Latin are overwhelmingly low SES and, hence, very unlikely to provide the challenge and upbeat social environment we need. For the Basis boosters who claim that the school will be different than Latin, retaining most high SES families who start in 5th and 6th, why should we believe you?

If we knew that we had a majority high SES ES + MS + HS sequence, we'd be feeling a lot more confident about staying on the Hill than we are. We know dozens of local families who probably feel the same way.

[Anonymous]

I think this (14:21) makes sense, but have some reservations about seeing Payne close. Payne has a good school culture even if the test scores are bad. The principal is lovely. The kids know how to behave at school. I spent quite a bit of time there, and in terms of orderliness it is every bit as much of a learning environment as Maury or Brent (and actually has a nicer feel that Watkins).

And I can also imagine Cluster parents fighting tooth and nail to keep the automatic feeder thing even though it hurts their kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think this (14:21) makes sense, but have some reservations about seeing Payne close. Payne has a good school culture even if the test scores are bad. The principal is lovely. The kids know how to behave at school. I spent quite a bit of time there, and in terms of orderliness it is every bit as much of a learning environment as Maury or Brent (and actually has a nicer feel that Watkins).

And I can also imagine Cluster parents fighting tooth and nail to keep the automatic feeder thing even though it hurts their kids.

Payne principal is indeed good but it's not a neighborhood school by any stretch of the imagination, and isn't becoming one past PreS and PreK (like Ludlow-Taylor) making life tough for the gentrifiers on the East Hill.

No shortage of parents in the Payne District who want the school closed in view of the fact that there's almost no hope of turning it around. High SES parents know they'd be much better off zoned for Maury or Tyler. A decade ago, when Brent started turning, you had enough college-educated parents on board to to effect lasting change. Now parents zoned for struggling Hill schools run to charters early on. They don't care if they're going for Chinese immersion, Hebrew immersion or experiential learning as long as other high SES parents are onboard for K+.

Yea, the Cluster parents fight what works, like having Brent and Maury feed to Stuart-Hobson.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: I think you overstate the case by saying "majority high SES". I'd be happy if my child had a middle-school option that wasn't 90+% FARMS.

New poster. What about SH then? I have yet to meet determined Hill parents who didn't get in OOB. Maybe that will change once high SES kids reach Brent, Maury and Tyler SI in large numbers. Not enough room at SH soon in view of Rhee's 2008 feeder decision.

Some of us do want majority high SES MS, like Deal, or a school within a school program where most parents are college educated. If our neighborhood had a big Asian population, no need for a majority high SES school of any kind. Low SES Asian kids tend to do better academically than high SES kids of other races.

[Anonymous]

This impresssion that the Cluster Parents don't want Brent and Maury to feed into SH is not quite right. The problem is that just before Brent and Maury started surging forward as neighborhood schools, Stuart Hobson added JO Wilson and Ludlow Taylor as additional feeder schools. Why? Because they both had relatively high test scores ( in the 70% range ). Later, thesetest scores were correlated at both schools with high erasure rates ( cheating ) and plunged in.the following years.

But, Stuart Hobson was stuck with them as feeders, and worse, no longer had any space to add Brent or Maury who began posting legitimately decent test scores.

It was strategically disasterous for the Cluster and they can't get out of the space crunch now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Demand for Basis by Hill parents will grow and grow, even if the STEM curriculum and fairly narrow focus aren't a good fit for many of the kids. Soon enough, as at Latin, the problem will be that a lottery will create a long waiting list come May, and a great deal of uncertainty about who can attend in the fall and when (Still spots during the first week of school? Should we pay a deposit and a private not knowing if spots will open by Labor Day? Should we move to the burbs over the summer?).

Many Hill parents want a definite majority high SES middle and high school sequence, though they many not admit it to avoid being called snobs, racists, whatever. The Hill is already majority high SES without schools mirroring this reality, other than Brent and SWS, for political reasons. Parents should lobby to end Rhee's elementary to middle feeder, regardless of where a family resides, since it means that the 2 Hill DCPS middle schoolls and 1 high school serve Wards 7 and 8 far better than Ward 6.

What a ridiculous situation when money is being poured into Stuart Hobson although three-quarters of its students are OOB and at least half don't reside on the Hill. SH's demographic won't much change anytime soon, not when most of the little kids in the feeder elementaries aren't Hill kids. Payne and Ludlow-Taylor should be shut so the ES middle school cohort isn't spread so thin around the Hill. The Stanton Park neighborhood north of the park could be folded into Maury without a fuss to ensure that another majority high SES emerges.

Maury isn't big enough to handle the potential numbers. Yet another indictment of the previously poor judgment of the powers that be at Ludlow Taylor. Maury could be shut and all the kids moved to LT, which is due for a renovation this summer.
We don't want public schools that are ALL high SES around here; we want neighborhood schools almost all neighbors feel comfortable with from preS 3 to through 12th. Tell Wells to get a plan.