HARDY: Anyone know how many feeder school kids attending next yr?

[Anonymous]

whether or not oob kids are low performing or ill bhaved has been discussed enough. wharever the case, oob students are there because ib families opted out. chicken or the egg?

[Anonymous]

TLR the rest of the comments, but I'm a parent from a feeder school and very happily sending my 5th grader to Hardy next year. And my next kid in 2 years. I went in to an open house thinking this was my safety backup school, and came out thinking, this school is awesome and it's where I want my kids. Deep down gut feeling. Just my opinion, but there's a big groundswell of others who feel the same, now that I've started asking around (as I am uninterested/out of the loop on whatever the controversy has been in the past.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:TL : DR the rest of the comments...

is what that was supposed to say. Dang emoticons.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:TLR the rest of the comments, but I'm a parent from a feeder school and very happily sending my 5th grader to Hardy next year. And my next kid in 2 years. I went in to an open house thinking this was my safety backup school, and came out thinking, this school is awesome and it's where I want my kids. Deep down gut feeling. Just my opinion, but there's a big groundswell of others who feel the same, now that I've started asking around (as I am uninterested/out of the loop on whatever the controversy has been in the past.)

Good for you! I will be doing same in two years for the same reasons.

[Anonymous]

Good to hear - I'm a parent of a Stoddert 4th grader and will be right there with you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Good to hear - I'm a parent of a Stoddert 4th grader and will be right there with you.

There are quite a few of us on the Hyde playground who will be joining you!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good to hear - I'm a parent of a Stoddert 4th grader and will be right there with you.

There are quite a few of us on the Hyde playground who will be joining you!

So jealous.

Signed -Ward Six Parent

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:whether or not oob kids are low performing or ill bhaved has been discussed enough. wharever the case, oob students are there because ib families opted out. chicken or the egg?

Revisionist history. The IB parents didn't opt out. The school was hijacked by its administration. IB families were seen as PITAs, so little effort was spent recruiting at feeder ESs. Instead, OOB spots were increased substantially. To ensure the that the PITA OOB kids didn't enroll, the wait-list procedures were manipulated to admit well off OOB students and discourage poor OOB enrollment. You can read about it here:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/9728/rhee-feared-hardy-principal-was-weeding-out-poor-kids/

IB parents have been trying for years to undo the damage with little success.

[Anonymous]

Interesting that there was not enough demand to keep the school open between roughly 1980 and 1996. Since it reopened, sitting, waiting, the actual users have rarely been from the immediate neighborhood. Point is, they stopped using it so it was shut down for a long time....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good to hear - I'm a parent of a Stoddert 4th grader and will be right there with you.

There are quite a few of us on the Hyde playground who will be joining you!

So jealous.

Signed -Ward Six Parent

Just bothers me. You'll find the same conversations about Eliot-Hine - on listserves and at meetings with names and faces attached. And if that's not enough, then try Jefferson' academy, which is doing really well and for good reasons. You may not be in-bounds but Stuart-Hobson has long worked that way. No, I'm not jealous of that commute. But if you really are, then just lottery. You'll get in.

[Anonymous]

The grass seems always greener on the other side of the fence.
That's why so many are driving their kids to and fro. What's the data on that? Within any one school boundary, kids attend an average of 64 different schools? Something like that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good to hear - I'm a parent of a Stoddert 4th grader and will be right there with you.

There are quite a few of us on the Hyde playground who will be joining you!

So jealous.

Signed -Ward Six Parent

Just bothers me. You'll find the same conversations about Eliot-Hine - on listserves and at meetings with names and faces attached. And if that's not enough, then try Jefferson' academy, which is doing really well and for good reasons. You may not be in-bounds but Stuart-Hobson has long worked that way. No, I'm not jealous of that commute. But if you really are, then just lottery. You'll get in.

I am not the ward 6 parent who posted the jealous note. I read that to mean jealous that the feeder schools to Hardy were all coming together and excited about Hardy as their neighborhood middle school and wishing that would happen for Ward 6 middle schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Interesting that there was not enough demand to keep the school open between roughly 1980 and 1996. Since it reopened, sitting, waiting, the actual users have rarely been from the immediate neighborhood. Point is, they stopped using it so it was shut down for a long time....

But Amy Carter attended back in 1974! Oh, wait, she was OOB.

Seriously, the history of Hardy 20 to 35 years ago is irrelevant to the discussion. The demographics of DC have changed dramatically in just the past decade. The city is gentrifying, and many middle class families are enrolling in DCPS.

The few articles I can find about Hardy suggest that before the renovation that started in December, 2005, Hardy had much high percentage of IB kids. However, the renovation required relocation to the Hamilton Center in NE, and enrollment dropped from 420 to 320 after the move. Presumably, most of the 100 who left were IB families who did not want their kids commuting to NE each day -- reportedly 45 minutes by bus. So, we might infer that IB enrollment was at least 24% in 2005.

It appears that Pope put little effort into luring IB families back to Hardy when the school returned to its renovated building in August, 2008. Instead, he simply increased OOB enrollment

Worse, however, is that rather than play the hand he was dealt and simply accept kids by lottery, he created an application process that allowed him to keep undesirables out. Of course, the easiest way to improve a public school in DC is to be selective in admissions...

So, Hardy became the darling of many OOB families -- if they made the cut. Those families, in turn, became vocal supporters of Pope. When Rhee got wind of what Pope was doing, she removed him. Of course, the IB families protested his removal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:whether or not oob kids are low performing or ill bhaved has been discussed enough. wharever the case, oob students are there because ib families opted out. chicken or the egg?

Revisionist history. The IB parents didn't opt out. The school was hijacked by its administration. IB families were seen as PITAs, so little effort was spent recruiting at feeder ESs. Instead, OOB spots were increased substantially. To ensure the that the PITA OOB kids didn't enroll, the wait-list procedures were manipulated to admit well off OOB students and discourage poor OOB enrollment. You can read about it here:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/9728/rhee-feared-hardy-principal-was-weeding-out-poor-kids/

IB parents have been trying for years to undo the damage with little success.

This story is just bullshit. This alleged research is poorly designed as has been discussed in this thread: http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/156849.page#1428750

As was typical of Rhee and some of her supporters, this person made novice mistakes and refused to take responsibility for shoddy work which was used to smear someone's reputation. If you can't do the real research, I guess you just pull pseudoscience out of your hat and pretend you know what you're doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Revisionist history. The IB parents didn't opt out. The school was hijacked by its administration. IB families were seen as PITAs, so little effort was spent recruiting at feeder ESs. Instead, OOB spots were increased substantially. To ensure the that the PITA OOB kids didn't enroll, the wait-list procedures were manipulated to admit well off OOB students and discourage poor OOB enrollment. You can read about it here:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/9728/rhee-feared-hardy-principal-was-weeding-out-poor-kids/

IB parents have been trying for years to undo the damage with little success.

This story is just bullshit. This alleged research is poorly designed as has been discussed in this thread: http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/156849.page#1428750

As was typical of Rhee and some of her supporters, this person made novice mistakes and refused to take responsibility for shoddy work which was used to smear someone's reputation. If you can't do the real research, I guess you just pull pseudoscience out of your hat and pretend you know what you're doing.

You should re-read the thread you cited, PP. I'll help you by editing it down to the most relevant post:

Here's the story as far as I can tell. My perspective is that of an in-boundary parent.

Pope was cherry-picking admissions, using administrative tricks to filter out both in-boundary and out-of-boundary kids he didn't want. He got pretty dirty with in-boundary families and pissed off a lot of people. When Fenty was running in 2006 -- way before Rhee was on the scene -- it was an issue in Ward 3, and Fenty made a campaign promise that he would get rid of Pope if elected.

During 2007-9 Rhee comes on board and tries to work with Pope. The chancellor's office arranges several awkward meetings between Pope and feeder school parents. One he blows off completely. Another one he comes to but apparently didn't say what was expected, I heard a deputy chancellor talking to him in the hallway afterward say "WTF was that?"

Fast forward to fall 2009. Fenty realizes that he has less than a year to go before the next election, and he's getting pressured about keeping his campaign promise. He realizes that Ward 3 is his base and he can't afford to lose it, and he gives the word to Rhee that Pope needs to go. Rhee realizes she can't fire Pope outright because she doesn't have the documentation to prove cause. She comes up with this arts magnet school in an effort to lure Pope away from Hardy. According to people who were in the room when Rhee pitched the arts magnet to Pope, Rhee left the meeting believing that Pope had agreed to the magnet school job.

Obviously, either Rhee misread Pope or Pope changed his mind, but clearly by the time the change was announced Pope had decided to fight to keep his position at Hardy. Pope launches a guerrilla campaign to undermine Rhee, with parents and students as his proxies. Hardy becomes a city-wide cause because of the general resentment of Rhee and Fenty, race and class, and anxiety about the out-of-boundary process. Rhee and Fenty lose their jobs but Pope doesn't get his back.

A new principal starts on July 1. She dismantles Pope's admissions scheme, and goes to a straight by-the-book lottery. Enrollment surges by over 120 students -- it turns out Pope had been keeping the school almost a quarter empty. The new students cause problems with scheduling and discipline. Pro-Pope parents know they can't complain about the change in admissions policy, so they start a campaign blaming all of the problems on the incompetence of the new prinicpal. After four months the new principal has had enough and begs for her old job back.

Which pretty much gets us to where we are today.

I stand by my previous post. It is revisionist history to claim that IB families abandoned Hardy. Pope drove them out.