If you get in nowhere, what next?

[Anonymous]

Michelle Rhee scrapped the per pupil funding formula last year. All the school budgets are up on DCPS's website if you care to see them. I did the budget this year at our school, but I truly couldn't explain how DCPS came up with their numbers.

As for Title I $, it is school based--NOT student based. I think the cut off to be Title one is 40% of the children on a free/reduced price lunch, but don't quote me on that. The schools that are generally chatted about on these boards (upper NW) get no Title I dollars.

And for the record, a school with a $3.8 million dollar operating budget only gets about $125,000 in Title I funds. That's small change compared to the $250k-$500K that the wealthy DCPS schools can raised through their PTAs.

[Anonymous]

Charter schools, FWIW, are funded on a per pupil basis. Which leads me to a question I've long wondered about.

How come charter schools have a cap and DCPS doesn't? I read somewhere the Capital City waitlist is over 1,000 students (surely that must be all the grades added together).

That's longer than any other waitlist in DC public or private. In fact, it's longer than several of them combined. How do they get to cap their number of students per class and DCPS does not?

[Anonymous]

How do they get to cap their number of students per class and DCPS does not?

Neighborhoods schools are legally bound to enroll in-boundary students. If they miscalculate available slots and new families move in-boundary, they can't un-invite OOB students, who were accepted by lottery in the spring. At least that's my sense of it.

[Anonymous]

Wow. This thread makes the private school mom bickerers look like pussy cats.

[Anonymous]

private school moms have less at stake.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:private school moms have less at stake.

I think the poster's point was that many threads in the private school forum take nasty turns. I have found the DCPS forum to be a fairly cordial one save this particular thread, which has been a bare knuckle brawl in some spots.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Ok - right back at ya, then: Why don't you show us some data on how these interloping kids are giving so much value to the schools? How they are singlehandedly holding up test scores in all of the best NW schools? Please, I'd love to see it!

This makes no sense at all. Do you even understand what the purpose of a LEA (local education authority) is? The students do not owe it to DCPS to add value. Quite the opposite: DCPS owes it to the students to provide them an education. That's why DCPS receives tax dollars - in order to do that very job (to varying degrees of success, depending upon which school we're talking about). The students only have to clear the "value add" hurdle in private schools, where the school gets to "select" students. It doesn't work this way in the public arena.

I believe the quote requesting data was responding to the poster(s) who stated that no principal would ever ask a one-time in boundary student that subsequently moved out of boundary to leave the school if such student was testing well and had parents that supported the school because that student added significant value. I tend to agree, in overcrowded schools that have a student population that tests well, why would one more high testing student sway a principal?