Coffee in Lincoln Park with David Catania

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do you live within a block or two of S-H? If you don't, you have no clue.

PP here I have lived within 2 blocks but not currently I do pass the school during school hours on a regular basis and know exactly the kind of behavior described -- not that much different than I've seen around Deal or Wilson either fwiw

[Anonymous]

Wilson, maybe, Deal, no longer.

For DCPS to get serious about serving neighborhoods at by-right schools in the gentrified zone, they must take the bull by the horns in addressing a variety of awkward matters. Anti-social behavior and sloppy dress in school uniform in the neighborhood is one of them, whatever the class and race implications.

Trust me, letting older S-H girls enter and emerge from the school in hooker make-up, hair and jewelry screaming with laughter, cussing up a storm and littering with abandon does nothing to persuade neighborhood families of elementary school-age kids to get behind the school.

Without a lot more gentrifiers, Hobson's test scores aren't going anywhere in particular. Pick your poison, no escape.

[Anonymous]

The gentrifiers aren't coming in significant numbers from Watkins. Ludlow-Taylor is still many years away from graduating a cohort of high-SES gentrifiers. CHM is now citywide and will be offering classes through 8th Grade. So where will these fictional gentrifiers come from?

The Cluster seems to want to do little more than continue to fill seats so as to justify the largesse bestowed upon SH and Watkins (soon) which are destined to remain majority OOB indefinitely.

[Anonymous]

Bottom line, I am glad that Stuart Hobson is providing a decent, though not great, middle school education to students from areas of the city where the middle schools are much worse. I am also glad the Jefferson Academy and Eliot-Hine are slowly, maybe improving and serving the students there better than a few years ago.

However, it remains simply too bad that the very large majority of the in-boundary 4th graders who come up through the feeder schools in Ward 6 are heading away from the DCPS middle schools in their neighborhood.

It's not good for the school system or our neighborhood that those 10-13 year olds are heading private, charter or to Hardy and Deal or worse yet moving away. Once gone, they won't come back for high school very easily.

We need to come together as a community to solve this issue. We need to solicit political leadership to help us to do that.

The status quo is not good enough. It's a waste of serious potential.

[Anonymous]

Amen. The car's broken and needs serious repairs, to save the neighborhood.

[Anonymous]

Elissa Silverman is now saying that she wants Maury, Brent, SWS and Peabody/Watkins to feed to the same neighborhood MS before boundary recommendations are finalized in several years. Good for her but I really really really doubt it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One of the first things Melissa Kim did as principal at Deal was to crack down on the behavior of students before and after school in the surrounding community. She took a lot of flak from complaints that she was racist as a result, but our experience at Deal was that the children knew they were held to very strict standards and generally complied with them.

I see and hear nothing comparable at Stuart-Hobson or Eliot-Hine, and have also witnessed student behavior both inside and around those schools that has previously and would continue to make me extremely, extremely reluctant to send our Capitol Hill children there.

Marion Barry took up the banner than Dr. Kim was a so-called racist. When she earned the opposition of that old racist fool Barry, it caused parents in Deal's IB area to look very seriously at how she had successfully reformed the school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Elissa Silverman is now saying that she wants Maury, Brent, SWS and Peabody/Watkins to feed to the same neighborhood MS before boundary recommendations are finalized in several years. Good for her but I really really really doubt it.

Cool, where and how is she saying this?

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Elissa Silverman is now saying that she wants Maury, Brent, SWS and Peabody/Watkins to feed to the same neighborhood MS before boundary recommendations are finalized in several years. Good for her but I really really really doubt it.

I don't get the "finalized in several years" part. The recommendations have been finalized and will be used in the lottery that begins in December (unless something changes). All that remains is an implementations plan.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Elissa Silverman is now saying that she wants Maury, Brent, SWS and Peabody/Watkins to feed to the same neighborhood MS before boundary recommendations are finalized in several years. Good for her but I really really really doubt it.

Cool, where and how is she saying this?

First of all, she needs to win a seat for that to even matter. Even with an at large seat, that won't assure her a seat on the education committee. And none of the boundary/feeder patterns are driven by the Council but by DME under the Mayor's office.

As a strictly logistical matter and based on shear volume that school could not be SH. Not that any of the top Hill ES retain many students through 5th, but a feeder MS would require the capacity to do so if inbound students were to remain in DCPS. It would need a capacity > 600 which even an expanded SH won't have.

[Anonymous]

But Eliot Hine has that capacity. And a great physical plant and proximity to Eastern and its athletic fields and possibilities for advanced high school studies. Also EH has the ability to work with Eastern to bring its INernational Baccalaureate Middle Years Program all the way through 10th grade like it is supposed to work. And you have the river close by for biological field work and a metro station right there.

Maybe SH makes a very nice city-wide museum magnet program working closely with the Smithsonian. And also feeds to Eastern.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Melissa crack downed but the school is predominantly AA back then and is now.

The school that you don't want, just might not want you. School choice is not a slogan...choose another school, good riddance. My word, we get it you've seen something that worries you and your unable to land your helicopter.

Only one in three Deal students are black in 2014. When Kim took the helm it was maybe 50% black.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you live within a block or two of S-H? If you don't, you have no clue.

PP here I have lived within 2 blocks but not currently I do pass the school during school hours on a regular basis and know exactly the kind of behavior described -- not that much different than I've seen around Deal or Wilson either fwiw

Wrong. Deal neighbor here who regularly has appointments on the Hill.

Deal kids are like Westland kids or Pyle kids in their "school's out" behavior. Seriously, they walk in an orderly line across the NPS property and continue on home. No shouting, much bike riding

Wilson, now, that's a different story. MPD cops are there every single day, sitting there and cooly monitoring that last bell, in front of the school and around whole foods, cvs and the metro.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But Eliot Hine has that capacity. And a great physical plant and proximity to Eastern and its athletic fields and possibilities for advanced high school studies. Also EH has the ability to work with Eastern to bring its INernational Baccalaureate Middle Years Program all the way through 10th grade like it is supposed to work. And you have the river close by for biological field work and a metro station right there.

Maybe SH makes a very nice city-wide museum magnet program working closely with the Smithsonian. And also feeds to Eastern.

This has been suggested here before. All parents band together and make EH the MS you want it to be. The response was hostile at best. It's SH, and the exclusion of "difficult" kids, or bust for some.

[Anonymous]

Well, I guess its "bust" then.