Change to policy re: moving out of boundary?

[Anonymous]

From SY23-24 guide, page 11:

Where a PK-12 student has been attending an in-boundary school and then moves out of boundary while remaining in the District of Columbia, the student has the right to attend their new in-boundary school. The student may also continue to attend the current school through the end of the school’s terminal grade. All families are required to notify the school of any change of residence within three (3) school days of such change.
After the terminal grade, the student has the right to attend the in-boundary school assigned for their next grade based on their home address and can apply to schools outside of the boundary via the My School DC lottery. They will lose their right to attend their old in-boundary feeder school and will need to use the My School DC lottery to apply as an out-of-boundary student to attend that school. For information on options where a student moves out of the District of Columbia, see page 34.

From SY24-25 guide, page 10:

Where a PK-12 student has been attending an in-boundary school and then moves out of boundary while remaining in the District of Columbia, the student has the right to attend their new in-boundary school and can apply to schools outside of the boundary via the My School DC lottery. All families are required to notify the school of any change of residence within three (3) school days of such change.

Does this mean students will now have to withdraw when they move out of boundary?

[Anonymous]

Oh wow. So not even finishing the school year?

[Anonymous]

I applaud you for catching that, OP! Just the kind of thing I come here to learn.

[Anonymous]

Another interesting point for interpretation, which has not changed from the old policy:

Where a PK-12 student has been attending an in-boundary school and then moves out of boundary while remaining in the District of Columbia, the student has the right to attend their new in-boundary school

Arguably a PK3/PK4 student who was attending a neighborhood PK program has a "right to attend" the new school's Pre-K even without applying to the new school's PK lottery. Has anyone made such a transfer?

[Anonymous]

If a real, intentional change, a significant one.

I don't know how many people actually try the trick where you rent IB for a school in order to get your child enrolled as an IB student, and then return to your actual home after a year or some other shorter period of time, but get to remain at the "former IB" through the terminal grade, but it's certainly been suggested on this website many times as a solution to bad lottery luck. But sounds like it's no longer even technically allowed.

I wonder if you would even be allowed to stay at the "former IB" through the end of the current school year? While I understand wanting to discourage people from essentially "fake moving" into a rental to gain access to a strong DCPS, kicking kids out midyear just because their families moved into another school boundary seems harsh. Sometimes it's hard to make a move perfectly line up with the school year.

[Anonymous]

The only way they can enforce this policy is if they have records of which kids matched in the lottery OOB and which were IB preference.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another interesting point for interpretation, which has not changed from the old policy:

Where a PK-12 student has been attending an in-boundary school and then moves out of boundary while remaining in the District of Columbia, the student has the right to attend their new in-boundary school

Arguably a PK3/PK4 student who was attending a neighborhood PK program has a "right to attend" the new school's Pre-K even without applying to the new school's PK lottery. Has anyone made such a transfer?

As I read it I believe your interpretation of the English language is correct, however I wonder whether DCPS's use of the English language was what they intended

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If a real, intentional change, a significant one.

I don't know how many people actually try the trick where you rent IB for a school in order to get your child enrolled as an IB student, and then return to your actual home after a year or some other shorter period of time, but get to remain at the "former IB" through the terminal grade, but it's certainly been suggested on this website many times as a solution to bad lottery luck. But sounds like it's no longer even technically allowed.

I wonder if you would even be allowed to stay at the "former IB" through the end of the current school year? While I understand wanting to discourage people from essentially "fake moving" into a rental to gain access to a strong DCPS, kicking kids out midyear just because their families moved into another school boundary seems harsh. Sometimes it's hard to make a move perfectly line up with the school year.

My read of this is that they are intending to make it sound like a policy change (perhaps to dissuade folks from doing this), but there is no real change. On page 15 of the same guide, it says:

"A My School DC lottery application is NOT required to:
• Enroll in grades K-12 at an in-boundary or geographic or programmatic feeder DCPS school.
• Re-enroll in their current school or the current strand within their current school.
• Enroll via a formal placement." (emphasis added)

It is [/i]highly[i] unlikely that the policy is to ask kids to immediately switch schools in the middle of the school year. That has the potential to do nothing but create staffing and space issues at schools suddenly receiving new students. Assuming that kids are allowed to finish out the school year, they would not be required to submit a lottery application to re-enroll at their current school, which means the policy is effectively unchanged. The policy has always officially* been that a kid doesn't get feeder rights at the next school in a feeder pattern if they were in the lower grade school because it was their inbound and they then moved out-of-bounds, so that hasn't changed at all.

*I'm not saying the policy is actually followed... it's pretty clear from the part I just quoted that it isn't.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The only way they can enforce this policy is if they have records of which kids matched in the lottery OOB and which were IB preference.

They do though. Rising 9th graders applied to PK4 via the very first My School lottery. So for every student coming to JR from a feeder elementary who got into that feeder by lotterying from OOB, there’s a My School record to confirm that fact. (And this is the first class for which that has ever been true, which might explain why they’re making the change now.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The only way they can enforce this policy is if they have records of which kids matched in the lottery OOB and which were IB preference.

That’s an easy list to maintain.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The only way they can enforce this policy is if they have records of which kids matched in the lottery OOB and which were IB preference.

This data definitely exists.

I suspect this is most likely to enforced at schools where people are most likely to try and game the system by moving IB for a short time and then returning to their actual, permanent home OOB. So basically, NW schools with crowding issues. Maybe some of the elementaries on the Hill where people have reportedly sometimes played fast and loose with the boundary rules, if overcrowding becomes an issue there.

Most schools are not going to bother with hit but the info is absolutely possible to compile and use to check boundary status.

The biggest thing here is that I would read this as an indication that DCPS actually does care about boundary fraud and maybe making an effort to curb it or close loopholes. The conventional wisdom for a while has been that DCPS only cares about residency fraud; I think that may be shifting by necessity as so many DCPS schools deal with overcrowding issues, and it is no longer reasonable to look the other way on this stuff.

[Anonymous]

Doesn't DCPS have only like two people devoted to investigating boundary fraud, compared with suburban districts like Fairfax that have like 25-50?

If so, none of this will matter.

[Anonymous]

I wonder if this is coming from attendance issues. They probably want to be able to send chronically absent kids back to their neighborhood school to eliminate the excuse of being too hard to get to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wonder if this is coming from attendance issues. They probably want to be able to send chronically absent kids back to their neighborhood school to eliminate the excuse of being too hard to get to.

They can already do that, I think.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another interesting point for interpretation, which has not changed from the old policy:

Where a PK-12 student has been attending an in-boundary school and then moves out of boundary while remaining in the District of Columbia, the student has the right to attend their new in-boundary school

Arguably a PK3/PK4 student who was attending a neighborhood PK program has a "right to attend" the new school's Pre-K even without applying to the new school's PK lottery. Has anyone made such a transfer?

Did they mean to say K-12? PK students don’t have right to attend their inbound (except for Guaranteed Access schools).