EdFest Tips and Retro

[Anonymous]

We had a really positive experience at EdFest on Saturday, and we also learned a lot in going through the process, so wanted to share some tips for anyone searching next year.

1) It's CRITICAL to come in with a list of schools you are interested in. There are hundreds of schools and lots of them are super far from your house and/or no good, and it's not really possible to tell that by walking by. "Let's just go check it out, see what schools look interesting" would make it a huge waste of time.

2) If you have more than about 2-3 schools you want to check out, do NOT bring your kids. We opted to get a sitter and were really glad we did. It'd probably be fine if you had plenty of time and only needed to talk to a couple of schools.

3) My husband and I did eight schools each (16 total) and I'd say that's about the max. We were there at opening time and stayed the whole time with one break and were VERY task oriented.

4) Have a list of questions ahead of time. Ideally, differentiated between the different people you'll talk to. We had (slightly) different lists of questions depending on whether we had the principal, a teacher, or a parent, and that was really helpful. There's no point in asking a parent about how teachers differentiate, or what the curriculum is. And particularly if you get the chance to talk to a principal (which you often do! I talked to the principal at about half the schools!), you really want to ask key questions and not spend your time talking about aftercare or nap time. One thing I didn't expect is that there were a lot of random administrators - the registrar, the front office person, the director of whatever-the-heck, so if I had to do it again, I'd be prepared for that.

5) Put some thought into your questions. You can probably only ask 3-5 max, so make sure you're going for stuff that will help you make your decision (which, for us, was really, do we like them enough to want to go to an open house?) and not stuff you can find out online or just general info.

We got a ton out of EdFest and will probably be able to narrow our list of 16 schools down to about 9 for open houses.

Anyone else have tips for future EdFest goers?

[Anonymous]

Great tips -- especially for the PK-8 Ed Fest. I agree that bringing kids to PK-8 Ed Fest isn't ideal if there are lots of schools you want to visit. For high school, do consider bringing the high school student.

[Anonymous]

I'd love to see how you do come college application time, OP. Heh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'd love to see how you do come college application time, OP. Heh.

Op here. Ha - yes, I approached my own college applications with a similar level of... let's call it precision.

Luckily, while I'm extraordinarily type-A, I'm also pretty free range in my parenting so luckily for everyone my kids will likely be pretty much on their own for college applications (for better or worse!)

[Anonymous]

What options did you narrow it down to? You started with 16 & are down to 9. That’s great! The lottery system can be pretty interesting depending on how popular your school is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What options did you narrow it down to? You started with 16 & are down to 9. That’s great! The lottery system can be pretty interesting depending on how popular your school is.

OP here. I'll bite. Noting that we're at our inbound right now (one of Raymond/Tubman/Cooke/Cleveland) and may stay, but this is our first time doing the lottery (I mean, I guess technically we did for PK3, but we just put our inbound and a couple safeties just in case). This is for early elementary (not PK)

Our list of nine is now:

Center City - Brightwood
El Haynes
Garrison
Inspired Teaching
John Lewis
Lee Montessori
Ross
School Within School
Thomson

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We had a really positive experience at EdFest on Saturday, and we also learned a lot in going through the process, so wanted to share some tips for anyone searching next year.

1) It's CRITICAL to come in with a list of schools you are interested in. There are hundreds of schools and lots of them are super far from your house and/or no good, and it's not really possible to tell that by walking by. "Let's just go check it out, see what schools look interesting" would make it a huge waste of time.

2) If you have more than about 2-3 schools you want to check out, do NOT bring your kids. We opted to get a sitter and were really glad we did. It'd probably be fine if you had plenty of time and only needed to talk to a couple of schools.

3) My husband and I did eight schools each (16 total) and I'd say that's about the max. We were there at opening time and stayed the whole time with one break and were VERY task oriented.

4) Have a list of questions ahead of time. Ideally, differentiated between the different people you'll talk to. We had (slightly) different lists of questions depending on whether we had the principal, a teacher, or a parent, and that was really helpful. There's no point in asking a parent about how teachers differentiate, or what the curriculum is. And particularly if you get the chance to talk to a principal (which you often do! I talked to the principal at about half the schools!), you really want to ask key questions and not spend your time talking about aftercare or nap time. One thing I didn't expect is that there were a lot of random administrators - the registrar, the front office person, the director of whatever-the-heck, so if I had to do it again, I'd be prepared for that.

5) Put some thought into your questions. You can probably only ask 3-5 max, so make sure you're going for stuff that will help you make your decision (which, for us, was really, do we like them enough to want to go to an open house?) and not stuff you can find out online or just general info.

We got a ton out of EdFest and will probably be able to narrow our list of 16 schools down to about 9 for open houses.

Anyone else have tips for future EdFest goers?

Take full advantage! I remember speaking with the principal of a school that had two campuses, and gave a brief description of what I was looking for, and they came right out and told me which order to rank their campuses to best fit my kid. With the info they provided as to why, it had a huge impact on my overall lottery list order.

[Anonymous]

Ooo I’m bookmarking this for next year. Thanks OP!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What options did you narrow it down to? You started with 16 & are down to 9. That’s great! The lottery system can be pretty interesting depending on how popular your school is.

OP here. I'll bite. Noting that we're at our inbound right now (one of Raymond/Tubman/Cooke/Cleveland) and may stay, but this is our first time doing the lottery (I mean, I guess technically we did for PK3, but we just put our inbound and a couple safeties just in case). This is for early elementary (not PK)

Our list of nine is now:

Center City - Brightwood
El Haynes
Garrison
Inspired Teaching
John Lewis
Lee Montessori
Ross
School Within School
Thomson

I don't know everything about all these schools, but if you're taking recs from strangers on DCUM, based on my own personal or friends' experience Garrison, Lewis, Ross, and Thomson are great bets. Don't know enough about the others to comment one way or the other.

[Anonymous]

Inspired Teaching is super "progressive", like putting social issues into math problems and having spirit weeks that completely ignore the holidays. Judge for yourself if you are into that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Inspired Teaching is super "progressive", like putting social issues into math problems and having spirit weeks that completely ignore the holidays. Judge for yourself if you are into that.

Oh noes, a spirit week that isn't about Christianity! Horrors!

[Anonymous]

Honest question: what's the point of "checking out schools" at EdFest? Does it give you a straight data-driven perspective on success, lottery stats, and so on that you can't get anywhere else? no, all those reports are available online. (Great, so they might give you a list of school clubs and course offerings or whatever. You can get that online too.)

ok, so does it give you a sense of it's like to physically attend the school, what the vibe is, what the surrounding neighborhood is like, how the commute would feel? no, for that you'd have to make an individual visit to the actual campus.

so does it give you a real-world, unvarnished take on the lived experience of students and parents? no, for that you'd need...someone, anyone who isn't drawing a paycheck from the school or sitting at a booth sponsored by the school.

I made plans to attend this one or two years, didn't go - and realized I now can't see the point. Can someone explain it to me?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honest question: what's the point of "checking out schools" at EdFest? Does it give you a straight data-driven perspective on success, lottery stats, and so on that you can't get anywhere else? no, all those reports are available online. (Great, so they might give you a list of school clubs and course offerings or whatever. You can get that online too.)

ok, so does it give you a sense of it's like to physically attend the school, what the vibe is, what the surrounding neighborhood is like, how the commute would feel? no, for that you'd have to make an individual visit to the actual campus.

so does it give you a real-world, unvarnished take on the lived experience of students and parents? no, for that you'd need...someone, anyone who isn't drawing a paycheck from the school or sitting at a booth sponsored by the school.

I made plans to attend this one or two years, didn't go - and realized I now can't see the point. Can someone explain it to me?

I do think there's some "vibe" perception benefit.

If the booth is terrible and the school leaders are really unimpressive, that's good to know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honest question: what's the point of "checking out schools" at EdFest? Does it give you a straight data-driven perspective on success, lottery stats, and so on that you can't get anywhere else? no, all those reports are available online. (Great, so they might give you a list of school clubs and course offerings or whatever. You can get that online too.)

ok, so does it give you a sense of it's like to physically attend the school, what the vibe is, what the surrounding neighborhood is like, how the commute would feel? no, for that you'd have to make an individual visit to the actual campus.

so does it give you a real-world, unvarnished take on the lived experience of students and parents? no, for that you'd need...someone, anyone who isn't drawing a paycheck from the school or sitting at a booth sponsored by the school.

I made plans to attend this one or two years, didn't go - and realized I now can't see the point. Can someone explain it to me?

I think as you narrow down your search then school visits/Open Houses are helpful, but if you are looking at putting 10+ schools on a lottery list, for many parents that is not feasible. I am a bit biased bc as a parent I have volunteered to stand at my kids' ES and MS tables on various years, and I think it is a unique time to be able to ask questions to school leaders who are normally swamped/busy. Sure, you will get their talking points, but that will be what you hear at Open Houses too. Also, if there are parents there they can shed information about the non-school issues/questions like commute, traffic, neighborhood vibe, school community, types of activities and clubs. Sure, the parents who volunteer are going to in general be fans of the school, but they will share different perspectives than the admin/teachers.
The more I learn about the insane number of hats school admin wear and things they have to juggle every day, I think getting to talk to/ask questions to these folks at EdFest is reason enough to go.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honest question: what's the point of "checking out schools" at EdFest? Does it give you a straight data-driven perspective on success, lottery stats, and so on that you can't get anywhere else? no, all those reports are available online. (Great, so they might give you a list of school clubs and course offerings or whatever. You can get that online too.)

ok, so does it give you a sense of it's like to physically attend the school, what the vibe is, what the surrounding neighborhood is like, how the commute would feel? no, for that you'd have to make an individual visit to the actual campus.

so does it give you a real-world, unvarnished take on the lived experience of students and parents? no, for that you'd need...someone, anyone who isn't drawing a paycheck from the school or sitting at a booth sponsored by the school.

I made plans to attend this one or two years, didn't go - and realized I now can't see the point. Can someone explain it to me?

I'm the OP of this thread. So for us, I used the data-driven, online research to narrow us down to 16 schools. That was based on commute, test scores, and a few other things (like we knew we didn't want immersion). Going to 16 school open houses would be a LOT - not really tenable in a few months. So we needed to make another round of cuts before we could start open houses.

Through our research, we had a bunch of schools that we were excited about, and bunch that just kinda "made the cut" - test scores were good enough, commute was good enough, but nothing that really excited us about the school. But we know, like you allude to, that there are lots of other factors that go into a school, (vibes, principal quality, etc) and it's very possible there was a "diamond in the rough" in there that we just didn't know about. So we kinda had two lists - for about half the schools, we were very likely to go to an open house, but it was worth visiting their Ed Fest table as a double check. Then for the other half, we really needed a hook or something to impress us, or we probably won't bother. Call it "probably" and "probably nots."

I think asking good questions is key. The ones I got the most out of were "What is special or different about your school?" and "Talk to me about differentiation in the upper grades."

Several of the schools on our "probably nots" list gave us pretty standard, cookie cutter answers to our questions. They couldn't really identify anything special about their school. Discussions about differentiation were mostly about bringing up kids who were behind. Staff were pleasant and nice, but not energetic or enthusiastic. Either the principal wasn't there (bad sign at a middle of the road school, IMHO) or gave the party line. After 10 minutes at a booth at EdFest, combined with the research we already have, we're comfortably crossing them off the list.

However, there were three of those "probably nots" that REALLY wowed us. Center City Brightwood had a great principal who talked a lot about how they work to develop community and make sure that all students are connected to staff members. They also have this brand new maker space (shared among all the Center City schools) that has things like a recording studio, a pottery studio with a kiln, etc, and they'll take turns going and spending the day there to do hands on learning. Combine that with the test scores compared to demographics (strong, which we already knew from our research) and they are definitely worth an open house. We had a similarly great conversation with EL Haynes. I got to spend a lot of time with their upper grades ELA teacher and she had SUCH good and interesting information when it came to differentiation. She really got into specifics on how she can support both the kids who are behind and the kids who are ahead of grade level and how she approaches this. I also found out they are using the same ELA curriculum that a few DCPS schools (Ross included) got a special waiver to use (because the DCPS ELA curriculum is pretty week). I also got to talk to an upper grades parent who was super happy with their experience at EL Haynes. And John Lewis was another - long conversation with the principal about how she brings fun and enthusiasm to the school and you could just FEEL her energy. They'll get a tour too. A good principal can change the whole tenor of a school.

There were also a couple of deal breakers with our "probably" schools, including an upcoming modernization/swing space that we just don't want to deal with. So a couple of those got crossed off.

Also - you're right that you're not getting the unvarnished truth. But it's actually not that hard to spot someone who's giving you bulls*t and someone whose telling you (the shiny version of) the truth. You set your skepticism meter to "high" and you can still learn stuff.

And so, 16 became 9, saving us 7 open houses. I do think where it's most useful is those "on the bubble" schools. We probably could have just skipped the ones at the top of our list and gone straight to an open house.