I don't think that is what happened. They allowed it to exist through the lottery and they were planning to review it at the April 7 meeting. If they did a behind the scenes shutdown, that's a lack of transparency and a violating of their own rules. If the school really did voluntarily shut down because the PCSB forced them to see their dire circumstances, that's more okay. |
You can see from the data that 27 students across all grades were still on their waitlist on match day, which means they didn't match elsewhere. |
Nope. It means there are 27 kids who ranked it higher than where they matched, not that they "didn't match elsewhere". |
At the end of the PCSB meeting on YouTube it says the school opted to close after a pre-review data meeting with PCSB. |
Good for the school for doing what they could to protect the families from even more upheaval. |
Stay critical. The PCSB didn’t shut them down. The PCSB literally told them that they could go to next year and they wouldn’t run the performance calculations to see if they met goals until AFTER the lottery next year at which time the school would have to relinquish or be revoked. Meanwhile OSSE releases its report card scores in late November/early December. The charter school decided they wouldn’t put their families or staff through that. It was simply a happy accident that the school made the decision a day before lottery matches were released. That one day gave My School DC the opportunity to re-run the matches. |
Wouldn’t have been the school’s fault they’re in this situation in the first place?!? |
It should have happened a month earlier. Current families are learning about this too late to enter the lottery. |
Agree with this. DCPCSB should either decide to shut down schools before the lottery deadline so current families have a chance to apply elsewhere, or keep them open another year with support to better serve the students. What happened with I Dream was better than with Eagle, but it's still a failure. |
Does the charter board keep data on schools they keep open with low enrollment and finance issues? Is there data to support that these schools can actually turn the corner and become successful? If the answer is no, or rarely, which is what I suspect, then they need to use that data to close schools sooner. |
https://dcpcsb.org/financial-analysis-reports If you look in this, there's information about each school. They do sometimes pull out of financial issues. Often times the issue is too expensive a building and if they downsize that brings them back onto an appropriate budget. That is an annual report, but there is also a running list here: https://dcpcsb.egnyte.com/dl/9uzDk8PaUP/Financial_Monitoring_List.pdf_ |
Probably true but plenty of people/organizations are at fault for something and then never do anything to deal with the fallout. This one did. |
+1000 In both cases, it wasn't even a DCPCSB decision for closure. The school's decided. Even though all of the data was there and available for the DCPCSB. These schools that are in trouble need to be pushed to make the best (even if hard) decision for their families. It's unfortunate that the push isn't coming from the agency that should be providing oversight. |
Interesting that Hope Tolson charter school also matched zero and offered zero seats. Perhaps they are also relinquishing. Their data was worse than I Dream and their review hearing was horrendous. They are the lowest performing elementary middle in DC. The OSSE report card puts them at the zeroth percentile for performance. |
Yes, I was astonished they made it through the hearing. PCSB's oversight is so weak, they will give any number of extensions to prop up a school that is in a clear spiral of failure. However, the way that data looks, I wonder if maybe it's been zeroed out or they weren't allowed to have matches. Because for a school that's trying to stay alive and maintain enrollment, how does offering zero seats make any sense? I didn't download the data set initially but maybe someone else has it. |