Prospective Ludlow Taylor Parent

[Anonymous]

MoTH would be an excellent place to get feedback on Watkins and Ludlow-Taylor since there are plenty of parents with kids in those schools.

[Anonymous]

Any more shootings recently? Is the neighborhood getting cleaned up, or do we just wait for another game of dice to go bad?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Nope, not a troll. Read old posts. Was mostly baseless praise. We have the kids in the cluster schools- and everyone we talk to says to run like hell from LT. Just trying to figure out why there is such discrepancy.

What does Scandinavian mythology have to do with this, troll?

[Anonymous]

Here's a message that was posted on MOTH:

"LT is our inbounds school so I can also speak to the neighborhood as a whole. I feel very safe in this part of the Hill. We do get some H street spillover but that is to be expected (unfortunately)."

Really, is there targeted crime on H Street to cause "spillover?" H Street is literally 1 block from LT. Folks who live "on the hill" have a false sense that the houses on their specific block (home or school) are somehow immune to crime. Whereas, homes on the next block over are crime-infested?

I've been following crime in DC and the perpetrators are often from Maryland and come to the Hill to target unsuspecting victims.

Did this rub anyone else the wrong way too?

[Anonymous]

What's the demographic make-up of this year's kindergarten class? How many classes, what's the size of the classes and what % are in-bounds? Positive experiences? Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What's the demographic make-up of this year's kindergarten class? How many classes, what's the size of the classes and what % are in-bounds? Positive experiences? Thanks.

Two K classes, each 20-25 kids. (I think my daughter made 21 valentines for her classmates?) I don't know the demographics off-hand, but at a rough guess her class is 75% black/25% white. (There's also one Asian girl, and I think there are a couple kids who are both black and Hispanic.) I have no idea what percent are in-bounds.

The K teachers, from what I've seen, are masters of differentiation. Reading groups are very fluid over the course of the year. My daughter is a strong reader, and rather than being content to let her rest at the DCPS K goal, her teacher pushes her to continue to advance, while at the same time working with kids who came into K without knowing their alphabet.

I think the math instruction is solid. I am not keen on the amount of homework but I can see value in it. I appreciate the way the monthly take-home projects integrate math and reading and sociology and whatever their monthly focus is (black history, nature, recycling) -- today she had to turn in a bar graph of how many bottles/cans/etc we recycled over the past week; last month it was a report on her favorite animal. I really like the arts integration and the french language program. I have yet to encounter a bum teacher at LT; that is one of the principal's signature strengths, I feel.

The shooting last Friday was scary, but from parents who were on the scene it sounds like the teachers got everyone inside and locked down quickly and efficiently, without scaring the little ones. Neither the shooter nor the victim was local to the neighborhood; the fact that it happened by the school seems to be pure coincidence.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What's the demographic make-up of this year's kindergarten class? How many classes, what's the size of the classes and what % are in-bounds? Positive experiences? Thanks.

Two K classes, each 20-25 kids. (I think my daughter made 21 valentines for her classmates?) I don't know the demographics off-hand, but at a rough guess her class is 75% black/25% white. (There's also one Asian girl, and I think there are a couple kids who are both black and Hispanic.) I have no idea what percent are in-bounds.

The K teachers, from what I've seen, are masters of differentiation. Reading groups are very fluid over the course of the year. My daughter is a strong reader, and rather than being content to let her rest at the DCPS K goal, her teacher pushes her to continue to advance, while at the same time working with kids who came into K without knowing their alphabet.

I think the math instruction is solid. I am not keen on the amount of homework but I can see value in it. I appreciate the way the monthly take-home projects integrate math and reading and sociology and whatever their monthly focus is (black history, nature, recycling) -- today she had to turn in a bar graph of how many bottles/cans/etc we recycled over the past week; last month it was a report on her favorite animal. I really like the arts integration and the french language program. I have yet to encounter a bum teacher at LT; that is one of the principal's signature strengths, I feel.

The shooting last Friday was scary, but from parents who were on the scene it sounds like the teachers got everyone inside and locked down quickly and efficiently, without scaring the little ones. Neither the shooter nor the victim was local to the neighborhood; the fact that it happened by the school seems to be pure coincidence.

Thanks! The testing seems higher than Watkins, with more advanced kids.

[Anonymous]

Really, is there targeted crime on H Street to cause "spillover?" H Street is literally 1 block from LT. Folks who live "on the hill" have a false sense that the houses on their specific block (home or school) are somehow immune to crime. Whereas, homes on the next block over are crime-infested?

The shooting last Friday was scary, but from parents who were on the scene it sounds like the teachers got everyone inside and locked down quickly and efficiently, without scaring the little ones. Neither the shooter nor the victim was local to the neighborhood; the fact that it happened by the school seems to be pure coincidence.

Both of these posters are ignorant. This shooting had nothing at all to do with H Street. The only thing H Street's development has to do with LT is enabling a lot of on-street parking on the weekends.

There has been a large group of men who hang out daily in front of two houses on Morris for at least 10 years, drinking, smoking weed and generally being a public nuisance. The administration at LT looks away, the old neighbors never minded, the new neighbors have too much white guilt to call them in, and the police can't do anything about loitering and it's hard/not worth it to bust them for public drinking, etc.

The loiterers are rarely currently from the neighborhood -- they come back to their old stomping grounds and use NE as their open-air bar/men's club. Anyone who has attended a little league game or practice on a weeknight knows exactly who/how/where this shooting occurred.

This problem is not block-specific, it's house-specific.

[Anonymous]

Zero tolerance. Keep calling the police. Drive them out. If the police stop responding, call your councilmember and get a meeting with police supervisors. This has to end. There is no guilt to be associated with this; we're talking safety and a clean neighborhood for families.

[Anonymous]

That is just a shame that a shooting occurs in front of school minutes after school is let out? Do people hold nothing sacred anymore? I would be more outraged than some of the parents on this thread who send their little ones to LT.

[Anonymous]

^^ and this is why I didn't send my DC there. There's a weird sense of apathy and low expectations surrounding it, even as it seems to be on the upswing academically.

Why hasn't the LT administration been on MPD for years about the sketchy loitering on Morris, near the playground? How do the parents not notice this?

[Anonymous]

Time for the open air men's club to be shut down.

[Anonymous]

The principal should be outraged[u], demanding a meeting with police and community leaders (ANC, etc.) to make a plan to end this. Any news?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:That is just a shame that a shooting occurs in front of school minutes after school is let out? Do people hold nothing sacred anymore? I would be more outraged than some of the parents on this thread who send their little ones to LT.

This might seem petty, but it wasn't in front of the school -- it was well away from either of the main entrances (on 7th and on G). I picked my daughter up and walked very near where it happened, apparently just a few minutes before it happened, and didn't see or hear anything scary.

I grew up on the Hill in the '70s and lived here through the Murder Capital years. The neighborhood is the safest it's been in my lifetime.

Do I want a shooting happening right outside my daughter's school? Obviously not -- I'd be happiest if there were no shootings -anywhere- in the city, next to schools or otherwise. But if my first priority were insulating my daughter from the potential risks of city life, we wouldn't be living on the Hill.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: This shooting had nothing at all to do with H Street. The only thing H Street's development has to do with LT is enabling a lot of on-street parking on the weekends.

There has been a large group of men who hang out daily in front of two houses on Morris for at least 10 years, drinking, smoking weed and generally being a public nuisance. The administration at LT looks away, the old neighbors never minded, the new neighbors have too much white guilt to call them in, and the police can't do anything about loitering and it's hard/not worth it to bust them for public drinking, etc.

The loiterers are rarely currently from the neighborhood -- they come back to their old stomping grounds and use NE as their open-air bar/men's club. Anyone who has attended a little league game or practice on a weeknight knows exactly who/how/where this shooting occurred.

This problem is not block-specific, it's house-specific.

Thank you! It was odd to hear folks say they live on the "good" block of Capitol Hill where there is rarely any crime (unlike the crime on H Street.) Very odd! In this particular instance, the crime followed nearby residents (whom we have to remember were victims as well). Doing drugs out in public shouldn't be tolerated so I agree that police should be called. However, the neighbors need to be on the same page because if they have been doing this for 10 years they won't appreciate new neighbors coming in to tell what to do.