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Anonymous
Watkins is already at something like 30% IB enrollment. There is no reason to rezone people out of Watkins, unless you are doing something drastic like fixing Watkins dumb boundaries. |
Anonymous
This x a billion. This is so short sighted. Maury is a good school. Leave it alone! Focus on why Miner is struggling and give it more resources. |
Anonymous
First off, CHML and SWS are irrelevant to a boundary conversation as they don't have boundaries. It's true LT and JOW are closer to each other than Maury and Miner. However, the boundary between them is H Street, a major thoroughfare with a lot of traffic. That's an ideal boundary between elementaries because it reduces the number of kids needing to cross a busy street to attend their in-boundary school. You also have to look at enrollment patterns. It's true that LT has much higher IB enrollment than JOW, and actually a decent number of kids from the JOW boundary lottery into Ludlow. But actually the biggest incursion into JOW's IB numbers is Two Rivers, which is treated my many in the boundary as an alternative IB school. However, that is likely to change as the shine is really of TR as an organization these last few years, and JOW set for a major renovation. I would expect JOW's IB numbers to grow a lot in the next few years following their reno, regardless of anything happening at LT. This is not true of Maury and Miner. Miner's boundary actually crosses H Street to grab a small portion of the neighborhood between H and Florida for some reason. Tennessee (which isn't that busy anyway) cuts through both boundaries, and I think Maryland might as well? The boundary between Miner and Maury is more arbitrarily drawn, likely based on population size, which is no doubt out of date given the large amount of development in the Hill East and Kingman Park neighborhoods in the last decade. There are also so weird aspects to the boundary, including the small "tail" of the Maury boundary that stretches to the east. Maury and Miner are .5 miles apart along one road (Tennessee). By contrast, Watkins and Peabody are 1.5 miles apart with no natural commute between the two -- it's actually a genuine pain to get from one to the other by car or bike, and takes at least a half hour on foot (longer with kids). None of that is true with Maury and Miner -- you could easily do drop off, on foot, at both schools, in about 15 minutes. And the demographic divisions between the schools are more stark than what you see between JOW and LT, again because the dynamics between JOW and LT have a lot more to do with TR siphoning off high SES families from JOW's catchment. I'm sure that's not comforting to Maury families who are very happy with their school and of course don't want to see any change. But Miner families likely feel differently, and there are reasons why Miner has had more trouble building its IB population that Maury has not had, and that has a lot to do with demographics and boundary lines, more so than the school itself. |
Anonymous
when the Cluster was designed, there was a bus between the schools. as for Maury-Miner - there is no metro near either school. If I had to drop off two sets of kids from my house, it would take me an extra 45 minutes in commute time to get back home or take the street car to Union Station. Not to mention that I would have to transit through the Starburst which is an absolutely unsafe area. it’s also kind of presumptuous to assume that Miner families have no opinion on this either. they likely don’t want to add onto their commutes either, and may not view mere whiteness increases as a benefit. |
Anonymous
I’m not even sure Miner is “struggling” in comparison to data for similar kids. This is all about the belief that black majority populations are inferior, something which I fine passing strange. Even if the argument is that black majorities get worse government services, wouldn’t the government reaction be to fix that? By proposing a cluster due to “segregation” is DCPS saying that it provides worse services to majority black schools? |
Anonymous
?? The message says that the there is a concern that the current boundaries are exacerbating socio-economic segregation, and the hope is that by mixing the schools, the economics between the two school boundaries will even out. |
Anonymous
It’s race, obviously. Someone still needs to explain why a majority black school is considered inherently bad in DC. |
Anonymous
I don't think you need to mix the boundaries to do that. DC is doing a great job of increasing crime, which will drive those who can afford it to leave. Then DC will have a uniformly depressed city. It shouldn't take more than 5 years to get there, imo. |
Anonymous
sad but true on the Hill. |
Anonymous
Even though you're probably trolling, this is pretty true. |
Anonymous
SWS and CHML are not irrelevant to a boundary conversation. Both schools do more to siphon off UMC kids from other parts of the Hill than any individual IB school does. I guarantee you there are more Miner IB kids at SWS than at Maury. But the point was actually that DCPS doesn't think twice about putting schools considerably closer together than Maury & Miner. Those schools being .5 miles apart have NOTHING to do with the differences between Maury and Miner's demographics, that's absurd. Maury draws from an almost exclusively gentrified area & is extremely heavily IB. Miner has some of the most dangerous and poorest housing projects in the city. Maury is at a relatively safe location. Miner's playground has literally been the site of gang warfare as of late (and it's a fabulous playground, but I don't take my kids there anymore). Gee, can't imagine why the two schools have different demographics? If you think the Maury & Miner boundaries are badly drawn where they meet (and I don't actually think they are given how close the boundary is to Maury already), then redraw them in a way that is sensible but creates more diverse schools; don't do a ridiculous Cluster arrangement that has led to only 30% IB enrollment in the one place it exists now... which is arguably a more gentrified neighborhood on average than either Maury or Miner. (Yes, I agree that the current Cluster is a far worse arrangement geographically, but I think it should be eliminated too.) Similarly, even though LT and JOW are very close together (literally 3 small blocks), no one thinks LT caused JOW's issues. LT has a richer IB population because H street has been a neighborhood demarcator as well. (And yet, if you look at enrollment patterns, there are way more kids from JOW attending LT than Miner kids attending Maury; in fact, there are more Miner kids attending LT than Maury!) Miner has struggled because, other than a few blocks at the Eastern edge (where no kidding the UMC parents wish they were zoned for Maury), it's IB is not well off and is currently quite dangerous. Pretending the demographics of the Maury and Miner IBs are similar and the school differences are about the boundaries and/or the schools' proximity to each other is really disingenuous. Also, FYI, H St. on 7th is easy to cross; good, predictable traffic lights. Cars not going quickly because there are lights on every block of H. Tennessee between Maury and Miner, especially near Maury where it meets 13th, is not easy to cross and a Maury teacher's child almost got killed there doing exactly that. Tennessee itself also has two more awkward intersections between the school because it's on a diagonal; JOW to LT, on the other hand, has two cross guard guarded streets & a tiny street without much traffic. I guarantee you the average parent would let their kid walk from JOW to LT alone WAY before from Maury to Miner considering all safety issues (traffic + crime). |
Anonymous
| I can tell you that if they go ahead with the cluster plan, I will try to lottery my kid into Ludlow or Brent next year (and Ludlow is substantially closer to my house than Miner is and both Ludlow and Brent are in the direction of most people’s commutes vs Miner). Two other neighbors on my block have said the same. Glad it remains pretty feasible to get into Ludlow in the upper grades, though that will likely change quickly if this goes through. |
Anonymous
It's already not that easy to lottery into LT. If you think this threat will get DCPS to ditch a cluster plan, you are mistaken. LT is doing really well and has great IB percentages, I don't think DCPS actually worried about Maury families suddenly shifting over to it. A few might be successful, but most won't. It would be more convincing if you said you'd lottery into Stoke's or Lee's East End campuses, which actually are easy to lottery into. So try that tactic. Another option would be to ask what about the proposed plan bothers you. The idea would be to make Miner an ECE campus and then turn Maury into 1st-5th for a combined boundary. If you have kids at Maury already, this means they would stay where they are and the only difference would be more classrooms for each grade and they'd be going to school with kids who are currently IB for Miner. If they are in ECE or not in school yet, they would spend 3 years at Miner, a school very nearby and that many IB Miner families already use for PK because of limited spots at Maury. Is the idea of having more kids from the Miner boundary sharing a school with your kids really that scary? There are actually a lot of high SES families IB for Miner anyway. It might encourage more of them to attend their IB (instead of going to charters as they now do). It could actually be beneficial for the neighborhood in the long run. |
Anonymous
I thought what the people behind the boundary study are saying is that by clustering Maury and Miner, kids within the poorer boundary will have access to a school within a richer boundary, and therefore be better off. |
Anonymous
Yes, I think suddenly dropping a bunch of kids into Maury, the MAJORITY of whom scored a ONE for ELA on last year's PARCC will be hugely disruptive. This suggests that the MAJORITY of kids in grades 3-5 last year at Miner were functionally illiterate. In math, 40% of students received a ONE (i.e., are unable to count objects correctly). I think you are not really understanding how far behind the kids in question are and what a large influx of them would do to a 3-5 classroom. Maybe in 10 years things would be fine, but my kid won't be there in 10 years. |