Maury Capitol Hill

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are they merging Maury and Miner or just rezoning some of the eastern part of the Maury boundary to Miner for capacity reasons?

This is what was in the Principal's weekly newsletter to families.

"There are proposed boundary changes that could impact the Maury community. One challenge that the committee has identified is Maury and Miner’s close proximity and socio-economic segregation. The advisory committee is assessing whether pairing the two schools (similar to Peabody/Watkins) could help address this challenge.

There will be a community conversation around potential boundary changes for Maury on November 28th at 6pm. This conversation will be held virtually, and all community members are invited to attend. We encourage Maury community members to share their voices around any proposed changes.

Maury parents will be losing their minds.

The truth is Maury and Miner aren’t unusually close together for the Hill. To put it into perspective, LT is closer to JOW, CHML and SWS than Maury & Miner are to each other. This is only being looked at because one of the schools is good and one is not, and DCPS is too stupid to care about anything but the latter. They will destroy Maury with a negligible benefit to Miner. The Cluster concept already doesn’t work well now that people aren’t desperate to go to the schools involved; why on earth would DCPS attempt to replicate it.

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.

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).

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.

This is correct. The issue isn't that the Miner and Maury populations are so similar that it makes sense to combine them. It's that one school is poor and black and the other school is rich and white, and surprise! the rich white school has much higher test scores, better teacher retention, more extra curricular offerings, etc.

I'd be interested to see if they are comparing the populations of the schools themselves, or of the catchment, however. It's true that Miner's boundary has more low-SES housing in it, especially along Benning Road. However, most of Kingman Park is in the Miner boundary and Kingman Park is heavily gentrified. It's just that high SES families zoned for Miner usually try to lottery out of it, either from the start or after PK. Miner has a large OOB contingent and is particularly popular with EOTR families for whom it is on the way for downtown commutes.

Combining these schools might actually encourage more of the high SES families in Miner's catchment to attend their IB, since it would give them access to Maury in the upper grades. Which would also likely decrease the availability of spots available to OOB families coming from EOTR. This would likely result in the overall population at the combined school being whiter and richer than the current combined populations of these schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are they merging Maury and Miner or just rezoning some of the eastern part of the Maury boundary to Miner for capacity reasons?

This is what was in the Principal's weekly newsletter to families.

"There are proposed boundary changes that could impact the Maury community. One challenge that the committee has identified is Maury and Miner’s close proximity and socio-economic segregation. The advisory committee is assessing whether pairing the two schools (similar to Peabody/Watkins) could help address this challenge.

There will be a community conversation around potential boundary changes for Maury on November 28th at 6pm. This conversation will be held virtually, and all community members are invited to attend. We encourage Maury community members to share their voices around any proposed changes.

Maury parents will be losing their minds.

The truth is Maury and Miner aren’t unusually close together for the Hill. To put it into perspective, LT is closer to JOW, CHML and SWS than Maury & Miner are to each other. This is only being looked at because one of the schools is good and one is not, and DCPS is too stupid to care about anything but the latter. They will destroy Maury with a negligible benefit to Miner. The Cluster concept already doesn’t work well now that people aren’t desperate to go to the schools involved; why on earth would DCPS attempt to replicate it.

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.

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).

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.

The prior poster said the boundaries were totally arbitrary and so somehow created the segregation/different demographics and that was the issue. Otherwise, why is Miner differently situated than any other low performing school? Is it really that because there's a good school nearby they are more deserving of access than others? There are plenty of bordering IBs in DCPS with vastly different outcomes. L-T v JO. Walker-Jones v L-T. Brent v Van Ness. Tyler v Brent. Ross v Thompson. Bancroft v Raymond.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

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.

I think it's extremely unlike that this plan will go through, however I also think that this issue could be addressed via thoughtful assignment of classrooms, essentially creating remedial classrooms for those kids who need it.

I also think the very low PARCC scores at Miner have to do with the fact high SES families tend to abandon the school well before 3rd grade, which results in upper grades with a very high percentage of kids who are FARMS, housing insecure, or otherwise at risk. It is surprising to no one that these kids have low test scores.

Combining the schools could incentivize more high-SES and involve parents to stay IB, which would greatly reduce the percent of students in any class that are at-risk. It would be higher than at Maury but much lower than at Miner. It is a foundational theory of equity in education that if you an distribute the especially high-needs kids more equally across schools, you can improve test scores in this population without impacting the academics for high-SES kids. This is the guiding principle in Howard county, for instance, where they regularly rebalance high school pyramids in order to distribute low-SES families more evenly across the district. And by and large, it works -- HoCo schools are generally well regarded, well resourced kids do fantastic in them, and while test scores are lower for low-SES families (as is always the case) the discrepancies are not as start as in other districts.

I don't think the idea behind this proposal is a bad one, honestly, though I understand why Maury families would oppose it and I think it will be politically unpopular and thus very unlikely to go through.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

PP what are you inbounds for? Miner or Maury?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are they merging Maury and Miner or just rezoning some of the eastern part of the Maury boundary to Miner for capacity reasons?

This is what was in the Principal's weekly newsletter to families.

"There are proposed boundary changes that could impact the Maury community. One challenge that the committee has identified is Maury and Miner’s close proximity and socio-economic segregation. The advisory committee is assessing whether pairing the two schools (similar to Peabody/Watkins) could help address this challenge.

There will be a community conversation around potential boundary changes for Maury on November 28th at 6pm. This conversation will be held virtually, and all community members are invited to attend. We encourage Maury community members to share their voices around any proposed changes.

Maury parents will be losing their minds.

The truth is Maury and Miner aren’t unusually close together for the Hill. To put it into perspective, LT is closer to JOW, CHML and SWS than Maury & Miner are to each other. This is only being looked at because one of the schools is good and one is not, and DCPS is too stupid to care about anything but the latter. They will destroy Maury with a negligible benefit to Miner. The Cluster concept already doesn’t work well now that people aren’t desperate to go to the schools involved; why on earth would DCPS attempt to replicate it.

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.

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).

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.

This is correct. The issue isn't that the Miner and Maury populations are so similar that it makes sense to combine them. It's that one school is poor and black and the other school is rich and white, and surprise! the rich white school has much higher test scores, better teacher retention, more extra curricular offerings, etc.

I'd be interested to see if they are comparing the populations of the schools themselves, or of the catchment, however. It's true that Miner's boundary has more low-SES housing in it, especially along Benning Road. However, most of Kingman Park is in the Miner boundary and Kingman Park is heavily gentrified. It's just that high SES families zoned for Miner usually try to lottery out of it, either from the start or after PK. Miner has a large OOB contingent and is particularly popular with EOTR families for whom it is on the way for downtown commutes.

Combining these schools might actually encourage more of the high SES families in Miner's catchment to attend their IB, since it would give them access to Maury in the upper grades. Which would also likely decrease the availability of spots available to OOB families coming from EOTR. This would likely result in the overall population at the combined school being whiter and richer than the current combined populations of these schools.

This all assumes that the Maury population remains.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

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.

I think it's extremely unlike that this plan will go through, however I also think that this issue could be addressed via thoughtful assignment of classrooms, essentially creating remedial classrooms for those kids who need it.

I also think the very low PARCC scores at Miner have to do with the fact high SES families tend to abandon the school well before 3rd grade, which results in upper grades with a very high percentage of kids who are FARMS, housing insecure, or otherwise at risk. It is surprising to no one that these kids have low test scores.

Combining the schools could incentivize more high-SES and involve parents to stay IB, which would greatly reduce the percent of students in any class that are at-risk. It would be higher than at Maury but much lower than at Miner. It is a foundational theory of equity in education that if you an distribute the especially high-needs kids more equally across schools, you can improve test scores in this population without impacting the academics for high-SES kids. This is the guiding principle in Howard county, for instance, where they regularly rebalance high school pyramids in order to distribute low-SES families more evenly across the district. And by and large, it works -- HoCo schools are generally well regarded, well resourced kids do fantastic in them, and while test scores are lower for low-SES families (as is always the case) the discrepancies are not as start as in other districts.

I don't think the idea behind this proposal is a bad one, honestly, though I understand why Maury families would oppose it and I think it will be politically unpopular and thus very unlikely to go through.

You think they'd do this plan and then create tracked classrooms which would be racially stark & essentially amount to Maury v Miner being schools within a school? Zero chance. That's even less likely than this going through.

I actually wouldn't have a problem with them reworking boundaries, not least of all because grandfathering would mean things happened gradually. But suddenly combining the schools entirely? No thanks. I also think you live in a fantasy world if you think that the percentage of high SES families overall would increase.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

PP what are you inbounds for? Miner or Maury?

Maury.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

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.

I think it's extremely unlike that this plan will go through, however I also think that this issue could be addressed via thoughtful assignment of classrooms, essentially creating remedial classrooms for those kids who need it.

I also think the very low PARCC scores at Miner have to do with the fact high SES families tend to abandon the school well before 3rd grade, which results in upper grades with a very high percentage of kids who are FARMS, housing insecure, or otherwise at risk. It is surprising to no one that these kids have low test scores.

Combining the schools could incentivize more high-SES and involve parents to stay IB, which would greatly reduce the percent of students in any class that are at-risk. It would be higher than at Maury but much lower than at Miner. It is a foundational theory of equity in education that if you an distribute the especially high-needs kids more equally across schools, you can improve test scores in this population without impacting the academics for high-SES kids. This is the guiding principle in Howard county, for instance, where they regularly rebalance high school pyramids in order to distribute low-SES families more evenly across the district. And by and large, it works -- HoCo schools are generally well regarded, well resourced kids do fantastic in them, and while test scores are lower for low-SES families (as is always the case) the discrepancies are not as start as in other districts.

I don't think the idea behind this proposal is a bad one, honestly, though I understand why Maury families would oppose it and I think it will be politically unpopular and thus very unlikely to go through.

DCPS does not permit remedial classrooms. All taught content must be to grade level; it’s a huge problem in math in many low performing schools.

DCPS also does not permit tracked classrooms in elementary school.

[Anonymous]

Recognizing the goals of DCPS here, I think that a dual-campus school is unlikely to achieve those goals. Peabody-Watkins has significant attrition of IB families in the upper elementary grades. While it's possible a cluster could attract high-SES Miner families, it's just as likely to lead to attrition from families in both boundaries in the upper grades, particularly, in light of the middle school issue on the Hill. I expect a fair number of high SES families would try to lottery out at 1st or 2nd, if they weren't planning to stick around through 5th anyway. This plan could negatively impact the momentum for in-bound families attending Eliot-Hine. Conversely, the continued improvement of E-H could lead to more IB families giving Miner a try in the upper grades if Eliot-Hine is perceived as a solid middle school path.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

I'd be interested to see if they are comparing the populations of the schools themselves, or of the catchment, however. It's true that Miner's boundary has more low-SES housing in it, especially along Benning Road. However, most of Kingman Park is in the Miner boundary and Kingman Park is heavily gentrified. It's just that high SES families zoned for Miner usually try to lottery out of it, either from the start or after PK. Miner has a large OOB contingent and is particularly popular with EOTR families for whom it is on the way for downtown commutes.

Combining these schools might actually encourage more of the high SES families in Miner's catchment to attend their IB, since it would give them access to Maury in the upper grades. Which would also likely decrease the availability of spots available to OOB families coming from EOTR. This would likely result in the overall population at the combined school being whiter and richer than the current combined populations of these schools.

I've been wondering the same. Is there any publicly available data that would give more information on this? Maury's boundary participation rate is more than double Miner's (and is artificially depressed by pre-K kids who are shut out of Maury and attend AppleTree or, incidentally, Miner instead, as well as fifth graders who have to make the jump to BASIS to get a MS spot). If affluent people in the Miner boundary sent their kids to Miner beyond pre-K, how much would that do to fix the socio-economic segregation? If that would help significantly, then it seems like DCPS should just be working to increase buy-in at Miner. If they are comparing boundary populations as a whole, I can see the point, though I'd support redrawing boundaries before a cluster -- whatever other challenges exist, potentially having to drop off ES kids at two different schools, and ES kids having to change schools, seem like pretty big negatives to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are they merging Maury and Miner or just rezoning some of the eastern part of the Maury boundary to Miner for capacity reasons?

This is what was in the Principal's weekly newsletter to families.

"There are proposed boundary changes that could impact the Maury community. One challenge that the committee has identified is Maury and Miner’s close proximity and socio-economic segregation. The advisory committee is assessing whether pairing the two schools (similar to Peabody/Watkins) could help address this challenge.

There will be a community conversation around potential boundary changes for Maury on November 28th at 6pm. This conversation will be held virtually, and all community members are invited to attend. We encourage Maury community members to share their voices around any proposed changes.

Maury parents will be losing their minds.

The truth is Maury and Miner aren’t unusually close together for the Hill. To put it into perspective, LT is closer to JOW, CHML and SWS than Maury & Miner are to each other. This is only being looked at because one of the schools is good and one is not, and DCPS is too stupid to care about anything but the latter. They will destroy Maury with a negligible benefit to Miner. The Cluster concept already doesn’t work well now that people aren’t desperate to go to the schools involved; why on earth would DCPS attempt to replicate it.

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.

I'd be interested to hear more about this. I always thought that Maury evolved to became as desirable as it is today over time (and as the area gentrified), and I guess I assumed that Miner was just farther behind on a similar path. But are there unique factors at play?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I'd be interested to see if they are comparing the populations of the schools themselves, or of the catchment, however. It's true that Miner's boundary has more low-SES housing in it, especially along Benning Road. However, most of Kingman Park is in the Miner boundary and Kingman Park is heavily gentrified. It's just that high SES families zoned for Miner usually try to lottery out of it, either from the start or after PK. Miner has a large OOB contingent and is particularly popular with EOTR families for whom it is on the way for downtown commutes.

Combining these schools might actually encourage more of the high SES families in Miner's catchment to attend their IB, since it would give them access to Maury in the upper grades. Which would also likely decrease the availability of spots available to OOB families coming from EOTR. This would likely result in the overall population at the combined school being whiter and richer than the current combined populations of these schools.

I've been wondering the same. Is there any publicly available data that would give more information on this? Maury's boundary participation rate is more than double Miner's (and is artificially depressed by pre-K kids who are shut out of Maury and attend AppleTree or, incidentally, Miner instead, as well as fifth graders who have to make the jump to BASIS to get a MS spot). If affluent people in the Miner boundary sent their kids to Miner beyond pre-K, how much would that do to fix the socio-economic segregation? If that would help significantly, then it seems like DCPS should just be working to increase buy-in at Miner. If they are comparing boundary populations as a whole, I can see the point, though I'd support redrawing boundaries before a cluster -- whatever other challenges exist, potentially having to drop off ES kids at two different schools, and ES kids having to change schools, seem like pretty big negatives to me.

See, I don't think this fact is incidental to the proposed plan.

Maury does not have enough PK seats to accommodate IB demand. It can be hard to get a PK spot at Maury unless you have an older sibling offering sibling preference. Not impossible, but you need a high lottery number.

As a result, yes, a lot of Maury families sent their kids to Miner for PK and then switch to Maury at K. This is so common that families don't even worry that much about the transition because the kids come over as a group.

These families have zero interest in remaining at Miner for upper grades -- Maury is a better school all around, with nicer facilities, higher test scores, more programming, etc.

In other words. Many Maury families already use Miner as their "ECE center" and then send their kids to Maury for upper grades. This works great for Maury families who want a very conveniently located free preschool option (Miner is, after all, just .5 miles away). It sucks for Miner, who get an influx of high-SES families from the Maury catchment for PK, and then promptly loses them for K. This also leads to additional attrition from high-SES families from within Miner's own catchment, as they watch a significant percentage of other high-SES families leave and worry this attrition will simply continue (which it does), and thus also leave for charters or other DCPS schools (but not Maury, which is notoriously hard to lottery into even in upper grades).

This dynamic raises issues. I think those issues are specifically why Maury-Miner is attracting attention in the boundary study whereas some of the other school pairs people have pointed to do not. For instance, you don't see tons of kids IB for LT using JOW for PK -- some LT families are shut out for PK but it's far less common than it is for Miner. And LT is easier to lottery into in the upper grades, so you do actually see JOW families headed to LT at 1st or 2nd or 3rd. So there is less of a sense that LT "uses" JOW as an auxiliary PK while totally shutting out OOB kids in upper grades due to high retention.

I think Maury is a bit of a victim of it's own success, and this had led to an unfortunately parasitic relationship with Miner that benefits Maury families but not the other way around.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

Do we know this is the idea? I didn't see this specified anywhere official. I would think the field space at Miner might make it more suitable for older kids, and I thought Miner had the edge on capacity (though I could be wrong). Also, does a Pre-K/K and 1-5 split work? My understanding is Maury is almost at capacity as-is, and switching out its pre-k and K classes for Miner's first through fifth grades would result in a net gain of more than 50 students (not taking into account the potential enrollment changes forecasted elsewhere in this thread).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I'd be interested to see if they are comparing the populations of the schools themselves, or of the catchment, however. It's true that Miner's boundary has more low-SES housing in it, especially along Benning Road. However, most of Kingman Park is in the Miner boundary and Kingman Park is heavily gentrified. It's just that high SES families zoned for Miner usually try to lottery out of it, either from the start or after PK. Miner has a large OOB contingent and is particularly popular with EOTR families for whom it is on the way for downtown commutes.

Combining these schools might actually encourage more of the high SES families in Miner's catchment to attend their IB, since it would give them access to Maury in the upper grades. Which would also likely decrease the availability of spots available to OOB families coming from EOTR. This would likely result in the overall population at the combined school being whiter and richer than the current combined populations of these schools.

I've been wondering the same. Is there any publicly available data that would give more information on this? Maury's boundary participation rate is more than double Miner's (and is artificially depressed by pre-K kids who are shut out of Maury and attend AppleTree or, incidentally, Miner instead, as well as fifth graders who have to make the jump to BASIS to get a MS spot). If affluent people in the Miner boundary sent their kids to Miner beyond pre-K, how much would that do to fix the socio-economic segregation? If that would help significantly, then it seems like DCPS should just be working to increase buy-in at Miner. If they are comparing boundary populations as a whole, I can see the point, though I'd support redrawing boundaries before a cluster -- whatever other challenges exist, potentially having to drop off ES kids at two different schools, and ES kids having to change schools, seem like pretty big negatives to me.

See, I don't think this fact is incidental to the proposed plan.

Maury does not have enough PK seats to accommodate IB demand. It can be hard to get a PK spot at Maury unless you have an older sibling offering sibling preference. Not impossible, but you need a high lottery number.

As a result, yes, a lot of Maury families sent their kids to Miner for PK and then switch to Maury at K. This is so common that families don't even worry that much about the transition because the kids come over as a group.

These families have zero interest in remaining at Miner for upper grades -- Maury is a better school all around, with nicer facilities, higher test scores, more programming, etc.

In other words. Many Maury families already use Miner as their "ECE center" and then send their kids to Maury for upper grades. This works great for Maury families who want a very conveniently located free preschool option (Miner is, after all, just .5 miles away). It sucks for Miner, who get an influx of high-SES families from the Maury catchment for PK, and then promptly loses them for K. This also leads to additional attrition from high-SES families from within Miner's own catchment, as they watch a significant percentage of other high-SES families leave and worry this attrition will simply continue (which it does), and thus also leave for charters or other DCPS schools (but not Maury, which is notoriously hard to lottery into even in upper grades).

This dynamic raises issues. I think those issues are specifically why Maury-Miner is attracting attention in the boundary study whereas some of the other school pairs people have pointed to do not. For instance, you don't see tons of kids IB for LT using JOW for PK -- some LT families are shut out for PK but it's far less common than it is for Miner. And LT is easier to lottery into in the upper grades, so you do actually see JOW families headed to LT at 1st or 2nd or 3rd. So there is less of a sense that LT "uses" JOW as an auxiliary PK while totally shutting out OOB kids in upper grades due to high retention.

I think Maury is a bit of a victim of it's own success, and this had led to an unfortunately parasitic relationship with Miner that benefits Maury families but not the other way around.

To me this is maybe a good reason to tighten Maury's boundaries a bit, to guarantee pre-K, but I don't understand the merits of a cluster model at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

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.

I think it's extremely unlike that this plan will go through, however I also think that this issue could be addressed via thoughtful assignment of classrooms, essentially creating remedial classrooms for those kids who need it.

I also think the very low PARCC scores at Miner have to do with the fact high SES families tend to abandon the school well before 3rd grade, which results in upper grades with a very high percentage of kids who are FARMS, housing insecure, or otherwise at risk. It is surprising to no one that these kids have low test scores.

Combining the schools could incentivize more high-SES and involve parents to stay IB, which would greatly reduce the percent of students in any class that are at-risk. It would be higher than at Maury but much lower than at Miner. It is a foundational theory of equity in education that if you an distribute the especially high-needs kids more equally across schools, you can improve test scores in this population without impacting the academics for high-SES kids. This is the guiding principle in Howard county, for instance, where they regularly rebalance high school pyramids in order to distribute low-SES families more evenly across the district. And by and large, it works -- HoCo schools are generally well regarded, well resourced kids do fantastic in them, and while test scores are lower for low-SES families (as is always the case) the discrepancies are not as start as in other districts.

I don't think the idea behind this proposal is a bad one, honestly, though I understand why Maury families would oppose it and I think it will be politically unpopular and thus very unlikely to go through.

DCPS does not permit remedial classrooms. All taught content must be to grade level; it’s a huge problem in math in many low performing schools.

DCPS also does not permit tracked classrooms in elementary school.

Though if they paired a boundary combination with the creation of tracked classrooms, they would get me on board so fast.