Maury Capitol Hill

[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.

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).

PP here and fair point, especially about field space. I was assuming the plan was to turn Miner into the ECE center and keep Maury as the 1-5th primarily because ECE at Miner is pretty successful (they retain families from PK3-PK4 and even a decent number to K) but upper grades are considered quite bad with terrible test scores. Also the issue of Maury families who already send their kids to PK at Miner.

But I'm not really sure it matters which is which from the perspective of the study -- if they deem it valuable to combing them, this would likely be mostly viewed as a facilities issue that could be worked out.

I still think it's highly unlikely and one factor may be the lack of capacity at either school to hold 1-5 (or 2-5). It may simply not make sense. But I think people arguing that the Maury-Miner relationship is no different than LT-JOW, or Brent-Van Ness, or LT-Walker-Jones, are mistaken. I actually think there are some clear reasons why Maury and Miner attracted this specific attention, and that those factors are not present at other school pairs.

[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.

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).

+1. I haven't seen this specified at all and Maury is over capacity already. It would have to be PK-1st at least if the younger grades were at Miner and that's the only possibly way you get even half of Maury family's to buy-in.

[Anonymous]

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.

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?

One issue is the existence of actual low-income family in the Miner catchment. I am unsure if there are designated low-income housing units in Maury's catchment, but if so, there are less than in Miner's.

This is likely related to another issue, which is that Miner's proximity to Benning road and the Starburst intersection. This has several impacts. One is that housing in Miner's catchment tends not to appreciate as much due to proximity to a high traffic road and more crime. BTW, this is also likely why LT has not been as successful as Maury in retaining its IB families (it's been very successful, LT is a fantastic school, but it's not as hard to lottery into LT and this is a major reason why -- more families move away because they decide they don't want to be so close to H Street).

Proximity to Benning/Starburst also contributes to another factor, which is that Miner attracts a lot of EOTR families who want a convenient school to drop kids at on their commute. Miner is significantly easier to access than Maury. One thing about the families doing this is that they actually tend to be fairly MC -- these are families who go to the trouble to lottery into Miner because they are unhappy with school options EOTR, they tend to be fairly invested in their kids. But it is a problem for IB families who attend Miner hoping for a "neighborhood school" and then discover many of their kids friends don't live in the neighborhood. This can lead to IB attrition even though it's not that IB families don't want their kids to go to school with the OOB kids. They just wish they weren't OOB and the school had more of a neighborhood vibe with more opportunities for weeknight and weekend socializing. JOW runs into this same issue.

The factors combined can make it hard to hold onto high-SES IB families, who either ditch the school to lottery into other schools, or move because they are unhappy with either the school or the neighborhood. If you want to do what Maury has done, you HAVE to have high-SES families, you need them to stick around and invest. High-SES families induce MC families to stick around and invest too, plus increase the amount of money the school can raise through then PTO. If you can't retain your high-SES families, you can't get better. Note this is also a problem schools EOTR have as all their high-SES and MC families lottery elsewhere or go private, leaving only the most at-risk kids behind.

High-SES families are also more demanding and more likely to complain and make a fuss over stuff like this proposed cluster, which is why I think it's dead in the water. But it does make for an interesting discussion about what makes schools successful, and how boundaries, the lottery, and other factors like crime and location, can impact the ability of a school to improve over time. Maury had a dedicated and involved parent base and a good administration, yes. But it also had some good fortune with location and boundary lines, and certain lottery dynamics, that helped it get where it is today. Some of that you can duplicate. Some of it you cannot.

[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.

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).

PP here and fair point, especially about field space. I was assuming the plan was to turn Miner into the ECE center and keep Maury as the 1-5th primarily because ECE at Miner is pretty successful (they retain families from PK3-PK4 and even a decent number to K) but upper grades are considered quite bad with terrible test scores. Also the issue of Maury families who already send their kids to PK at Miner.

But I'm not really sure it matters which is which from the perspective of the study -- if they deem it valuable to combing them, this would likely be mostly viewed as a facilities issue that could be worked out.

I still think it's highly unlikely and one factor may be the lack of capacity at either school to hold 1-5 (or 2-5). It may simply not make sense. But I think people arguing that the Maury-Miner relationship is no different than LT-JOW, or Brent-Van Ness, or LT-Walker-Jones, are mistaken. I actually think there are some clear reasons why Maury and Miner attracted this specific attention, and that those factors are not present at other school pairs.

The clear reason is that Maury is very good and Miner families who live near it want access. They tried this last time with the Maury, Payne, Miner choice set which was horrendously unpopular. Payne has been removed from the deal now because Payne improved on its own with extremely little thanks to DCPS.

[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.

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).

PP here and fair point, especially about field space. I was assuming the plan was to turn Miner into the ECE center and keep Maury as the 1-5th primarily because ECE at Miner is pretty successful (they retain families from PK3-PK4 and even a decent number to K) but upper grades are considered quite bad with terrible test scores. Also the issue of Maury families who already send their kids to PK at Miner.

But I'm not really sure it matters which is which from the perspective of the study -- if they deem it valuable to combing them, this would likely be mostly viewed as a facilities issue that could be worked out.

I still think it's highly unlikely and one factor may be the lack of capacity at either school to hold 1-5 (or 2-5). It may simply not make sense. But I think people arguing that the Maury-Miner relationship is no different than LT-JOW, or Brent-Van Ness, or LT-Walker-Jones, are mistaken. I actually think there are some clear reasons why Maury and Miner attracted this specific attention, and that those factors are not present at other school pairs.

This is naive beyond belief. I can't imagine even this plan's biggest backers think that if you put the upper grades at Miner you'd get any significant number of Maury families. Maury would become Peabody redux.

[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.

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?

One issue is the existence of actual low-income family in the Miner catchment. I am unsure if there are designated low-income housing units in Maury's catchment, but if so, there are less than in Miner's.

This is likely related to another issue, which is that Miner's proximity to Benning road and the Starburst intersection. This has several impacts. One is that housing in Miner's catchment tends not to appreciate as much due to proximity to a high traffic road and more crime. BTW, this is also likely why LT has not been as successful as Maury in retaining its IB families (it's been very successful, LT is a fantastic school, but it's not as hard to lottery into LT and this is a major reason why -- more families move away because they decide they don't want to be so close to H Street).

Proximity to Benning/Starburst also contributes to another factor, which is that Miner attracts a lot of EOTR families who want a convenient school to drop kids at on their commute. Miner is significantly easier to access than Maury. One thing about the families doing this is that they actually tend to be fairly MC -- these are families who go to the trouble to lottery into Miner because they are unhappy with school options EOTR, they tend to be fairly invested in their kids. But it is a problem for IB families who attend Miner hoping for a "neighborhood school" and then discover many of their kids friends don't live in the neighborhood. This can lead to IB attrition even though it's not that IB families don't want their kids to go to school with the OOB kids. They just wish they weren't OOB and the school had more of a neighborhood vibe with more opportunities for weeknight and weekend socializing. JOW runs into this same issue.

The factors combined can make it hard to hold onto high-SES IB families, who either ditch the school to lottery into other schools, or move because they are unhappy with either the school or the neighborhood. If you want to do what Maury has done, you HAVE to have high-SES families, you need them to stick around and invest. High-SES families induce MC families to stick around and invest too, plus increase the amount of money the school can raise through then PTO. If you can't retain your high-SES families, you can't get better. Note this is also a problem schools EOTR have as all their high-SES and MC families lottery elsewhere or go private, leaving only the most at-risk kids behind.

High-SES families are also more demanding and more likely to complain and make a fuss over stuff like this proposed cluster, which is why I think it's dead in the water. But it does make for an interesting discussion about what makes schools successful, and how boundaries, the lottery, and other factors like crime and location, can impact the ability of a school to improve over time. Maury had a dedicated and involved parent base and a good administration, yes. But it also had some good fortune with location and boundary lines, and certain lottery dynamics, that helped it get where it is today. Some of that you can duplicate. Some of it you cannot.

This is very interesting and helpful, thank you!

[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.

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?

One issue is the existence of actual low-income family in the Miner catchment. I am unsure if there are designated low-income housing units in Maury's catchment, but if so, there are less than in Miner's.

This is likely related to another issue, which is that Miner's proximity to Benning road and the Starburst intersection. This has several impacts. One is that housing in Miner's catchment tends not to appreciate as much due to proximity to a high traffic road and more crime. BTW, this is also likely why LT has not been as successful as Maury in retaining its IB families (it's been very successful, LT is a fantastic school, but it's not as hard to lottery into LT and this is a major reason why -- more families move away because they decide they don't want to be so close to H Street).

Proximity to Benning/Starburst also contributes to another factor, which is that Miner attracts a lot of EOTR families who want a convenient school to drop kids at on their commute. Miner is significantly easier to access than Maury. One thing about the families doing this is that they actually tend to be fairly MC -- these are families who go to the trouble to lottery into Miner because they are unhappy with school options EOTR, they tend to be fairly invested in their kids. But it is a problem for IB families who attend Miner hoping for a "neighborhood school" and then discover many of their kids friends don't live in the neighborhood. This can lead to IB attrition even though it's not that IB families don't want their kids to go to school with the OOB kids. They just wish they weren't OOB and the school had more of a neighborhood vibe with more opportunities for weeknight and weekend socializing. JOW runs into this same issue.

The factors combined can make it hard to hold onto high-SES IB families, who either ditch the school to lottery into other schools, or move because they are unhappy with either the school or the neighborhood. If you want to do what Maury has done, you HAVE to have high-SES families, you need them to stick around and invest. High-SES families induce MC families to stick around and invest too, plus increase the amount of money the school can raise through then PTO. If you can't retain your high-SES families, you can't get better. Note this is also a problem schools EOTR have as all their high-SES and MC families lottery elsewhere or go private, leaving only the most at-risk kids behind.

High-SES families are also more demanding and more likely to complain and make a fuss over stuff like this proposed cluster, which is why I think it's dead in the water. But it does make for an interesting discussion about what makes schools successful, and how boundaries, the lottery, and other factors like crime and location, can impact the ability of a school to improve over time. Maury had a dedicated and involved parent base and a good administration, yes. But it also had some good fortune with location and boundary lines, and certain lottery dynamics, that helped it get where it is today. Some of that you can duplicate. Some of it you cannot.

This is very interesting and helpful, thank you!

+1. I think this is largely right, except that I think LT has also had SWS (literally in its IB so many families are closer to it), CHML (exactly the same) & 2R (historically, though the tide has turned there) to deal with as well, which helps explain its slower development as a neighborhood school. I actually think DCPS basically set up LT to fail as a neighborhood school because they were happy with its rep as a solid and solidly Black MC school that lots of DC government employees lotteried (and cheated) for their kids to get into. It was never a bad school in the way many overwhelmingly OOB schools are; it was sort of like Thompson in many respects. What happened to LT was the rapid and overwhelming uber-gentrification of the neighborhood + a very small IB area that made organizing/community atmosphere easier + no non-senior low income housing IB (a huge factor as PP pointed out; not an accident that the Watkins IB was gerrymandered to avoid Potomac Gardens, which are right next to it, back in the day when the Cluster had all the Hill's political power) + 1 great principal who courted IB families but held on to the support of teachers/the existing community + an extremely active PTO that did a great job navigating gentrification-related issues. One thing that still holds LT back is that it's IB is all so expensive that it's hard to buy there as a MC family that cares about education; there are lots of families with that profile at Maury who live between the school and RFK where housing is still cheaper -- it's really good for the school. At LT, there are lots of OOB families who fit that profile (a solid chunk of MC black families with teacher or other DC government employee parents); it's also a population that's great for the school, but you can't guarantee it in the same way as having cheaper real estate near Maury (and those families show up as OOB anyway).

Miner's issues/disadvantages as compared to Maury or LT include: parts of its IB are actually dangerous & that includes areas near the school, that's always going to scare UMC families; lots of low income housing; a relatively large IB that covers multiple actual neighborhoods, so much harder to get that community feel; and haven't lucked into that one good principal (maybe had it with Jackson, who stabilized the school a lot, but then COVID hit).

[Anonymous]

I skipped through the video of the last Advisory Committee meeting to try to figure out where this is coming from, and it sounded like the working groups had written materials that for the life of me I cannot find available online anywhere. It sounded like these materials included details about potential scenarios/proposals, including perhaps a list of potential school pairs. Does anyone know if these materials are publicly available anywhere? It would be interesting to see at what level of detail the Committee has actually considered this (e.g., whether this stems purely from a list of potential pairs that includes Maury/Miner, or if there is anything more considered).

[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.

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).

PP here and fair point, especially about field space. I was assuming the plan was to turn Miner into the ECE center and keep Maury as the 1-5th primarily because ECE at Miner is pretty successful (they retain families from PK3-PK4 and even a decent number to K) but upper grades are considered quite bad with terrible test scores. Also the issue of Maury families who already send their kids to PK at Miner.

But I'm not really sure it matters which is which from the perspective of the study -- if they deem it valuable to combing them, this would likely be mostly viewed as a facilities issue that could be worked out.

I still think it's highly unlikely and one factor may be the lack of capacity at either school to hold 1-5 (or 2-5). It may simply not make sense. But I think people arguing that the Maury-Miner relationship is no different than LT-JOW, or Brent-Van Ness, or LT-Walker-Jones, are mistaken. I actually think there are some clear reasons why Maury and Miner attracted this specific attention, and that those factors are not present at other school pairs.

I think I was out of date on my numbers -- in a dataset I found for last year, Maury capacity is given as 592 compared to Miner's 550.

[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.

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?

One issue is the existence of actual low-income family in the Miner catchment. I am unsure if there are designated low-income housing units in Maury's catchment, but if so, there are less than in Miner's.

This is likely related to another issue, which is that Miner's proximity to Benning road and the Starburst intersection. This has several impacts. One is that housing in Miner's catchment tends not to appreciate as much due to proximity to a high traffic road and more crime. BTW, this is also likely why LT has not been as successful as Maury in retaining its IB families (it's been very successful, LT is a fantastic school, but it's not as hard to lottery into LT and this is a major reason why -- more families move away because they decide they don't want to be so close to H Street).

Proximity to Benning/Starburst also contributes to another factor, which is that Miner attracts a lot of EOTR families who want a convenient school to drop kids at on their commute. Miner is significantly easier to access than Maury. One thing about the families doing this is that they actually tend to be fairly MC -- these are families who go to the trouble to lottery into Miner because they are unhappy with school options EOTR, they tend to be fairly invested in their kids. But it is a problem for IB families who attend Miner hoping for a "neighborhood school" and then discover many of their kids friends don't live in the neighborhood. This can lead to IB attrition even though it's not that IB families don't want their kids to go to school with the OOB kids. They just wish they weren't OOB and the school had more of a neighborhood vibe with more opportunities for weeknight and weekend socializing. JOW runs into this same issue.

The factors combined can make it hard to hold onto high-SES IB families, who either ditch the school to lottery into other schools, or move because they are unhappy with either the school or the neighborhood. If you want to do what Maury has done, you HAVE to have high-SES families, you need them to stick around and invest. High-SES families induce MC families to stick around and invest too, plus increase the amount of money the school can raise through then PTO. If you can't retain your high-SES families, you can't get better. Note this is also a problem schools EOTR have as all their high-SES and MC families lottery elsewhere or go private, leaving only the most at-risk kids behind.

High-SES families are also more demanding and more likely to complain and make a fuss over stuff like this proposed cluster, which is why I think it's dead in the water. But it does make for an interesting discussion about what makes schools successful, and how boundaries, the lottery, and other factors like crime and location, can impact the ability of a school to improve over time. Maury had a dedicated and involved parent base and a good administration, yes. But it also had some good fortune with location and boundary lines, and certain lottery dynamics, that helped it get where it is today. Some of that you can duplicate. Some of it you cannot.

A+ analysis. If home owners with no kids (old people) or people with kids older than elementary/Maury knew about the possible cluster and the effect on real estate value, they'd be up in arms too. The odd/even address value of real estate on D Street NE is stark.

[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.

Huh, could be true. Then we will be in for another cycle of hand-wringing.

[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 make a good case except that a) the lower test score kids will not be “evenly distributed” and b) DCPS will *never* allow any sort of tracking in elementary school and will affirmatively discourage differentiation. DCPS cannot even pronounce the words “advanced” when it comes to elementary schools and can barely do it for middle schools. If DCPS showed it cared *at all* for grade-level and above kids in elementary school, then people would be much less concerned about clustering.

[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.

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?

One issue is the existence of actual low-income family in the Miner catchment. I am unsure if there are designated low-income housing units in Maury's catchment, but if so, there are less than in Miner's.

This is likely related to another issue, which is that Miner's proximity to Benning road and the Starburst intersection. This has several impacts. One is that housing in Miner's catchment tends not to appreciate as much due to proximity to a high traffic road and more crime. BTW, this is also likely why LT has not been as successful as Maury in retaining its IB families (it's been very successful, LT is a fantastic school, but it's not as hard to lottery into LT and this is a major reason why -- more families move away because they decide they don't want to be so close to H Street).

Proximity to Benning/Starburst also contributes to another factor, which is that Miner attracts a lot of EOTR families who want a convenient school to drop kids at on their commute. Miner is significantly easier to access than Maury. One thing about the families doing this is that they actually tend to be fairly MC -- these are families who go to the trouble to lottery into Miner because they are unhappy with school options EOTR, they tend to be fairly invested in their kids. But it is a problem for IB families who attend Miner hoping for a "neighborhood school" and then discover many of their kids friends don't live in the neighborhood. This can lead to IB attrition even though it's not that IB families don't want their kids to go to school with the OOB kids. They just wish they weren't OOB and the school had more of a neighborhood vibe with more opportunities for weeknight and weekend socializing. JOW runs into this same issue.

The factors combined can make it hard to hold onto high-SES IB families, who either ditch the school to lottery into other schools, or move because they are unhappy with either the school or the neighborhood. If you want to do what Maury has done, you HAVE to have high-SES families, you need them to stick around and invest. High-SES families induce MC families to stick around and invest too, plus increase the amount of money the school can raise through then PTO. If you can't retain your high-SES families, you can't get better. Note this is also a problem schools EOTR have as all their high-SES and MC families lottery elsewhere or go private, leaving only the most at-risk kids behind.

High-SES families are also more demanding and more likely to complain and make a fuss over stuff like this proposed cluster, which is why I think it's dead in the water. But it does make for an interesting discussion about what makes schools successful, and how boundaries, the lottery, and other factors like crime and location, can impact the ability of a school to improve over time. Maury had a dedicated and involved parent base and a good administration, yes. But it also had some good fortune with location and boundary lines, and certain lottery dynamics, that helped it get where it is today. Some of that you can duplicate. Some of it you cannot.

A+ analysis. If home owners with no kids (old people) or people with kids older than elementary/Maury knew about the possible cluster and the effect on real estate value, they'd be up in arms too. The odd/even address value of real estate on D Street NE is stark.

Or if clustering Maury and Miner means that more houses have access to Maury, that may cause people with no kids/older kids in the current Miner boundary to fervently support the proposal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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?

One issue is the existence of actual low-income family in the Miner catchment. I am unsure if there are designated low-income housing units in Maury's catchment, but if so, there are less than in Miner's.

This is likely related to another issue, which is that Miner's proximity to Benning road and the Starburst intersection. This has several impacts. One is that housing in Miner's catchment tends not to appreciate as much due to proximity to a high traffic road and more crime. BTW, this is also likely why LT has not been as successful as Maury in retaining its IB families (it's been very successful, LT is a fantastic school, but it's not as hard to lottery into LT and this is a major reason why -- more families move away because they decide they don't want to be so close to H Street).

Proximity to Benning/Starburst also contributes to another factor, which is that Miner attracts a lot of EOTR families who want a convenient school to drop kids at on their commute. Miner is significantly easier to access than Maury. One thing about the families doing this is that they actually tend to be fairly MC -- these are families who go to the trouble to lottery into Miner because they are unhappy with school options EOTR, they tend to be fairly invested in their kids. But it is a problem for IB families who attend Miner hoping for a "neighborhood school" and then discover many of their kids friends don't live in the neighborhood. This can lead to IB attrition even though it's not that IB families don't want their kids to go to school with the OOB kids. They just wish they weren't OOB and the school had more of a neighborhood vibe with more opportunities for weeknight and weekend socializing. JOW runs into this same issue.

The factors combined can make it hard to hold onto high-SES IB families, who either ditch the school to lottery into other schools, or move because they are unhappy with either the school or the neighborhood. If you want to do what Maury has done, you HAVE to have high-SES families, you need them to stick around and invest. High-SES families induce MC families to stick around and invest too, plus increase the amount of money the school can raise through then PTO. If you can't retain your high-SES families, you can't get better. Note this is also a problem schools EOTR have as all their high-SES and MC families lottery elsewhere or go private, leaving only the most at-risk kids behind.

High-SES families are also more demanding and more likely to complain and make a fuss over stuff like this proposed cluster, which is why I think it's dead in the water. But it does make for an interesting discussion about what makes schools successful, and how boundaries, the lottery, and other factors like crime and location, can impact the ability of a school to improve over time. Maury had a dedicated and involved parent base and a good administration, yes. But it also had some good fortune with location and boundary lines, and certain lottery dynamics, that helped it get where it is today. Some of that you can duplicate. Some of it you cannot.

A+ analysis. If home owners with no kids (old people) or people with kids older than elementary/Maury knew about the possible cluster and the effect on real estate value, they'd be up in arms too. The odd/even address value of real estate on D Street NE is stark.

Or if clustering Maury and Miner means that more houses have access to Maury, that may cause people with no kids/older kids in the current Miner boundary to fervently support the proposal.

I would be very curious to find out what families in Kingman Park and other expensive housing in Miner's boundary think. I know a couple people in the Miner zone but their kids are upper elementary and they long ago figure out other solutions (one family's kids actually lotteried into Maury before it became completely impossible to do so OOB at K). So I don't think they are heavily invested in terms of their kids, but I could see them liking the potential positive impact on home values, especially with housing prices in that neighborhood stagnating a bit recently due to crime and rate increases. Prices over there are more elastic than elsewhere on the Hill, especially the IB areas for Maury/Brent/LT.

I have to assume there is also some contingent of people who have babies or don't have kids yet who live IB for Miner and would be thrilled about this development, as it could totally solve elementary for them. I know people with older kids (like me) tend to say "oh you think elementary is an issue but just wait for MS" but I remember those years well and feeling totally overwhelmed by the lottery and the lack of control, and I could totally see how suddenly combing Miner with Maury would be like an education fairy godmother making your biggest concerns go away. I still think many of them would lottery, but with knowledge that they just got a huge upgrade in their IB default.

I think the odds are still agains the proposal and I already sense the Maury contingent perhaps mobilizing against it, but you never know. There are definitely interests on both sides of this debate who could sway it one way or another.

Does the whole Ward 6/Ward 7 thing factor in? Sorry if this has already been discussed but isn't part of the Miner catchment in Ward 7 now?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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?

One issue is the existence of actual low-income family in the Miner catchment. I am unsure if there are designated low-income housing units in Maury's catchment, but if so, there are less than in Miner's.

This is likely related to another issue, which is that Miner's proximity to Benning road and the Starburst intersection. This has several impacts. One is that housing in Miner's catchment tends not to appreciate as much due to proximity to a high traffic road and more crime. BTW, this is also likely why LT has not been as successful as Maury in retaining its IB families (it's been very successful, LT is a fantastic school, but it's not as hard to lottery into LT and this is a major reason why -- more families move away because they decide they don't want to be so close to H Street).

Proximity to Benning/Starburst also contributes to another factor, which is that Miner attracts a lot of EOTR families who want a convenient school to drop kids at on their commute. Miner is significantly easier to access than Maury. One thing about the families doing this is that they actually tend to be fairly MC -- these are families who go to the trouble to lottery into Miner because they are unhappy with school options EOTR, they tend to be fairly invested in their kids. But it is a problem for IB families who attend Miner hoping for a "neighborhood school" and then discover many of their kids friends don't live in the neighborhood. This can lead to IB attrition even though it's not that IB families don't want their kids to go to school with the OOB kids. They just wish they weren't OOB and the school had more of a neighborhood vibe with more opportunities for weeknight and weekend socializing. JOW runs into this same issue.

The factors combined can make it hard to hold onto high-SES IB families, who either ditch the school to lottery into other schools, or move because they are unhappy with either the school or the neighborhood. If you want to do what Maury has done, you HAVE to have high-SES families, you need them to stick around and invest. High-SES families induce MC families to stick around and invest too, plus increase the amount of money the school can raise through then PTO. If you can't retain your high-SES families, you can't get better. Note this is also a problem schools EOTR have as all their high-SES and MC families lottery elsewhere or go private, leaving only the most at-risk kids behind.

High-SES families are also more demanding and more likely to complain and make a fuss over stuff like this proposed cluster, which is why I think it's dead in the water. But it does make for an interesting discussion about what makes schools successful, and how boundaries, the lottery, and other factors like crime and location, can impact the ability of a school to improve over time. Maury had a dedicated and involved parent base and a good administration, yes. But it also had some good fortune with location and boundary lines, and certain lottery dynamics, that helped it get where it is today. Some of that you can duplicate. Some of it you cannot.

A+ analysis. If home owners with no kids (old people) or people with kids older than elementary/Maury knew about the possible cluster and the effect on real estate value, they'd be up in arms too. The odd/even address value of real estate on D Street NE is stark.

Or if clustering Maury and Miner means that more houses have access to Maury, that may cause people with no kids/older kids in the current Miner boundary to fervently support the proposal.

I would be very curious to find out what families in Kingman Park and other expensive housing in Miner's boundary think. I know a couple people in the Miner zone but their kids are upper elementary and they long ago figure out other solutions (one family's kids actually lotteried into Maury before it became completely impossible to do so OOB at K). So I don't think they are heavily invested in terms of their kids, but I could see them liking the potential positive impact on home values, especially with housing prices in that neighborhood stagnating a bit recently due to crime and rate increases. Prices over there are more elastic than elsewhere on the Hill, especially the IB areas for Maury/Brent/LT.

I have to assume there is also some contingent of people who have babies or don't have kids yet who live IB for Miner and would be thrilled about this development, as it could totally solve elementary for them. I know people with older kids (like me) tend to say "oh you think elementary is an issue but just wait for MS" but I remember those years well and feeling totally overwhelmed by the lottery and the lack of control, and I could totally see how suddenly combing Miner with Maury would be like an education fairy godmother making your biggest concerns go away. I still think many of them would lottery, but with knowledge that they just got a huge upgrade in their IB default.

I think the odds are still agains the proposal and I already sense the Maury contingent perhaps mobilizing against it, but you never know. There are definitely interests on both sides of this debate who could sway it one way or another.

Does the whole Ward 6/Ward 7 thing factor in? Sorry if this has already been discussed but isn't part of the Miner catchment in Ward 7 now?

Or it could destroy a good school option for the current Maury contingent and create another cluster disaster w/mass exodus beyond ECE ala the original failed cluster schools on the hill.