Deal Behavior

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

You mean OOB feeder rights. Just because an OOB student attends an in boundary elementary school should not confer the right to go on to Deal and to Wilson.

There are few OOB kids in K. Current kindergarten enrollment at the Deal feeders is 535. Times three years is 1605 kids when these kids hit Deal. Stopping OOB feeder rights is not going to help.

By 5th grade there are a bunch of kids who are enrolled who no longer live IB. In my kids cohort of 5th graders, it is about 10% of the students. Now - some of these families moved to an area that still feeds Deal - but most did not. This group officially does not have "rights" to the feeder pattern - but no one checks. Overcrowding is a queuing problem - it is like a traffic congestion where 1 additional car breaks the system. Imagine that Deal had 5% less kids in the cafeteria or in the hallway or on the stairs. It is enough to make a difference with movement and flow.

This is a policy that is currently in place that is not enforced. How do we get it done?

This has only been the policy for ONE year. If you want the policy enforced, which DCPS has the data to do, write your council member, call into WAMU when Ferrebee is on, use social media, start a petition -- and focus public attention on the lack of adherence to DCPS' own policy.

No, that was always the law. It was changed in the handbook for one year and then fixed to comply with the law, which let a bunch of people slip through because they "relied' on the error. BS, but someone got what they were after.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:to 22/37 -- Deal is only diverse if you think diverse means that there are some students from every racial and ethnic group.

But Deal is not at all reflective of the DC school population. At all.

Not going to post the stats here (again) but you can see for yourself https://dcschoolreportcard.org/

Do you know what diverse means, hint, it does not mean reflective of the city’s population.

Diverse means economically diverse too, which Deal is not. And it is losing what racial and ethnic diversity it does have every year -- not as fast as Wilson but it's significant.

Maybe someone could post the world rankings on this vitally important academic number, 'diversity'. All I can find is our horrible stats for math, reading and science...along with US kids' #1 ranking in, "self esteem"!!!!!!! Not a typo. Not STEM auto-corrected to 'esteem'. Bad at academics, yet still feel superior to those crushing their scores. (Kind of explains the atrocious Sidwell parents' behavior in this week's Post article.)

If folks truly wanted their kids to have a rich cultural academic experience, they know their kids could enroll OOB at any other MS in the city. But, come on, they just want to post online and talk at parties about how frustrated they are with diversity at the school that's a half mile from Chevy Chase Md.

This is because DCPS actually hires “esteem coordinators” at the expense of more science teachers and librarians.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just a friendly reminder that neighborhood schools are a choice as well. There is no fundamental right to go to your neighborhood school. School districts adopt systems to identify how they will distribute seats to schools. DCPS has long been a neighborhood school system with a lottery system for available seats. The feeder rights for OOB students has now been in place almost a decade.

Cities like NY give a preference but no guarantee of a spot in a neighborhood school. SF has a complete lottery system. Seattle long had a choice system with a neighborhood preference to a cluster of schools.

DCPS could adopt a number of ways to solve the overcrowding problem. Doing away with the right for OOB students to follow a feeder pattern is one option but not the only and not necessarily the most politically palatable.

My youngest starts Deal in the fall. How they solve this will not have an impact on my kids so I really do not have a dog in this fight other than property values.

All of you parents that recently bought into upper NW and think this can be easily solved by cutting off feeder rights to OOB students likely did not participate in this discussion last time it was actually on the table in a boundary review.

I think it is wise to think about a solution that betters the system for all DCPS students, not just your child's path.

I really don't know what you are trying to say in this post.

There is no such thing as a fundamental right when it comes to what school you can attend.

Right now in DC you have the right to attend the school whose boundaries you live within. In the case of Deal and Wilson those boundaries are illogical and enormous.

Now perhaps what you meant to say is that the right is not set in stone and can be taken away and that is true.

But practically speaking the alternatives to such a system at the MS and HS level would be to go to either an all merit based application system or a pure lottery system where everyone is equal and scattered around the city randomly. The former would do almost nothing to address inequality or access to the select schools while the latter would almost certainly fail and cause lots of middle class families to flee.

I don't think new boundaries and sticking with neighborhood based schools will necessarily cause so many middle class families to flee - knowing where their kids would be attending middle and high school would give those families the chance to be engaged with DCPS and the DC Council years before their kids actually get to those schools and to make sure those schools were up to their expectations but sending the kids to random schools would make that impossible. Unfortunately DCPS has been screwing around for years when it comes to getting a high quality middle school up and running in Ward 4 which is the needed bridge to get these kids to some other high school besides Wilson.

And the swipe from the PP at Upper NW parents shows how misinformed this poster is - the demographic that is going to most vociferously fight any changes is the same demographic most causing the problems in EOTP schools and that is the new UMC families who do whatever they can to avoid sending their kids to their neighborhood EOTP schools whether by going the charter route or finding ways to squeze into Deal/Wilson. If you want to know what it looks like when white people riot then zone Crestwood out of Deal.

The people on here screaming about closing OOB feeder rights are overestimating its role but mostly I think conflating OOB and neighborhood schools - Deal still has enormous boundaries and draws kids from much of NW DC. I think there are some UMC families from both sides of the park that are a bit surprised at how diverse Deal is but the fact that we've got a lot of UMC white families crossing the park to attend a diverse school suggests it should not be impossible to get them to attend a diverse school EOTP and that hopefully points the way to solving the overcrowding here.

I am the PP you are responding to. I am an upper NW parent that was very engaged in the last boundary review. Things like a city-wide lottery to the middle and high schools were on the table. My swipe was to the parents that are blaming OOB feeder pattern is just a response to the entitlement expressed in their posts that their children have a right to their in boundary schools that is stronger than those that get in through the OOB process. The rules of the OOB process are just as embedded in the law as the boundaries and changing that iis not so simple as just deciding to stop it. The mayor did not win her job in upper NW, there are other parts of the city that DCPS is responsive to and upper NW is lucky that no one in the city wanted to do away with the boundary system, even those with what you would consider sucky IB schools.

Don’t forget that in DCPS white students are the diversity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The most important issue is not the overcrowding, but that the DC Council has set impossibly strict limits on suspensions. Kids do egregious acts and are in school the next day because downtown won’t suspend them.

Yup. You can watch some of them in action at the Tenleytown Metro station, and it’s notcoretty.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most important issue is not the overcrowding, but that the DC Council has set impossibly strict limits on suspensions. Kids do egregious acts and are in school the next day because downtown won’t suspend them.

Yup. You can watch some of them in action at the Tenleytown Metro station, and it’s notcoretty.

Not pretty after Deal and Wilson are dismissed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

You mean OOB feeder rights. Just because an OOB student attends an in boundary elementary school should not confer the right to go on to Deal and to Wilson.

There are few OOB kids in K. Current kindergarten enrollment at the Deal feeders is 535. Times three years is 1605 kids when these kids hit Deal. Stopping OOB feeder rights is not going to help.

By 5th grade there are a bunch of kids who are enrolled who no longer live IB. In my kids cohort of 5th graders, it is about 10% of the students. Now - some of these families moved to an area that still feeds Deal - but most did not. This group officially does not have "rights" to the feeder pattern - but no one checks. Overcrowding is a queuing problem - it is like a traffic congestion where 1 additional car breaks the system. Imagine that Deal had 5% less kids in the cafeteria or in the hallway or on the stairs. It is enough to make a difference with movement and flow.

This is a policy that is currently in place that is not enforced. How do we get it done?

This has only been the policy for ONE year. If you want the policy enforced, which DCPS has the data to do, write your council member, call into WAMU when Ferrebee is on, use social media, start a petition -- and focus public attention on the lack of adherence to DCPS' own policy.

No, that was always the law. It was changed in the handbook for one year and then fixed to comply with the law, which let a bunch of people slip through because they "relied' on the error. BS, but someone got what they were after.

The kids I know who moved OOB have followed the feeder pattern to middle school. Does anyone know of a child who lived IB, moved OOB, and was not allowed to continue in the feeder pattern?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

True, but the flip side is that if there's no way to ensure rights to a quality school, then families will leave DCPS and probably DC. The incentive to buy in neighborhoods that are IB for Deal and Wilson would disappear as rights to these schools would disappear. There would be negative impacts to a city that can't support families with quality schools. And yes, property values would decline in many neighborhoods too and we'd revert back to the levels of urban flight for families that was standard from the 60's until relatively recently.

If there is one thing I am most concerned about, it's keeping up property values for homes worth over $1 million. Very high on my list of concerns about the city.

If you have any sense, you should be. Who do you think is paying the property taxes that run this city?

[Anonymous]

Our favorite teacher from 7th grade (two years ago) left after one year at Deal because she spent so much time breaking up rights, pulling disruptive kids out of the classroom and trying to pull kids into weekly tutoring and whatever that after lunch club is to get them to catch up, The smart kids were find, but not challenged enough. The kids who struggled were not getting enough support and the kids who were disruptive were not getting reprimanded by the administration. I went to a big public school but it wasn't like this. I don't know how Deal can get on top the problem. But its getting out of hand.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Building Capacity is: 1200
They currently have over 1500 students enrolled

I do not care how many demountables there are -
you have 300 extra kids in the lunch room / in the halls / in the stairwells.

It is a problem and DCPS does not care. They will keep pressuring for OOB (They accepted last year)

Parents who have the means will put their children in private - when their child complains that they can't eat lunch b/c there is no place to sit and eat. The stress is real for these kids.

Have you seen the projections in the DME's Master Facilities Plan? 2108 students by SY 2017-18. That's eight years away.

I think you mean 2027-2028?

Do not forget there is a boundary review scheduled for 2022-23.

Yes, 27-28.

Let's think about that boundary review. According to the projections, Deal will be 538 over capacity. The three next closest middle schools to Deal -- Hardy, MacFarlane, and Adams -- will all be over capacity, by a combined 273. So those four schools will have 800 kids who have to go somewhere else. The two next closest are Brookland and McKinley, which both will have space, combined about 400 seats. Then there's Stuart-Hobson, which will be 112 seats short. The next two schools are Jefferson and Eliot-Hine, which both have capacity, about 220 seats.

West of the Anacostia there are nine middle schools. Five of them will be over capacity, by a combined 923 seats. Four will have space, a combined 673 seats. Every middle school in that part of the city would have to change its boundaries, and you still wouldn't have enough seats.

West of North Capitol Street the middle schools will be short a combined 800 seats.

It's not going to be like 2012 where they could move Eaton from Deal to Hardy and call it good. Every boundary is going to have to change, and some by a lot. It may not be possible to keep boundaries that physically include the school.

I'm really not sure that DC's political culture can handle it. It may be easier to go all-lottery.

Except cities that went all lottery called it a failure and are going back to neighborhood school. It makes much more sense to build more schools. DCPS doesn’t have the will to do either, yet. But who knows what will happen in 10 years.

[Anonymous]

DCPS favors the larger school models because it’s less expensive to run a larger building with everyone squeezes in. The per student funding model is ineffective for finding the extracurriculars and extrapograms of smaller schools. Although large schools are well funded and can afford paraeducators, counselors and more foreign languages but only spots for basketball, soccer, baseball, band, choir etc, so a lot of kids get lost in the system.

I don’t know the answer to this but the outside climate is now coming into schools and it’s becoming dangerous to be a teacher. We have to do a better job for the struggling kids.
And there needs to be more enrichment for bright kids. It’s such a mess and now I’m stressed out again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Building Capacity is: 1200
They currently have over 1500 students enrolled

I do not care how many demountables there are -
you have 300 extra kids in the lunch room / in the halls / in the stairwells.

It is a problem and DCPS does not care. They will keep pressuring for OOB (They accepted last year)

Parents who have the means will put their children in private - when their child complains that they can't eat lunch b/c there is no place to sit and eat. The stress is real for these kids.

Have you seen the projections in the DME's Master Facilities Plan? 2108 students by SY 2017-18. That's eight years away.

I think you mean 2027-2028?

Do not forget there is a boundary review scheduled for 2022-23.

Yes, 27-28.

Let's think about that boundary review. According to the projections, Deal will be 538 over capacity. The three next closest middle schools to Deal -- Hardy, MacFarlane, and Adams -- will all be over capacity, by a combined 273. So those four schools will have 800 kids who have to go somewhere else. The two next closest are Brookland and McKinley, which both will have space, combined about 400 seats. Then there's Stuart-Hobson, which will be 112 seats short. The next two schools are Jefferson and Eliot-Hine, which both have capacity, about 220 seats.

West of the Anacostia there are nine middle schools. Five of them will be over capacity, by a combined 923 seats. Four will have space, a combined 673 seats. Every middle school in that part of the city would have to change its boundaries, and you still wouldn't have enough seats.

West of North Capitol Street the middle schools will be short a combined 800 seats.

It's not going to be like 2012 where they could move Eaton from Deal to Hardy and call it good. Every boundary is going to have to change, and some by a lot. It may not be possible to keep boundaries that physically include the school.

I'm really not sure that DC's political culture can handle it. It may be easier to go all-lottery.

Except cities that went all lottery called it a failure and are going back to neighborhood school. It makes much more sense to build more schools. DCPS doesn’t have the will to do either, yet. But who knows what will happen in 10 years.

DC will never go to a lottery system for everyone. That would be politically unacceptable m. How do you think upper Northwest parents would feel about their kids being told to go to Marion Barry High?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: How do you think upper Northwest parents would feel about their kids being told to go to Marion Barry High?

I'd rather my kids' school be named after Marion Barry than Woodrow Wilson.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/11/20/9766896/woodrow-wilson-racist

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DCPS favors the larger school models because it’s less expensive to run a larger building with everyone squeezes in. The per student funding model is ineffective for finding the extracurriculars and extrapograms of smaller schools. Although large schools are well funded and can afford paraeducators, counselors and more foreign languages but only spots for basketball, soccer, baseball, band, choir etc, so a lot of kids get lost in the system.

I don’t know the answer to this but the outside climate is now coming into schools and it’s becoming dangerous to be a teacher. We have to do a better job for the struggling kids.
And there needs to be more enrichment for bright kids. It’s such a mess and now I’m stressed out again.

Here's a list of DCPS high schools with their enrollments:

Washington Metropolitan HS 196
Ron Brown College Preparatory High School 209
Luke Moore Alternative HS 251
Phelps Architecture Construction and Engineering HS 260
Coolidge HS 310
Anacostia HS 379
H.D. Woodson HS 488
Duke Ellington School for the Arts 566
School Without Walls SHS 592
Dunbar HS 617
Eastern HS 769
McKinley Technology HS 861
Roosevelt HS 1213
Ballou HS 1375
Wilson HS 1829

A quick Google search tells me that the average high school size in the US is 750 students, so only three of them could be considered "large" -- Roosevelt, Ballou and Wilson. For an urban high school even Wilson isn't that large.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DCPS favors the larger school models because it’s less expensive to run a larger building with everyone squeezes in. The per student funding model is ineffective for finding the extracurriculars and extrapograms of smaller schools. Although large schools are well funded and can afford paraeducators, counselors and more foreign languages but only spots for basketball, soccer, baseball, band, choir etc, so a lot of kids get lost in the system.

I don’t know the answer to this but the outside climate is now coming into schools and it’s becoming dangerous to be a teacher. We have to do a better job for the struggling kids.
And there needs to be more enrichment for bright kids. It’s such a mess and now I’m stressed out again.

The overwhelmingly biggest expense in running a school is personnel, there just aren't economies of scale in education.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: How do you think upper Northwest parents would feel about their kids being told to go to Marion Barry High?

I'd rather my kids' school be named after Marion Barry than Woodrow Wilson.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/11/20/9766896/woodrow-wilson-racist

You're crazy.

Poor kids.