Maury Capitol Hill

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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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?

Of course UMC families zoned for Miner will like this proposal. If it doesn't work out, they are no worse off. Even a failed cluster experiment isn't going to be worse from their perspective than current Miner, which 95% of them would never use past K anyway. Even if they never plan to use the school or have no kids at all, this might help their housing values which are currently trending nowhere because of crime concerns, so of course they'll be in favor. But presumably these aren't the families that DCPS is trying to target in the name of equity. I'd be more interested in what MC/LMC/poor residents of the boundary think, because I'm not sure all of them would be gung-ho to trek their kids substantially farther and/or to two different schools into an established school community where they will no longer get free aftercare or maybe even lunch depending on how the demographics shake out and where the school community will massively resent them.

But look, as a parent at LT, I have absolutely no direct skin in this game (if anything, destroying Maury would probably lead to UMC flight from Maury that could benefit LT)... but this is a terrible idea. There is no evidence citywide that a cluster model anywhere works. There is one cluster. It was set up under very different circumstances (in particular, the schools involved were considered the most desirable in Ward 6 at the time) and it has never been a big success... now, more than ever, it seems to be failing. Also, DCPS took an active step to destroy it -- cancelling the free bus, which was the only thing that made it workable for many working parents -- so why would anyone trust them to do right logistically-speaking by this cluster? So, just the premise of setting up another cluster seems insane to me.

If you want to change the boundaries to make the IBs more equitable, then change the boundaries... but I don't think that gets you much, since Maury is to the West and the South of Miner and, in that area, the Western part and the Southern part of the IB are both richer and don't contain the housing projects with concentrated poverty and the resulting issues. It is true that parts of Kingman Park are gentrified, but they are much less gentrified than the area around Lincoln Park (so there aren't deep pockets to pour cash into Miner like there are for Maury, Kingman Park is actually much like the poorest area of the Maury zone, the bit east of Maury towards RFK) and there are huge swaths of VERY concentrated poverty. Ultimately, given the location of the housing projects IB for Miner, there is no way to zone them to Maury without some crazy shenanigans. Neighborhood schools are supposed to serve their neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of Maury and Miner simply are not the same; that said, you could probably change the boundaries to make them a bit more equitable.

But a cluster? That is literally just sacrificing one good, high performing school for a pipe dream. It's insane and it discourages people from making the kind of sweat equity investment that people made at Maury (as they had previously at Brent and as folks have at LT). It should not be that if you bust your butt to get community buy-in for a school, DCPS just comes and takes it away in the name of weird faux equity for people in one other specific IB. It seems like not an accident that someone from Maury didn't end up on the Boundary Review committee (and, in fact, that originally NO ONE from Ward 6 did). The earlier posts about the advantages Maury and LT had relative to Miner (and that Maury had relative to LT) are absolutely correct, but without committed parents willing to devote thousands of hours and dollars each to the school, it would absolutely not have improved. Gentrification is not enough and there are plenty of DCPS IBs and now-failing charter schools that show you that encouraging parents to commit is crucial. Craziness like this proposal completely undermines that incentive. Payne is another Hill school that seems to be quickly going down this path and I hope changes there don't scuttle their momentum, because that was absolutely driven initially by a handful of parents -- that has now become a solid core of parents -- as well.

Anyway, I think everyone knows that the specific boundaries for schools can change, but targeting a school specifically because they have been too successful and saying they are going to fundamentally alter the entire nature of the school solely driven by benefiting the children in another IB seems terribly misguided and short-sighted to me.

[Anonymous]

The biggest reason to live within the Maury boundary is Maury, because otherwise, that part of the Hill is really inconvenient. I wouldn't buy a house in that boundary if I send my kids to Miner for part of elementary school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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?

Of course UMC families zoned for Miner will like this proposal. If it doesn't work out, they are no worse off. Even a failed cluster experiment isn't going to be worse from their perspective than current Miner, which 95% of them would never use past K anyway. Even if they never plan to use the school or have no kids at all, this might help their housing values which are currently trending nowhere because of crime concerns, so of course they'll be in favor. But presumably these aren't the families that DCPS is trying to target in the name of equity. I'd be more interested in what MC/LMC/poor residents of the boundary think, because I'm not sure all of them would be gung-ho to trek their kids substantially farther and/or to two different schools into an established school community where they will no longer get free aftercare or maybe even lunch depending on how the demographics shake out and where the school community will massively resent them.

But look, as a parent at LT, I have absolutely no direct skin in this game (if anything, destroying Maury would probably lead to UMC flight from Maury that could benefit LT)... but this is a terrible idea. There is no evidence citywide that a cluster model anywhere works. There is one cluster. It was set up under very different circumstances (in particular, the schools involved were considered the most desirable in Ward 6 at the time) and it has never been a big success... now, more than ever, it seems to be failing. Also, DCPS took an active step to destroy it -- cancelling the free bus, which was the only thing that made it workable for many working parents -- so why would anyone trust them to do right logistically-speaking by this cluster? So, just the premise of setting up another cluster seems insane to me.

If you want to change the boundaries to make the IBs more equitable, then change the boundaries... but I don't think that gets you much, since Maury is to the West and the South of Miner and, in that area, the Western part and the Southern part of the IB are both richer and don't contain the housing projects with concentrated poverty and the resulting issues. It is true that parts of Kingman Park are gentrified, but they are much less gentrified than the area around Lincoln Park (so there aren't deep pockets to pour cash into Miner like there are for Maury, Kingman Park is actually much like the poorest area of the Maury zone, the bit east of Maury towards RFK) and there are huge swaths of VERY concentrated poverty. Ultimately, given the location of the housing projects IB for Miner, there is no way to zone them to Maury without some crazy shenanigans. Neighborhood schools are supposed to serve their neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of Maury and Miner simply are not the same; that said, you could probably change the boundaries to make them a bit more equitable.

But a cluster? That is literally just sacrificing one good, high performing school for a pipe dream. It's insane and it discourages people from making the kind of sweat equity investment that people made at Maury (as they had previously at Brent and as folks have at LT). It should not be that if you bust your butt to get community buy-in for a school, DCPS just comes and takes it away in the name of weird faux equity for people in one other specific IB. It seems like not an accident that someone from Maury didn't end up on the Boundary Review committee (and, in fact, that originally NO ONE from Ward 6 did). The earlier posts about the advantages Maury and LT had relative to Miner (and that Maury had relative to LT) are absolutely correct, but without committed parents willing to devote thousands of hours and dollars each to the school, it would absolutely not have improved. Gentrification is not enough and there are plenty of DCPS IBs and now-failing charter schools that show you that encouraging parents to commit is crucial. Craziness like this proposal completely undermines that incentive. Payne is another Hill school that seems to be quickly going down this path and I hope changes there don't scuttle their momentum, because that was absolutely driven initially by a handful of parents -- that has now become a solid core of parents -- as well.

Anyway, I think everyone knows that the specific boundaries for schools can change, but targeting a school specifically because they have been too successful and saying they are going to fundamentally alter the entire nature of the school solely driven by benefiting the children in another IB seems terribly misguided and short-sighted to me.

DCPS didn't cancel the Cluster bus. The "equity" parents within the Cluster cancelled the bus -- saying that the bus benefited all the IB?Hill students, but not the OOB/non-Hill students. That's why you have the problem you have now. Peabody is really hard to get to for OOB families not living on the Hill, so most OOB families there now are just Hill families. Watkins is much easier to access for OOB families, so OOB families go there, but it is harder for families that leave near Peabody to get to without a bus.

That's one of the real issues Maury will face if you cluster with Miner. Most families in Maury right now think remarkably alike. That's the real reason it was so easy to get things moving in "the right direction" at that school -- most people agree on the direction to go. There were lots of "committed parents" at Watkins, but lots of disagreement about what to commit to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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?

Of course UMC families zoned for Miner will like this proposal. If it doesn't work out, they are no worse off. Even a failed cluster experiment isn't going to be worse from their perspective than current Miner, which 95% of them would never use past K anyway. Even if they never plan to use the school or have no kids at all, this might help their housing values which are currently trending nowhere because of crime concerns, so of course they'll be in favor. But presumably these aren't the families that DCPS is trying to target in the name of equity. I'd be more interested in what MC/LMC/poor residents of the boundary think, because I'm not sure all of them would be gung-ho to trek their kids substantially farther and/or to two different schools into an established school community where they will no longer get free aftercare or maybe even lunch depending on how the demographics shake out and where the school community will massively resent them.

But look, as a parent at LT, I have absolutely no direct skin in this game (if anything, destroying Maury would probably lead to UMC flight from Maury that could benefit LT)... but this is a terrible idea. There is no evidence citywide that a cluster model anywhere works. There is one cluster. It was set up under very different circumstances (in particular, the schools involved were considered the most desirable in Ward 6 at the time) and it has never been a big success... now, more than ever, it seems to be failing. Also, DCPS took an active step to destroy it -- cancelling the free bus, which was the only thing that made it workable for many working parents -- so why would anyone trust them to do right logistically-speaking by this cluster? So, just the premise of setting up another cluster seems insane to me.

If you want to change the boundaries to make the IBs more equitable, then change the boundaries... but I don't think that gets you much, since Maury is to the West and the South of Miner and, in that area, the Western part and the Southern part of the IB are both richer and don't contain the housing projects with concentrated poverty and the resulting issues. It is true that parts of Kingman Park are gentrified, but they are much less gentrified than the area around Lincoln Park (so there aren't deep pockets to pour cash into Miner like there are for Maury, Kingman Park is actually much like the poorest area of the Maury zone, the bit east of Maury towards RFK) and there are huge swaths of VERY concentrated poverty. Ultimately, given the location of the housing projects IB for Miner, there is no way to zone them to Maury without some crazy shenanigans. Neighborhood schools are supposed to serve their neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of Maury and Miner simply are not the same; that said, you could probably change the boundaries to make them a bit more equitable.

But a cluster? That is literally just sacrificing one good, high performing school for a pipe dream. It's insane and it discourages people from making the kind of sweat equity investment that people made at Maury (as they had previously at Brent and as folks have at LT). It should not be that if you bust your butt to get community buy-in for a school, DCPS just comes and takes it away in the name of weird faux equity for people in one other specific IB. It seems like not an accident that someone from Maury didn't end up on the Boundary Review committee (and, in fact, that originally NO ONE from Ward 6 did). The earlier posts about the advantages Maury and LT had relative to Miner (and that Maury had relative to LT) are absolutely correct, but without committed parents willing to devote thousands of hours and dollars each to the school, it would absolutely not have improved. Gentrification is not enough and there are plenty of DCPS IBs and now-failing charter schools that show you that encouraging parents to commit is crucial. Craziness like this proposal completely undermines that incentive. Payne is another Hill school that seems to be quickly going down this path and I hope changes there don't scuttle their momentum, because that was absolutely driven initially by a handful of parents -- that has now become a solid core of parents -- as well.

Anyway, I think everyone knows that the specific boundaries for schools can change, but targeting a school specifically because they have been too successful and saying they are going to fundamentally alter the entire nature of the school solely driven by benefiting the children in another IB seems terribly misguided and short-sighted to me.

DCPS didn't cancel the Cluster bus. The "equity" parents within the Cluster cancelled the bus -- saying that the bus benefited all the IB?Hill students, but not the OOB/non-Hill students. That's why you have the problem you have now. Peabody is really hard to get to for OOB families not living on the Hill, so most OOB families there now are just Hill families. Watkins is much easier to access for OOB families, so OOB families go there, but it is harder for families that leave near Peabody to get to without a bus.

That's one of the real issues Maury will face if you cluster with Miner. Most families in Maury right now think remarkably alike. That's the real reason it was so easy to get things moving in "the right direction" at that school -- most people agree on the direction to go. There were lots of "committed parents" at Watkins, but lots of disagreement about what to commit to.

WMATA cancelled it during the Watkins renovation, and the principal didn't advocate to get it back. There were definitely parents who agreed with cancelling the bus, but I blame the principal.

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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?

Of course UMC families zoned for Miner will like this proposal. If it doesn't work out, they are no worse off. Even a failed cluster experiment isn't going to be worse from their perspective than current Miner, which 95% of them would never use past K anyway. Even if they never plan to use the school or have no kids at all, this might help their housing values which are currently trending nowhere because of crime concerns, so of course they'll be in favor. But presumably these aren't the families that DCPS is trying to target in the name of equity. I'd be more interested in what MC/LMC/poor residents of the boundary think, because I'm not sure all of them would be gung-ho to trek their kids substantially farther and/or to two different schools into an established school community where they will no longer get free aftercare or maybe even lunch depending on how the demographics shake out and where the school community will massively resent them.

But look, as a parent at LT, I have absolutely no direct skin in this game (if anything, destroying Maury would probably lead to UMC flight from Maury that could benefit LT)... but this is a terrible idea. There is no evidence citywide that a cluster model anywhere works. There is one cluster. It was set up under very different circumstances (in particular, the schools involved were considered the most desirable in Ward 6 at the time) and it has never been a big success... now, more than ever, it seems to be failing. Also, DCPS took an active step to destroy it -- cancelling the free bus, which was the only thing that made it workable for many working parents -- so why would anyone trust them to do right logistically-speaking by this cluster? So, just the premise of setting up another cluster seems insane to me.

If you want to change the boundaries to make the IBs more equitable, then change the boundaries... but I don't think that gets you much, since Maury is to the West and the South of Miner and, in that area, the Western part and the Southern part of the IB are both richer and don't contain the housing projects with concentrated poverty and the resulting issues. It is true that parts of Kingman Park are gentrified, but they are much less gentrified than the area around Lincoln Park (so there aren't deep pockets to pour cash into Miner like there are for Maury, Kingman Park is actually much like the poorest area of the Maury zone, the bit east of Maury towards RFK) and there are huge swaths of VERY concentrated poverty. Ultimately, given the location of the housing projects IB for Miner, there is no way to zone them to Maury without some crazy shenanigans. Neighborhood schools are supposed to serve their neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of Maury and Miner simply are not the same; that said, you could probably change the boundaries to make them a bit more equitable.

But a cluster? That is literally just sacrificing one good, high performing school for a pipe dream. It's insane and it discourages people from making the kind of sweat equity investment that people made at Maury (as they had previously at Brent and as folks have at LT). It should not be that if you bust your butt to get community buy-in for a school, DCPS just comes and takes it away in the name of weird faux equity for people in one other specific IB. It seems like not an accident that someone from Maury didn't end up on the Boundary Review committee (and, in fact, that originally NO ONE from Ward 6 did). The earlier posts about the advantages Maury and LT had relative to Miner (and that Maury had relative to LT) are absolutely correct, but without committed parents willing to devote thousands of hours and dollars each to the school, it would absolutely not have improved. Gentrification is not enough and there are plenty of DCPS IBs and now-failing charter schools that show you that encouraging parents to commit is crucial. Craziness like this proposal completely undermines that incentive. Payne is another Hill school that seems to be quickly going down this path and I hope changes there don't scuttle their momentum, because that was absolutely driven initially by a handful of parents -- that has now become a solid core of parents -- as well.

Anyway, I think everyone knows that the specific boundaries for schools can change, but targeting a school specifically because they have been too successful and saying they are going to fundamentally alter the entire nature of the school solely driven by benefiting the children in another IB seems terribly misguided and short-sighted to me.

DCPS didn't cancel the Cluster bus. The "equity" parents within the Cluster cancelled the bus -- saying that the bus benefited all the IB?Hill students, but not the OOB/non-Hill students. That's why you have the problem you have now. Peabody is really hard to get to for OOB families not living on the Hill, so most OOB families there now are just Hill families. Watkins is much easier to access for OOB families, so OOB families go there, but it is harder for families that leave near Peabody to get to without a bus.

That's one of the real issues Maury will face if you cluster with Miner. Most families in Maury right now think remarkably alike. That's the real reason it was so easy to get things moving in "the right direction" at that school -- most people agree on the direction to go. There were lots of "committed parents" at Watkins, but lots of disagreement about what to commit to.

WMATA cancelled it during the Watkins renovation, and the principal didn't advocate to get it back. There were definitely parents who agreed with cancelling the bus, but I blame the principal.

I think there was a WMATA bus route that was canceled, and then subsequently a dedicated chartered bus paid for by the city that was then also canceled a few years ago. Agree the principal seemed to stir the pot there.

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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?

Of course UMC families zoned for Miner will like this proposal. If it doesn't work out, they are no worse off. Even a failed cluster experiment isn't going to be worse from their perspective than current Miner, which 95% of them would never use past K anyway. Even if they never plan to use the school or have no kids at all, this might help their housing values which are currently trending nowhere because of crime concerns, so of course they'll be in favor. But presumably these aren't the families that DCPS is trying to target in the name of equity. I'd be more interested in what MC/LMC/poor residents of the boundary think, because I'm not sure all of them would be gung-ho to trek their kids substantially farther and/or to two different schools into an established school community where they will no longer get free aftercare or maybe even lunch depending on how the demographics shake out and where the school community will massively resent them.

But look, as a parent at LT, I have absolutely no direct skin in this game (if anything, destroying Maury would probably lead to UMC flight from Maury that could benefit LT)... but this is a terrible idea. There is no evidence citywide that a cluster model anywhere works. There is one cluster. It was set up under very different circumstances (in particular, the schools involved were considered the most desirable in Ward 6 at the time) and it has never been a big success... now, more than ever, it seems to be failing. Also, DCPS took an active step to destroy it -- cancelling the free bus, which was the only thing that made it workable for many working parents -- so why would anyone trust them to do right logistically-speaking by this cluster? So, just the premise of setting up another cluster seems insane to me.

If you want to change the boundaries to make the IBs more equitable, then change the boundaries... but I don't think that gets you much, since Maury is to the West and the South of Miner and, in that area, the Western part and the Southern part of the IB are both richer and don't contain the housing projects with concentrated poverty and the resulting issues. It is true that parts of Kingman Park are gentrified, but they are much less gentrified than the area around Lincoln Park (so there aren't deep pockets to pour cash into Miner like there are for Maury, Kingman Park is actually much like the poorest area of the Maury zone, the bit east of Maury towards RFK) and there are huge swaths of VERY concentrated poverty. Ultimately, given the location of the housing projects IB for Miner, there is no way to zone them to Maury without some crazy shenanigans. Neighborhood schools are supposed to serve their neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of Maury and Miner simply are not the same; that said, you could probably change the boundaries to make them a bit more equitable.

But a cluster? That is literally just sacrificing one good, high performing school for a pipe dream. It's insane and it discourages people from making the kind of sweat equity investment that people made at Maury (as they had previously at Brent and as folks have at LT). It should not be that if you bust your butt to get community buy-in for a school, DCPS just comes and takes it away in the name of weird faux equity for people in one other specific IB. It seems like not an accident that someone from Maury didn't end up on the Boundary Review committee (and, in fact, that originally NO ONE from Ward 6 did). The earlier posts about the advantages Maury and LT had relative to Miner (and that Maury had relative to LT) are absolutely correct, but without committed parents willing to devote thousands of hours and dollars each to the school, it would absolutely not have improved. Gentrification is not enough and there are plenty of DCPS IBs and now-failing charter schools that show you that encouraging parents to commit is crucial. Craziness like this proposal completely undermines that incentive. Payne is another Hill school that seems to be quickly going down this path and I hope changes there don't scuttle their momentum, because that was absolutely driven initially by a handful of parents -- that has now become a solid core of parents -- as well.

Anyway, I think everyone knows that the specific boundaries for schools can change, but targeting a school specifically because they have been too successful and saying they are going to fundamentally alter the entire nature of the school solely driven by benefiting the children in another IB seems terribly misguided and short-sighted to me.

DCPS didn't cancel the Cluster bus. The "equity" parents within the Cluster cancelled the bus -- saying that the bus benefited all the IB?Hill students, but not the OOB/non-Hill students. That's why you have the problem you have now. Peabody is really hard to get to for OOB families not living on the Hill, so most OOB families there now are just Hill families. Watkins is much easier to access for OOB families, so OOB families go there, but it is harder for families that leave near Peabody to get to without a bus.

That's one of the real issues Maury will face if you cluster with Miner. Most families in Maury right now think remarkably alike. That's the real reason it was so easy to get things moving in "the right direction" at that school -- most people agree on the direction to go. There were lots of "committed parents" at Watkins, but lots of disagreement about what to commit to.

WMATA cancelled it during the Watkins renovation, and the principal didn't advocate to get it back. There were definitely parents who agreed with cancelling the bus, but I blame the principal.

I think there was a WMATA bus route that was canceled, and then subsequently a dedicated chartered bus paid for by the city that was then also canceled a few years ago. Agree the principal seemed to stir the pot there.

Yes. WMATA cancelled the long-standing route during the renovation. The city chartered a bus to Elliott Hine during the renovation. Charles Allen got the city to charter a bus for one year after the renovation between Peabody and Watkins, and then that was that.

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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?

Of course UMC families zoned for Miner will like this proposal. If it doesn't work out, they are no worse off. Even a failed cluster experiment isn't going to be worse from their perspective than current Miner, which 95% of them would never use past K anyway. Even if they never plan to use the school or have no kids at all, this might help their housing values which are currently trending nowhere because of crime concerns, so of course they'll be in favor. But presumably these aren't the families that DCPS is trying to target in the name of equity. I'd be more interested in what MC/LMC/poor residents of the boundary think, because I'm not sure all of them would be gung-ho to trek their kids substantially farther and/or to two different schools into an established school community where they will no longer get free aftercare or maybe even lunch depending on how the demographics shake out and where the school community will massively resent them.

But look, as a parent at LT, I have absolutely no direct skin in this game (if anything, destroying Maury would probably lead to UMC flight from Maury that could benefit LT)... but this is a terrible idea. There is no evidence citywide that a cluster model anywhere works. There is one cluster. It was set up under very different circumstances (in particular, the schools involved were considered the most desirable in Ward 6 at the time) and it has never been a big success... now, more than ever, it seems to be failing. Also, DCPS took an active step to destroy it -- cancelling the free bus, which was the only thing that made it workable for many working parents -- so why would anyone trust them to do right logistically-speaking by this cluster? So, just the premise of setting up another cluster seems insane to me.

If you want to change the boundaries to make the IBs more equitable, then change the boundaries... but I don't think that gets you much, since Maury is to the West and the South of Miner and, in that area, the Western part and the Southern part of the IB are both richer and don't contain the housing projects with concentrated poverty and the resulting issues. It is true that parts of Kingman Park are gentrified, but they are much less gentrified than the area around Lincoln Park (so there aren't deep pockets to pour cash into Miner like there are for Maury, Kingman Park is actually much like the poorest area of the Maury zone, the bit east of Maury towards RFK) and there are huge swaths of VERY concentrated poverty. Ultimately, given the location of the housing projects IB for Miner, there is no way to zone them to Maury without some crazy shenanigans. Neighborhood schools are supposed to serve their neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of Maury and Miner simply are not the same; that said, you could probably change the boundaries to make them a bit more equitable.

But a cluster? That is literally just sacrificing one good, high performing school for a pipe dream. It's insane and it discourages people from making the kind of sweat equity investment that people made at Maury (as they had previously at Brent and as folks have at LT). It should not be that if you bust your butt to get community buy-in for a school, DCPS just comes and takes it away in the name of weird faux equity for people in one other specific IB. It seems like not an accident that someone from Maury didn't end up on the Boundary Review committee (and, in fact, that originally NO ONE from Ward 6 did). The earlier posts about the advantages Maury and LT had relative to Miner (and that Maury had relative to LT) are absolutely correct, but without committed parents willing to devote thousands of hours and dollars each to the school, it would absolutely not have improved. Gentrification is not enough and there are plenty of DCPS IBs and now-failing charter schools that show you that encouraging parents to commit is crucial. Craziness like this proposal completely undermines that incentive. Payne is another Hill school that seems to be quickly going down this path and I hope changes there don't scuttle their momentum, because that was absolutely driven initially by a handful of parents -- that has now become a solid core of parents -- as well.

Anyway, I think everyone knows that the specific boundaries for schools can change, but targeting a school specifically because they have been too successful and saying they are going to fundamentally alter the entire nature of the school solely driven by benefiting the children in another IB seems terribly misguided and short-sighted to me.

DCPS didn't cancel the Cluster bus. The "equity" parents within the Cluster cancelled the bus -- saying that the bus benefited all the IB?Hill students, but not the OOB/non-Hill students. That's why you have the problem you have now. Peabody is really hard to get to for OOB families not living on the Hill, so most OOB families there now are just Hill families. Watkins is much easier to access for OOB families, so OOB families go there, but it is harder for families that leave near Peabody to get to without a bus.

That's one of the real issues Maury will face if you cluster with Miner. Most families in Maury right now think remarkably alike. That's the real reason it was so easy to get things moving in "the right direction" at that school -- most people agree on the direction to go. There were lots of "committed parents" at Watkins, but lots of disagreement about what to commit to.

WMATA cancelled it during the Watkins renovation, and the principal didn't advocate to get it back. There were definitely parents who agreed with cancelling the bus, but I blame the principal.

I think there was a WMATA bus route that was canceled, and then subsequently a dedicated chartered bus paid for by the city that was then also canceled a few years ago. Agree the principal seemed to stir the pot there.

Yes. WMATA cancelled the long-standing route during the renovation. The city chartered a bus to Elliott Hine during the renovation. Charles Allen got the city to charter a bus for one year after the renovation between Peabody and Watkins, and then that was that.

Charles Allen got funding for a bus, right at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a movement by some parents and the equity group to cancel the bus, and the then-principal went along with that. I do remember that there were many parents who did not agree, but there was no real discussion about other options, etc.

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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?

Of course UMC families zoned for Miner will like this proposal. If it doesn't work out, they are no worse off. Even a failed cluster experiment isn't going to be worse from their perspective than current Miner, which 95% of them would never use past K anyway. Even if they never plan to use the school or have no kids at all, this might help their housing values which are currently trending nowhere because of crime concerns, so of course they'll be in favor. But presumably these aren't the families that DCPS is trying to target in the name of equity. I'd be more interested in what MC/LMC/poor residents of the boundary think, because I'm not sure all of them would be gung-ho to trek their kids substantially farther and/or to two different schools into an established school community where they will no longer get free aftercare or maybe even lunch depending on how the demographics shake out and where the school community will massively resent them.

But look, as a parent at LT, I have absolutely no direct skin in this game (if anything, destroying Maury would probably lead to UMC flight from Maury that could benefit LT)... but this is a terrible idea. There is no evidence citywide that a cluster model anywhere works. There is one cluster. It was set up under very different circumstances (in particular, the schools involved were considered the most desirable in Ward 6 at the time) and it has never been a big success... now, more than ever, it seems to be failing. Also, DCPS took an active step to destroy it -- cancelling the free bus, which was the only thing that made it workable for many working parents -- so why would anyone trust them to do right logistically-speaking by this cluster? So, just the premise of setting up another cluster seems insane to me.

If you want to change the boundaries to make the IBs more equitable, then change the boundaries... but I don't think that gets you much, since Maury is to the West and the South of Miner and, in that area, the Western part and the Southern part of the IB are both richer and don't contain the housing projects with concentrated poverty and the resulting issues. It is true that parts of Kingman Park are gentrified, but they are much less gentrified than the area around Lincoln Park (so there aren't deep pockets to pour cash into Miner like there are for Maury, Kingman Park is actually much like the poorest area of the Maury zone, the bit east of Maury towards RFK) and there are huge swaths of VERY concentrated poverty. Ultimately, given the location of the housing projects IB for Miner, there is no way to zone them to Maury without some crazy shenanigans. Neighborhood schools are supposed to serve their neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of Maury and Miner simply are not the same; that said, you could probably change the boundaries to make them a bit more equitable.

But a cluster? That is literally just sacrificing one good, high performing school for a pipe dream. It's insane and it discourages people from making the kind of sweat equity investment that people made at Maury (as they had previously at Brent and as folks have at LT). It should not be that if you bust your butt to get community buy-in for a school, DCPS just comes and takes it away in the name of weird faux equity for people in one other specific IB. It seems like not an accident that someone from Maury didn't end up on the Boundary Review committee (and, in fact, that originally NO ONE from Ward 6 did). The earlier posts about the advantages Maury and LT had relative to Miner (and that Maury had relative to LT) are absolutely correct, but without committed parents willing to devote thousands of hours and dollars each to the school, it would absolutely not have improved. Gentrification is not enough and there are plenty of DCPS IBs and now-failing charter schools that show you that encouraging parents to commit is crucial. Craziness like this proposal completely undermines that incentive. Payne is another Hill school that seems to be quickly going down this path and I hope changes there don't scuttle their momentum, because that was absolutely driven initially by a handful of parents -- that has now become a solid core of parents -- as well.

Anyway, I think everyone knows that the specific boundaries for schools can change, but targeting a school specifically because they have been too successful and saying they are going to fundamentally alter the entire nature of the school solely driven by benefiting the children in another IB seems terribly misguided and short-sighted to me.

DCPS didn't cancel the Cluster bus. The "equity" parents within the Cluster cancelled the bus -- saying that the bus benefited all the IB?Hill students, but not the OOB/non-Hill students. That's why you have the problem you have now. Peabody is really hard to get to for OOB families not living on the Hill, so most OOB families there now are just Hill families. Watkins is much easier to access for OOB families, so OOB families go there, but it is harder for families that leave near Peabody to get to without a bus.

That's one of the real issues Maury will face if you cluster with Miner. Most families in Maury right now think remarkably alike. That's the real reason it was so easy to get things moving in "the right direction" at that school -- most people agree on the direction to go. There were lots of "committed parents" at Watkins, but lots of disagreement about what to commit to.

WMATA cancelled it during the Watkins renovation, and the principal didn't advocate to get it back. There were definitely parents who agreed with cancelling the bus, but I blame the principal.

I think there was a WMATA bus route that was canceled, and then subsequently a dedicated chartered bus paid for by the city that was then also canceled a few years ago. Agree the principal seemed to stir the pot there.

Yes. WMATA cancelled the long-standing route during the renovation. The city chartered a bus to Elliott Hine during the renovation. Charles Allen got the city to charter a bus for one year after the renovation between Peabody and Watkins, and then that was that.

Charles Allen got funding for a bus, right at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a movement by some parents and the equity group to cancel the bus, and the then-principal went along with that. I do remember that there were many parents who did not agree, but there was no real discussion about other options, etc.

Meant to say "Charles Allen got funding for a bus for a year. Then, right at the beginning of the pandemic, ....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:When is Charles Allen going to do something about the surge of crime in Ward 6?

Why don't you ask him? He's willing to explain what he's doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The biggest reason to live within the Maury boundary is Maury, because otherwise, that part of the Hill is really inconvenient. I wouldn't buy a house in that boundary if I send my kids to Miner for part of elementary school.

Yes, as noted in one of the PPs, the Maury IB's relatively reasonable cost (which is driven largely by its relative inaccessibility/relative lack of amenities) was a huge advantage to improving Maury, because even marginally UMC families committed to education could move their specifically for Maury); somewhere like LT was relatively disadvantaged because it's a more expensive area real estate-wise, because it's more accessible/there's more stuff, so LT will never be *the* big draw for prospective IB residents (it's less likely that even an ideal school would cause as much of a price premium in that zone) and it's just not as affordable. There's a good reason that Maury's IB rate is so much higher than even, e.g., Brent's even though that's a long established, quality school. It's in an area too expensive for people to buy in for that reason and too expensive for many to buy into at all; also people living there are more likely to be able to afford private ES.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When is Charles Allen going to do something about the surge of crime in Ward 6?

Why don't you ask him? He's willing to explain what he's doing.

NP. Charles Allen is doing nothing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The biggest reason to live within the Maury boundary is Maury, because otherwise, that part of the Hill is really inconvenient. I wouldn't buy a house in that boundary if I send my kids to Miner for part of elementary school.

Yes, as noted in one of the PPs, the Maury IB's relatively reasonable cost (which is driven largely by its relative inaccessibility/relative lack of amenities) was a huge advantage to improving Maury, because even marginally UMC families committed to education could move their specifically for Maury); somewhere like LT was relatively disadvantaged because it's a more expensive area real estate-wise, because it's more accessible/there's more stuff, so LT will never be *the* big draw for prospective IB residents (it's less likely that even an ideal school would cause as much of a price premium in that zone) and it's just not as affordable. There's a good reason that Maury's IB rate is so much higher than even, e.g., Brent's even though that's a long established, quality school. It's in an area too expensive for people to buy in for that reason and too expensive for many to buy into at all; also people living there are more likely to be able to afford private ES.

Yes Maury is a success story for DC MC families as well as lower income - there is actually quite a bit of affordable housing stock in the zone. DCPS only sees “whiteness” though and will have to stomp it out. Cluster is a forgone conclusion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When is Charles Allen going to do something about the surge of crime in Ward 6?

Why don't you ask him? He's willing to explain what he's doing.

NP. Charles Allen is doing nothing.

Well, Charles Allen does strongly support reducing penalties for carjacking and armed robbery in DC.

Good thing that these aren’t a problem in DC and Ward 6.

Oh, wait…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When is Charles Allen going to do something about the surge of crime in Ward 6?

Why don't you ask him? He's willing to explain what he's doing.

NP. Charles Allen is doing nothing.

Well, Charles Allen does strongly support reducing penalties for carjacking and armed robbery in DC.

Good thing that these aren’t a problem in DC and Ward 6.

Oh, wait…

With Charles Allen's support, parents can one day hope to be carjacked at drop off, or to teach their children a good lesson about "city living" by learning when to hit the ground when there is random gunfire.

[Anonymous]

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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?

Of course UMC families zoned for Miner will like this proposal. If it doesn't work out, they are no worse off. Even a failed cluster experiment isn't going to be worse from their perspective than current Miner, which 95% of them would never use past K anyway. Even if they never plan to use the school or have no kids at all, this might help their housing values which are currently trending nowhere because of crime concerns, so of course they'll be in favor. But presumably these aren't the families that DCPS is trying to target in the name of equity. I'd be more interested in what MC/LMC/poor residents of the boundary think, because I'm not sure all of them would be gung-ho to trek their kids substantially farther and/or to two different schools into an established school community where they will no longer get free aftercare or maybe even lunch depending on how the demographics shake out and where the school community will massively resent them.

But look, as a parent at LT, I have absolutely no direct skin in this game (if anything, destroying Maury would probably lead to UMC flight from Maury that could benefit LT)... but this is a terrible idea. There is no evidence citywide that a cluster model anywhere works. There is one cluster. It was set up under very different circumstances (in particular, the schools involved were considered the most desirable in Ward 6 at the time) and it has never been a big success... now, more than ever, it seems to be failing. Also, DCPS took an active step to destroy it -- cancelling the free bus, which was the only thing that made it workable for many working parents -- so why would anyone trust them to do right logistically-speaking by this cluster? So, just the premise of setting up another cluster seems insane to me.

If you want to change the boundaries to make the IBs more equitable, then change the boundaries... but I don't think that gets you much, since Maury is to the West and the South of Miner and, in that area, the Western part and the Southern part of the IB are both richer and don't contain the housing projects with concentrated poverty and the resulting issues. It is true that parts of Kingman Park are gentrified, but they are much less gentrified than the area around Lincoln Park (so there aren't deep pockets to pour cash into Miner like there are for Maury, Kingman Park is actually much like the poorest area of the Maury zone, the bit east of Maury towards RFK) and there are huge swaths of VERY concentrated poverty. Ultimately, given the location of the housing projects IB for Miner, there is no way to zone them to Maury without some crazy shenanigans. Neighborhood schools are supposed to serve their neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of Maury and Miner simply are not the same; that said, you could probably change the boundaries to make them a bit more equitable.

But a cluster? That is literally just sacrificing one good, high performing school for a pipe dream. It's insane and it discourages people from making the kind of sweat equity investment that people made at Maury (as they had previously at Brent and as folks have at LT). It should not be that if you bust your butt to get community buy-in for a school, DCPS just comes and takes it away in the name of weird faux equity for people in one other specific IB. It seems like not an accident that someone from Maury didn't end up on the Boundary Review committee (and, in fact, that originally NO ONE from Ward 6 did). The earlier posts about the advantages Maury and LT had relative to Miner (and that Maury had relative to LT) are absolutely correct, but without committed parents willing to devote thousands of hours and dollars each to the school, it would absolutely not have improved. Gentrification is not enough and there are plenty of DCPS IBs and now-failing charter schools that show you that encouraging parents to commit is crucial. Craziness like this proposal completely undermines that incentive. Payne is another Hill school that seems to be quickly going down this path and I hope changes there don't scuttle their momentum, because that was absolutely driven initially by a handful of parents -- that has now become a solid core of parents -- as well.

Anyway, I think everyone knows that the specific boundaries for schools can change, but targeting a school specifically because they have been too successful and saying they are going to fundamentally alter the entire nature of the school solely driven by benefiting the children in another IB seems terribly misguided and short-sighted to me.

This is spot on. We are IB for Watkins, so I also have no dog in this fight, other than that I object to stupid ideas, and I've seen how the cluster model doesn't work at all.

Right now, with the ridiculous wave of crime happening, the city should be working to keep MC and UMC families in every way possible. This dumb proposal is not going to help.