Proposal is up!

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06/14/2014 09:22

Subject: Proposal is up!

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Anonymous

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Anonymous wrote:The changing of Eastern feeder pattern is not highly controversial. It just makes more sense in some form by making Jefferson exclusively Eastern and taking the neighborhood of Kelly Miller students out of the mix. Now the questions still remains, how can DCPS ignore one of the largest middle schools of them all and that is Friendship MS. We constantly say that we are all one school system but the majority of Eastern eligible feeder students attend the second largest middle school in comparison to Deal. Friendship MS is located in Ward 6 neighborhood close to Eastern but many of those kids are shuffled off to Friendship HS in Ward 7. I will say it on this post too, where do the students from Browne Educational go to school when all is seemingly neighborhood generated...Spingarn is no longer available.

History note: Eastern used to have the following feeder schools:
Eliot
Browne
Sousa
Jefferson
Hine
Evans
Kelly Miller
Roper (Ron Brown)
Fletcher-Johnson
Stuart-Hobson
Woodson Jr

So the inventory of feeder schools have dwindled down from 11 to 3 but Eastern is still projected to be the second largest high-school next year.

Oh who bloody cares. I'll be surprised if a single kid from my child's DCPS Hill early childhood program (which is almost entirely high SES for PreK3, PreK4 and K, and white) ended up at Eastern (which is almost entirely low SES and AA). You'd need a generation to turn things around at this rate, not a mere decade.

It didn't take a generation for that to happen at Deal. Why not join up with your neighbors and make it happen sooner?

I still have trouble understanding exactly what the Hill families are looking for.

Imagine that Janney, Murch and the other Deal feeders each fed to a separate, underenrolled middle school along with elementary schools that were still struggling to graduate a majority of students who are on grade level academically.

Deal would not happen under those circumstances.

That is the way it is purposefully set up by DCPS on Capitol Hill, but in an even smaller geographic area than the Deal feeder system.

It is insanity not to concentrate these elementary schools to feed into a comprehensive Capitol Hill Middle School with enough per pupil funding to serve all ends of the academic spectrum. Then into Eastern that is poised and ready with an IB Diplomae program already as well as some great vocational programs.

Why can't someone with a brain see the potential of all these schools feeding to one middle school rather than three that then end up serving all out of zone students?

I am a ward 3 parent and I have to agree that continuing the unsuccessful middle schools feeder patterns on CH is the most boneheaded plan ever. I have never understood what the politics are that prohibit affirmatively bringing successful children together to create another Deal-like middle school. Who objects to this? Who thinks the current plan is working?

As a longtime Hill resident, I don't see hope (not even a glimmer) of the failed MS feeder patterns DCPS has pushed on CH since 2009 changing, even for the big in-boundary early childhood crowd. Simply put, our toddlers are not on track to atttend Eastern. To make at least one neighborhood middle school work for the Hill, DCPS would have to roll back Rhee's 2009 policy of allowing OOB kids from ES feeders to have the same right to attend as in-boundary kids, and those with neighborhood proximity. It's a city-wide policy that isn't even on the table in the current boundary review. Nobody is talking about changing this bad policy, including Catania.

Without the Maury, Brent and Watkins high SES families heading to the same Deal-like middle school, or a high wattage test-in/magnet program that feeds into another at Eastern, there's no light at the end of the tunnel. Many newcomers don't have their heads around how dead-ended these feeds are. They speak euphemstically of "things changing by the time our kids reach middle and high school" without dealing with the fact that a huge low SES population in the ES feeders without test-in options means that their fate is already sealed as upper middle income families. They will need luck in charter lotteries, a willingness to send their children to struggling neighborhood middle schools, or the cash for independents to stay on the Hill.