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Anonymous
I may be wrong about this but I believe the shooting you're referring to did not take place at the school. Two Wilson students were killed somewhere else I believe by a jealous boyfriend. Not saying that makes it okay but it does change the picture somewhat. |
Anonymous
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16:01 again: I found the cite in the WaPo's archives. Again, not saying this makes it all right but this murder didn't even happen in Northwest:
FREE Article Preview Buy Complete Document Buy Page Print Wilson High Suspect Gave Two Accounts, Officers Say [FINAL Edition] The Washington Post - Washington, D.C. Author: Neely Tucker Date: Jan 5, 2001 Start Page: B.5 Section: METRO Text Word Count: 593 [Carlton Blount], 19, could face the District's harshest penalty, life in prison without parole, if convicted of charges that he killed [Andre Wallace] and [Natasha Marsh], a popular couple at the high school. The shooting, in Marsh's driveway in Northeast Washington, followed a brawl between Wallace and Blount at a Wilson High basketball game. In the first day of pretrial motions yesterday, attorneys Claudia Crichlow and Anthony Houghton said that Blount was extremely upset at the time he made the statements and that he had asked the officers to call his attorneys that day. But when they got only an answering machine, the officers called the U.S. attorney's office, ostensibly looking for someone who might help the frustrated Blount reach his defense counsel. He told the guards that a third man they picked up, Julian Jones, was the only one in [Jermaine Johnson]'s truck with a gun. Blount said that when the trio caught up with Wallace and Marsh, he got out and challenged Wallace, a muscular football star, to fight again. |
Anonymous
| Wilson might be considered turned around when: 1) they no longer need metal detectors and constant police presence on the school grounds, and 2) the weekly crime report from 2D doesn't have a listing for a violent crime/armed offense/drug offense occurring at the school for a year (unlike weekly as it has for the past five years at least). For now, as a resident of the neighborhood, who knows kids who go there, nothing has changed and I wouldn't send me kids there if my life depended on it. Just my two cents. A new principal sounds great, but Wilson's problems run deep--and it is going to take alot more than new administration to fix it. Sad that it is considered one of the safer public high schools in the city. |
Anonymous
Well, that IS a sad event involving a beef among Wilson students & non-Wilson students, but it's not the event I was thinking of. There was a shooting, fatal I believe, that occurred basically at the Metro bus stop behind the school on 40th st NW, close to Whole Foods. It was a drive by. I can't find the article either. It was around 2000. |
Anonymous
|
here,
D.C. Teenager Is Stabbed to Death in Northwest; Youth Was Confronted by Group on Street Near Wilson High School, Police Say Washington Post January 27, 1998 A teenager was fatally stabbed yesterday afternoon in a confrontation near Woodrow Wilson High School in upper Northwest Washington, D.C. police said. The victim, who officials said was 16 or 17 years old, was standing with a group of friends behind a parking garage and grocery store in the 4500 block of 40th Street NW about 4 p.m ... |
Anonymous
I watch the crime logs closely, and I have no idea what you're talking about here. Weekly violent and/or drug offenses on school property? Can you cut and paste some from the report, perhaps in the past couple of months, just to give us some context? As to the stabbing abovementioned, we're talking nearly 11 years ago, people. A single, tragic, violent incident NOT ON SCHOOL PREMISES that happened more than a decade ago. Look, there are plenty of things to be upset about in DCPS in general and Wilson in particular. I want it to be a better school and hope that it is by the time my kids get there. But the selective history being dredged up here is misleading at best. I went to the top public HS in my state, but while I was there the amount of drug use was staggering, and a year or two after I graduated, a student stabbed another with a pencil, injuring him seriously. At the HS where my dad taught, another top school, a kid was thrown from the roof of a car in the school parking lot, the result of a regular binge-drinking session common throughout his class. Awful stuff happens to kids at all schools. Kids do stupid, dangerous things at all schools. I just wish someone with kids at the school would pipe in here with some detailed information about what's really going on at Wilson. |
Anonymous
| I'll point out, too, that DC was a very different place in 1998 than it is today. |
Anonymous
Okay, sorry, I didn't know that there was another event. Thanks for clearing that up. |
Anonymous
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I watch the crime logs closely, and I have no idea what you're talking about here. Weekly violent and/or drug offenses on school property? Can you cut and paste some from the report, perhaps in the past couple of months, just to give us some context? 1) If you read the crime reports in the papers, any crime listed at 3900 Chesapeake street NW is Wilson High--depending on the paper (Post or NW Current) it may even reference "school" in parenthesis. 2) I am a former DC prosecutor and saw the detailed police reports, which included all the cases, those papered and "no papered" (meaning no US Atty charges--either charged as a juvenile or DC AG charges). FYI many crimes don't make the paper "crime lists", or they don't do so in a timely manner--will be reported several weeks later. I have no idea why this is the case, but it does.... The range of charges I have seen include assault, gun possession, drug possession, drug distribution, theft. I guess some might consider it good news that there are no homicides, assaults with intent to kill or armed robberies. It would be interesting to compare the rate of crime occurring at Wilson with a high school in close in Montgomery County or Arlington, to get a sense of whether the rate of crime at Wilson is just kids being kids or a DC thing. I know where I would put my money..... |
Anonymous
With the exception of gun possession, the offenses listed above certainly do happen at many suburban HSs, to some degree or another. Whether or not perpetrators are prosecuted is a different story, and one might surmise that police presence at Wilson makes arrests/charges far more likely than at other schools, where things are handled as discipline matters rather than criminal matters. But let's accept that disruptions such as fights and drugs are more common at Wilson than at BCC or Yorktown (although I'd guess that drugs are at least as common at those schools as they are at Wilson). That doesn't mean that students there can't/don't receive high quality education; the list of college acceptances out of Wilson suggests that a significant portion of the school population is high-achieving. So while I understand that we all worry about our children's safety in school, can we please acknowledge that this isn't the only factor that determines a school's quality? Can anyone enlighten us about the academic program at Wilson? The quality of teachers, particularly in honors and AP courses? The breadth of extracurricular activities? |
Anonymous
| This discussion has been amusing to me, a former Wilson student. I'm going to make some assumptions here: most of the people on these boards who are interested in knowing the quality/environment of Wilson are likely white and will likely push/encourage their children to take as many AP classes as possible. That means your children will likely have very little contact with the more disruptive populations of students at Wilson. It was true in my day (the mid-90s) and a pp mentioned that it is still true - the social worlds of the school are largely segregated by race. To put it bluntly and in un-PC terms, most of the students at Wilson that are causing the problems are not white. (You can go ahead and flame me - I'm black, I went there, I've known kids that have gone there after me, and I know that to be the truth.) That means your white AP students just aren't going to be in a lot of classes with the kids that are committing crimes - generally, those kids are going to stay away from the AP classes because it's just not cool to challenge yourself academically. So all of the concern about the environment at Wilson, the security at Wilson, the general behavior of the student body at Wilson in reality is not going to have as big an impact on your white AP student as you might think. While the overall picture of the school might at times be unflattering, if you're considering sending your white AP student there, that's the population whose experience you should focus on - not some crimes that were committed years ago or the antics of kids riding the Metro. If people with more recent knowledge of the school know that things have changed in this regard, please let us know. |
Anonymous
| A voice of sanity. Thanks for sharing, pp! |
Anonymous
| Yes, truly, thank you, Wilson alum. I'm one of the posters debating perceptions about the school's safety, and I'm thrilled to finally hear from someone who actually has experience at the school. Your perspective sounds similar to that of a friend of mine who graduated from Wilson in the early 90s. |