Doing math on the new boundaries

[Anonymous]

From my understanding the issue is not the current numbers, it is the out years they are worried about. For example, as I under stand it Janey had 3 5th grades but currently 5 2nd grades?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Janney will be close to 725 this coming year. Maybe more depending on how many houses sell in AU.

Right now they are sending close to 100 to Deal. When this year's first grade class (rising second graders) hit deal it will be 125.

That is crazy. It's really completely unacceptable! How can anyone be okay with this??

My impression is that the chancellor has a preference for larger schools, believing they can provide more diverse curricular & extracurricular options as well as offer economies of scale.

I personally like the feel of a smaller school -- I think there's something to Dunbar's number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number) -- but that has not been the trend I've seen in DCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Janney will be close to 725 this coming year. Maybe more depending on how many houses sell in AU.

Right now they are sending close to 100 to Deal. When this year's first grade class (rising second graders) hit deal it will be 125.

That is crazy. It's really completely unacceptable! How can anyone be okay with this??

My impression is that the chancellor has a preference for larger schools, believing they can provide more diverse curricular & extracurricular options as well as offer economies of scale.

I personally like the feel of a smaller school -- I think there's something to Dunbar's number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number) -- but that has not been the trend I've seen in DCPS.

Preference for larger schools is one thing, esp. at the HS and MS levels. Preference for 4 year-olds going to a school the size of a small town is something else altogether.

[Anonymous]

Every friend I have in Fairfax and Montgomery and Loudon- covering about 5 elementary schools are at least 800. This is the norm in most suburban districts. This is the reason a handful of my friends have used local Catholic schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm starting to do some math on the new boundaries and the various feeder arrangements. I'm not sure though if I'm thinking about this the right way though. I started with Deal first, because it's such a source of controversy. Here's what I see ...

Deal capacity: 1200 (grades 6, 7, 8)
Capacity of Deal's proposed new feeders: Bancroft (563), Hearst (325), Janney (570), Lafayette (516), Murch (488), Shepherd (342) (all grades K-5?)

Assumptions:
(1) Each of the feeders will be filled to capacity. Most are filled already, and I'm guessing that with the boundary changes, many more OOB students will apply to fill up remaining capacity, in hopes of getting access to Deal.
(2) The spread of students is roughly even across the grades. In other words, if Murch has 488 students across six grades, that's about 81 students per grade.

Are those valid assumptions? Help me out here.

If my assumptions are right, then the collective feeders will be putting 1400 students into Deal each year. That's 200 more than capacity. That's not including the 20+% growth projected for the Deal boundary area. That's not including the extra 10% OOB set aside seats at Deal that the proposal calls for (120 seats). I get that some number of students may switch to private school after elementary, but will it really be that many?

If my back-of-envelope math is correct, it seems the proposal will quickly put Deal well over capacity. Since I'd expect the DME's proposal to actually work mathematically, I'm think I must be missing something. What is it? Where will all those elementary students go besides Deal?

Any help appreciated.

In order to do this properly/seriously you would need all the data, the office of planning projections. The raw census data is publicly available but difficult to use. You need to splice census tracts and sometimes even block by block because tracts don't line up nicely with school boundaries in many cases. Then you need to understand how to use the live births and other data to project school aged demographics, accounting for neighborhood turnover, then you need to account for private and charter, and so on. It's a big task and it is the full time job of multiple statisticians and planners, from census to DC gov, and then DME adds further analysis. And although raw data is often public the full analysis behind the projections would need to be FOIA'ed.

Without this detailed data and the ability to analyze it you won't get very far. For example in your above analysis you don't account for the population decline predicted at Lafayette, the extent to which the current (say) PK class is anomalous or normal at any school, rates of attrition, and so on. You also need to understand how OOB and school capacity work together. You say that you expect increased OOB but this doesn't make sense given that all above schools have waiting lists. Then you need to get into building plans for all schools including Deal and Wilson, and understand where the capacity constraint is physical versus programmatic/budget. These are just a few examples that I only know about from reading DME materials and my own question-asking. There will be a lot of other hidden pitfalls to the assumptions you want to make.

This is not to belittle OP's efforts, and I get that some parent groups are concerned about overcrowding (Janney for example). But I haven't seen any reason to question the competence or honesty of the people behind these projections. Absent any suspicions, and in light of how complex it is to analyze this even for professionals with access to all the data and tools, I wouldn't spend a ton of time on armchair analyses that use rough numbers and make a lot of simplifying assumptions. Your time is probably better spent FOIA'ing DME and office of planning, or maybe just calling them and trying to get some of your concerns answered on the phone.

Otherwise I would be inclined to trust the DME projections and the civil servants who developed them. This doesn't mean that the DME proposal makes everyone happy or worry-free, but I don't see a reason to doubt that it would avoid overcrowding at Deal/Wilson for the next 10+ years, one of its stated goals. That's not controversial - the controversial part for some is how they propose to do it.

[Anonymous]

This is OP. Thanks for your helpful comments. I spoke with someone from DME's office, and that person agreed my rough calculation of overcapacity is likely correct. The person pointed out that the projected continued overcapacity is exactly why DME proposed predetermined "triggers" for future readjustment of boundaries in event of continued overcrowding.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is OP. Thanks for your helpful comments. I spoke with someone from DME's office, and that person agreed my rough calculation of overcapacity is likely correct. The person pointed out that the projected continued overcapacity is exactly why DME proposed predetermined "triggers" for future readjustment of boundaries in event of continued overcrowding.

Thanks for sharing this, OP. So it sounds like the DME is aware of the issues you are raising but made the current proposal nevertheless. They did not propose further shrinking Deal boundaries or any of your other suggestions in your first post. So do you now support the DME proposal as currently drafted, with the triggers included?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is OP. Thanks for your helpful comments. I spoke with someone from DME's office, and that person agreed my rough calculation of overcapacity is likely correct. The person pointed out that the projected continued overcapacity is exactly why DME proposed predetermined "triggers" for future readjustment of boundaries in event of continued overcrowding.

Thanks for sharing this, OP. So it sounds like the DME is aware of the issues you are raising but made the current proposal nevertheless. They did not propose further shrinking Deal boundaries or any of your other suggestions in your first post. So do you now support the DME proposal as currently drafted, with the triggers included?

Well, I'm not sure what suggestions you're talking about. I'm just looking at how the math works. What suggestions do you think I'm making?