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DC Public and Public Charter Schools
Applications down 21% on myschooldc
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Anonymous
This is a great point. I know more than a few people who are moving from charter to their IB school and didn't have to lottery to do that. |
Anonymous
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People are leaving DC, probably in part because schools have been closed for so long.
Redfin: "New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Chicago top the list of places Redfin.com users were looking to leave in October and November, as they did in the second and third quarters of this year. There has been a 95% uptick in the net outflow of people looking to leave Washington, D.C. since October and November of last year." |
Anonymous
Look, I am a new PP but the discussion here seems to be about whether DC's PK is family friendly and is able to attract families to move to or stay in the city. If the seats are available but a 45 minute commute away then families are just less likely to use them and they are not going to have the effect of drawing families to the city. Maybe DC doesn't care and that is fine but in a discussion about whether or not the PK program is beneficial to families, you have to take into account how easy it is to access. If DC tried to attract businesses by offering generous tax credits but then made them hard to get due to red tape, that would presumably affect how many business might move to or open in DC right? Same thing here- the manner that DC provides PK will absolutely have and affect on families staying |
Anonymous
No, this is where the "you may not agree with the approach" applies. Kids are allowed to attend school, just not in-person. Everyone is being paid, the District hasn't saved a dime and hasn't benefited financially. If anything they've spent even more to retrofit schools to allow the limited in-person they are doing. So the commitment remains the same, you just don't like their approach. You've come to a different risk assessment decision about the dangers of full in-person learning than the decision makers at DCPS. That has nothing to do with commitment, just your approach to managing and assessing pandemic risks. |
Anonymous
Are you for real? Are there people out there who are really this poorly informed? By this point, every physician in America has said ten times that kids should have been in school a long time ago because schools were wildly exaggerating the risks of reopening, even before vaccines were available. DC has become an extreme outlier, compared to the rest of the country, in its willingness to keep kids out of school. That has nothing to do with coronavirus. It's because of politics. Unlike most places around the country, the teachers union here is powerful and the mayor isn't willing to fight with them to get kids back in school because she sees teachers are her political allies. Lastly, every education study that has ever been conducted on the topic finds kids, particularly young children, do extravagantly worse with distance learning than with being in person. Studies show when children miss this much school, they typically never catch up with children their age who've been in school, and that will have profound consequences for these children's lives. |
Anonymous
WTF does that even mean? Redfin searches? Wow, what a hard-hitting metric. Wake me up when count day passes. |
Anonymous
Let's not pretend they haven't been given any resources. What has the district spent on COVID-related school expenses that has not or will not be covered through federal COVID funding for schools ( https://covid-relief-data.ed.gov/ ) or through state and local aid. |
Anonymous
DC's PK is family friendly and attracts families to move or stay in the city. But it's also designed, like Head Start, to give kids a leg up and try to have everyone start at close to the same place in K. It's not a rent incentive to get people in the door; it doesn't just have one purpose. And so it isn't targeted completely at the richest people in the District. The only people who don't have abundant neighborhood PK3 & 4 options are in the most expensive and sought-after neighborhoods in upper NW. Strangely enough they aren't choosing to buy EOTR (or EOTP, for that matter) because they might have to drive or pay for prek. And there are still bidding wars essentially every time a house in that area goes on the market, so I don't think your concerns about losing families because of pre-k are warranted. |
Anonymous
Well that took an interesting nasty turn. One solution would be to expand school capacity, but that's really beside the point. I'm not arguing what they should or should not do. I'm simply arguing that, for many people, "universal" preK ain't all that it is cracked up to be because it is hard to use and access. And because you may not be able to access it in a functional way, you shouldn't value that "benefit" to DC as highly as you would if preK were more accessible in many neighborhood schools. In fact, that the existing system requires you to "go where the seats [are, even if extremely inconvenient] or shut up," and simply not use preK proves my point. |
Anonymous
Well said. |
Anonymous
Not only am I for real, I turned down offers for in-person PK3 in terms 3 and 4 despite how awful distance learning is for 3 year olds. I am also very likely more qualified than you to assess the actual risks of in-person schooling, but I don't care to debate the risks because you are missing the point. It is offensive to suggest that because you believe the risks are negligible that you are more committed to your child's education than I or anyone else is to theirs. Full stop. So take a deep breath, realize that no matter how certain you might be that in-person school is safe, other people who are equally informed, maybe even more informed, might have a different opinion, and that doesn't make them anti-education. |
Anonymous
At this point, if you're still for keeping schools closed, you're not only anti-education, you're anti-science, anti-children and also just kind of a loon (or maybe you just have an anxiety disorder?). Whatever the case, you're thumbing your nose at the entire medical profession in the United States. Most children in this country currently attend school all day, every day. There are places in this country where children have never missed a single day of school because of coronavirus. If it was actually even slightly dangerous for schools to be open, the evidence would have been in a long, long time ago. It's not because it isn't. https://info.burbio.com/school-tracker-update-apr-26/ |
Anonymous
Nope. OK to choose DL for your kids, not OK to agitate to keep schools closed given the overall harm to kids. I do not accept that that’s a legit position any longer. |
Anonymous
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This was back in February: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/upshot/schools-reopening-coronavirus-experts.html
Many of the common preconditions to opening schools — including vaccines for teachers or students, and low rates of infection in the community — are not necessary to safely teach children in person, a consensus of pediatric infectious disease experts said in a new survey. Instead, the 175 experts — mostly pediatricians focused on public health — largely agreed that it was safe enough for schools to be open to elementary students for full-time and in-person instruction now. Some said that was true even in communities where Covid-19 infections were widespread, as long as basic safety measures were taken. Most important, they said, were universal masking, physical distancing, adequate ventilation and avoidance of large group activities. |
Anonymous
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I did not feel the percentage of enrollment go down in my lottery choices I had high waitlist number in every charter I applied to for 3rd grade above 25. I applied for the ones near Brookland area.
The public schools that are most popular we had a high number as well above 12 for this grade. So I guess I just have to wait until the renrollment process to see if this changes. |