Protest at Mundo on P street
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Anonymous
This data is from 21-22. When a school starts to fall, it can fall fast. The fact is they have open seats and so many open seats they’re clearing waitlists in May and reducing the number of classes in grades. That’s BAD for their finances and there’s no way around it. The budget spiral from open seats should be alarming to everyone. |
Anonymous
That is school year 21-22 data, so I think it shows retention from spring 2021 into fall 2021. Nobody is saying retention has always been bad. People are saying it is bad *now*, as evidenced by the number of lottery seats this year and last year. |
Anonymous
It seems like they need to accept the diminishment of their upper grades programs and offer more preschool classrooms. |
Anonymous
That would be a stop gap measure at best. Both campuses are on the short waitlist page for kindergarten this year. When parents realize they don’t have an elementary pathway, which it seems like they’re starting to realize now, they’ll just stop lotterying for the school at all. Good for the neighborhood IBs, bad for MV. If attrition gets so bad that they can’t fill their DCI seats, you’ll still have bilingual families lotterying in for fifth to get DCI, but that makes for a terribly unstable school community and miserable experience for the fifth grade staff. |
Anonymous
What if they stopped backfilling completely, relying on attrition so that the chances of getting into DCI become pretty good? |
Anonymous
I think that has to be part of their charter documents with the charter board. Wasn’t that an issue with LAMB when they joined the common lottery a few years ago? Besides, if they stopped backfilling, they’d doom themselves budget-wise. They’re still filling a lot of elementary seats through the lottery (though not enough). They need those bodies for funding and you can’t run an elementary school without elementary students. |
Anonymous
| Mundo's quality has always fallen off after first grade. We saw the writing on the wall and left. The school is not going to improve for the upper grades with Kristen in charge. If you care enough about your kid's education to protest and find tutors, you need to take that energy and find another school. Most people have a better option - either their in bound school (most DCPS schools are better than Mundo) or most DCUM parents could afford to leave DC. |
Anonymous
| The real question is why protest (starting last week) with five school days left? |
Anonymous
Their IB is not a better option. People that leave a charter school go to another charter or private, no one goes back to their IB. |
Anonymous
j You have to make up your mind, was it always bad or is it bad now? Data don’t lie, most parents are happy with the school. Retention is higher than my IB, which is around 70% This year they still have 1000+ students. There is no budget issues. For any prospective parents, go and talk with parents with direct experience at the school, don’t believe everything that you read here. |
Anonymous
Well, they could have the same number of students by we expanding their preschool. PIt seems like the demand is there for more preschool seats. So that would make up the budget gap. |
Anonymous
MV always had these issues, but it's only now that people are opening their eyes and calling it out, so the impact is getting worse now. Except you, who are still in denial. 1) You have no idea what their retention was more recently or will be going into next year. 2) Please explain why they offered so many lottery seats. If retention is good, then they're expanding significantly by accepting so many new kids at P St, right? 3) Having however many students does not mean there isn't a budget issue. Budget issues come from not completely filling classrooms, because they still have to pay the teacher's salary even if the room isn't full. So if they don't have a good allocation of kids across the grades, it's trouble. You don't know right now how that will shake out this fall. |
Anonymous
"Data don't lie"? Come on. Here's some data for you: MV has more parents protesting outside than any other school I know of. Here's some more data: P St offered 60 Kindergarten seats, plus 17 Equitable Access Kindergarten seats, and neither category even filled up. They used to have a waitlist of over 100 kids for K-- even after opening Calle Ocho. What happened? Please explain this data to us, since data doesn't lie. |
Anonymous
| The real issue with the backfilling as adding so many kids without the Spanish background. It sets the whole system up for failure. The model was based on adding a few in Kindergarten but none later. |
Anonymous
At least one parent rep has repeatedly raised hard questions in the public part of the board meetings. I don't know what happens in the closed door sessions. What would it take to make an executive change? Would the board need a majority vote of no confidence? They need to have a board meeting without any MV paid staff present to dig into the issue. |