Can anyone explain DCI's sibling preference?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:is it going to be harder to get into DCI as a lottery, as time goes on ?
if the feeders keep growing ...

Of course. The other thing that makes DCI attractive is your kid gets a more traditional middle school experience - large enough school to accommodate different strokes, great facilities, lots of sports and extracurriculars, etc..

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well Stokes wants to start their own middle school. If that happens, I suspect they will pull out of DCI to get the number of students needed for funding.

If that happens, more Spanish seats for other Spanish feeders and French seats.

Stokes has said many times that they are not giving up their feeder rights. The new middle school will be EOTR and is primarily for the East End students for whom DCI isn’t a realistic option. It can also be an option for Houston and Tyler students as well as any other bilingual in that part of DC. Some Brookland kids may opt for Stokes MS, but not many.

So it's going to be a teeny tiny middle school, basically, with no high school path? Good luck.

Dci needs buses.

A lot of the kids use the DC bus system or metro. Is there a specific route you're trying to figure out?

[Anonymous]

is it definite that DCI will accept everyone from its feeders?

[Anonymous]

No, there is no guaranteed admission from a feeder school which has replicated to a second campus. Those feeders only had so many seats allotted and the allocation did not increase just because the feeder enlarged itself. Students from a feeder with too few seats will enter an intra-school lottery and those who are not selected for the DCI feed will be waitlisted. Note that students from these schools do not get a sibling preference stacked on top of their feeder preference. On the upside, all 5th graders stand an equal chance of the DCI feed. The downside is that parents risk having a younger sibling not get into DCI. There is only a sibling preference applicable if the feeder preference is inapplicable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No, there is no guaranteed admission from a feeder school which has replicated to a second campus. Those feeders only had so many seats allotted and the allocation did not increase just because the feeder enlarged itself. Students from a feeder with too few seats will enter an intra-school lottery and those who are not selected for the DCI feed will be waitlisted. Note that students from these schools do not get a sibling preference stacked on top of their feeder preference. On the upside, all 5th graders stand an equal chance of the DCI feed. The downside is that parents risk having a younger sibling not get into DCI. There is only a sibling preference applicable if the feeder preference is inapplicable.

I think the way sibling preference works in the elementary lottery is nonsense, but even I can recognize what a disaster it would be to strike out a younger sibling once one child is already in middle/high school. The younger kid would be left with no good options and it would be terribly disruptive to move the older one.

[Anonymous]

When students (and/or their younger siblings) don’t have a guaranteed feed to DCI they could be more likely to peel off for Latin and BASIS (which DO offer sibling preference) at 5th grade. This is neither good for the feeders (because it encourages backfilling with students who may or may not have any experience in the language, in the absence of any proficiency test for entry at elementary charter schools) nor for DCI (because students with potentially less foreign language experience come in from the feeders and siblings are less likely to be able to reinforce the language at home if they are not subsequently admitted). To date, DCI does not have plans to duplicate or expand its capacity. That may change, but it seems shortsighted for the feeders to have expanded without also being able to expand the seats they provide to DCI.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:When students (and/or their younger siblings) don’t have a guaranteed feed to DCI they could be more likely to peel off for Latin and BASIS (which DO offer sibling preference) at 5th grade. This is neither good for the feeders (because it encourages backfilling with students who may or may not have any experience in the language, in the absence of any proficiency test for entry at elementary charter schools) nor for DCI (because students with potentially less foreign language experience come in from the feeders and siblings are less likely to be able to reinforce the language at home if they are not subsequently admitted). To date, DCI does not have plans to duplicate or expand its capacity. That may change, but it seems shortsighted for the feeders to have expanded without also being able to expand the seats they provide to DCI.

Students already peel off for Latin and Basis, nothing new. If some more do, it’s not a problem. The Spanish track will always be filled with feeder kids once the hit when the feeder expansion starts. Same with French since Stokes expanded.

DCI has many levels for languages so non-feeder kids with no language background just gets placed at the beginner level. It’s not like they put kids of different abilities together.

DCI doesn’t have plans to expand yet but it doesn’t mean they won’t in the future as demand increases. They already have the seat approval.