SWS moving to Prospect LC building?
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Anonymous
| I guess I don't understand why existing parents wouldn't be interested to make this a neighborhood school by giving proximity. Since it used to be pretty much an IB-only program, everybody should be from the Hill area. If I were a parent, I think, I would want my kids to play with the neighborhood kids or me to get to know some more parents in the area. So what am I missing? |
Anonymous
A lot of parents agree with you. DCPS ultimately made the call. It's not IB but skews heavily towards Hill families. The school connection is nice for building community, but you cross paths with other neighborhood families in a lot of different settings. It's not the be all end all. |
Anonymous
I don't think you understand the process. I am an SWS parent and would much prefer a neighborhood school to a city-wide lottery. But DCPS is calling these shots, not the current parents who can either agree to the terms or not get a school. |
Anonymous
| in addition, I get the feeling that the SWS staff prefers a city-wide lottery. |
Anonymous
The SWS staff works for DCPS and may be less into rocking the boat or showing up or questioning the DCPS leadership than the parents. |
Anonymous
SWS will continue to attract mainly affluent Hill families, city-wide draw or no. Much of the OOB population at LT and Watkins is comprised of lower-middle-class AA families with roots in these school communities. They come from poorish swathes of Ward 6, or PG Country, with parents who grew up on the Hill using the addresses of elderly relatives who still live there to fudge IB registration. The address cheating took off after Tommy Wells introduced near universal free PreS 3 and Prek 4 (means tested in MD and not offered to all) EotP. These extended families have never been much interested in SWS and are really unlikely to flock there in the future. LT in particular supports a culture of address cheating and provides a comfort zone for a large low-SES population (almost all AA teachers, large special needs program, free lunch for all) while SWS has never done so. Only die hard Cluster parents (very liberal, mix of white and AA) tend to prefer Watkins over SWS. This means that many, possibly most, new Peabody families will now try to lottery into SWS, hoping to stay until 5th. Not great news for the LT IB crowd. From what I've seen observed living in the LT District for nearly a decade, almost every IB LT family finds an appealing public school option after playing the lotteries for one to three years. For a very few, the choice is to stay at LT, for most, it's a language immersion school like Yu Ying or Stokes, for others, a well-regarded charter like Two Rivers or Inpsired Teaching, or an OOB Hill option like Maury. |
Anonymous
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I tend to agree that even with a city-wide lottery, SWS will remain a Hill-centric school.
For sure local families will enter the lottery and rank it high in greater numbers than far away families. It is hard to imagine that many people will want to bring their 3 or 4 year old on a lengthy daily commute across the city no matter how great the program. ( older kids, maybe more likely ). |
Anonymous
PP here -- thanks for interesting analysis. I suspect you're right about the demographics, but given the mad scramble for charter slots and the distances some families travel, I don't get a clear read of latent off-Hill interest in SWS. |
Anonymous
| It will remain Hill-centric for a while due to sibling preference, certainly. But I live in Ward 5 and work on the Hill, and will certainly be trying for a spot this year. Never underestimate parents' willingness to travel for a decent school! |
Anonymous
Watkins and SWS only overlap a single grade, and it's year one for SWS in a temporary space to boot, so I don't know if that comparison is apples to apples. Perhaps it translates to a preference for Peabody as it retains Watkins and Stuart Hobson feeders |
Anonymous
| It would be pretty interesting if they end up opposite of Watkins -- racially mixed to fairly white older classrooms and more low-SES younger classrooms because of the citywide lottery. Will it feed to SH or EH MS? If SH, Brent parents are going to boil over. |
Anonymous
The MS feeder situation is the wild card - the Brent and Maury parents haven't stopped pressuring DCPS and Wells to change their feed from Eliot-Hine to Stuart Hobson and nobody knows where the reinvented SWS will feed. If the middle-class Hill graduates of all the Hill elementary schools could feed into Stuart Hobson, a concept with broad-based communtiy support, the school would almost certainly improve dramatically, and quickly. As things stand, with half the SH students failing to test proficient on the DC-CAS, droves of weak Ludlow-Taylor and J.O. Wilson students set to feed in for the first time, and no honors classes beyong 8th grade algebra, few IB Watkins parents are sold on their neighborhood MS. Parents of IB Watkins 4th graders lottery into charter middle schools (BASIS, Washington Latin, 2 Rivers) like crazy, move to the burbs or head to privates. Even if SWS also feeds into SH, many IB Peabody/Watkins parents will pick SWS if they can for more upper elementary grades challenge than Watkins offers, a more upper-middle-class friendly social environment and a smaller, saner school. The % of white kids at Wakins has dipped several school years in a row. With Brent racing ahead to offer more challenge for advanced learners (e.g. math pullout groups, none at Wakins), SWS will have its work cut out for it to keep up. I see a long SWS waiting list emerging fast, loaded not only with the usual LT, Miner and Payne why-did-we-buy-a-house-on-the-east-Hill K refugees, but IB Peabody/Watkins folk. |
Anonymous
It won't work this way, not when diversity hinges on access in downtown neighborhoods where socioeconomic mixing is tapering off. The $60,000 question is will families be repsonsible for getting kids to a boundary-less SWS, as at charters, or will they be bused in, like special needs kids? It's one thing to give a SWW or Banneker teenager a $30/month Metro pass, another altogether for an ES child to reach a distant school. I can't see DCPS paying for busing kids without special needs. I predict that SWS will remain a strongly high-SES school in an increasingly affluent neighborhood. No shortage of evidence that low-SES families struggle to get their kids to ES charters outside neighborhoods where they have extended family ties. E.g. there are very few low-SES Yu Ying families that don't hail from Brookland/Petworth. A city-wide lottery is really only good as low-SES access. Also, low-SES families don't mob the same schools or programs that are popular with the high-SES crowd, even if they can - look at the racial make-up of Tyler SI (mostly white a block from the almost entirely black Potomac Gardens housing project). If low-SES parents see a lot of white faces as at SWS--administrators, teachers, parents, kids--they conclude that their children won't fit in easily (because they won't). |
Anonymous
| How does Logan Montessori work this? Don't they have some funky lottery system based on zip code? Do they draw a majority of families from close-by or far away? |
Anonymous
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A couple other local demographic trends worth considering vis a vis demand for SWS. Two Rivers has started leaning low-SES, reducing incentives for high-SES families to stay. High-SES Two Rivers families are leaving slightly younger, and in greater numbers, than in years past. You're getting more advanced kids there without the challenge they need. Meanwhile, the J.O. Wilson District is attracting more high-SES families of babies and toddlers all the time, with only a handful staying IB past PreS 3. J.O. Wilson is, thus, becoming the LT of the H St. Corridor, with little hope of a critical mass of high-SES parents emerging to turn it around. With Maury now full up before K, many of these north Hill yuppies are sure to try for a SWS reaching to 5th.
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