21,000 new students in DCPS/charters by 2026?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
That's why all the bilingual schools should feed there--leaving Oyster and Bancroft out hurts MacFarland and makes Deal and Wilson more overcrowded. I'd be glad to see Jefferson have a test-in component, with core classes advanced and non-core stuff like PE and afterschool clubs mixed. Or have it be all test-in and send the current feeder students to Stuart-Hobson and Eliot-Hine. It would be a good location since it's so close to L'Enfant Plaza and many bus lines, so kids from all over DC would have an easy commute. Plus it would be funny to see the gyrations of Brent and Van Ness parents who say there's no way their babies could make it all the way to Jefferson each day (and simultaneously how advanced their kids are and there's no way JA could meet their needs). |
Anonymous
My guess is that by 2024, the OOB problem will be close to having worked itself out. The lower grades have admitted very few OOB children in many years. The upper grades are full to bursting. As long as that trend holds, which no one has any reason to doubt, all the feeders will be full of neighborhood children. The problem is that because those schools are the ones that parents trust, DC parents do their damnedest to buy within those districts, leading to the large class sizes of IB children that already exist. I think that the answer is that there are too many schools that feed into Deal and Wilson and that the only way to solve the problem of overcrowding at Deal and Wilson is to reduce the number of students who are zoned to attend them by right. Strengthening other schools is a related issue, but it's ultimately a separate issue. I would personally be in favor of eliminating the OOB lottery all together, but I know that that will never happen in DC. |
Anonymous
I wish you could hear yourself. There is no "OOB problem" -- unless you consider poor kids mixing with richer kids a problem, but I won't accuse you of that. Schools in the Wilson feeder pattern have a crowding problem, and the rest of DCPS has an enrollment problem. There is some chance that the enrollment problem might fix itself due to demographic shifts, but there is no chance the crowding problem is going to fix itself. The schools that feed Wilson and Deal have more seats than Wilson and Deal; for the foreseeable future those feeder schools are going to be full, which means the schools they feed are going to be overcrowded. Re: eliminating the OOB lottery. The lottery is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is that DC schools vary tremendously in their attractiveness. If all schools were relatively comparable, the lottery would be a way for students to pick the school offering that suits them best, and it would be a minor part of the landscape. Today there are stark differences in school quality and the lottery is a make-or-break proposition for the families who participate. |
Anonymous
PP here. I think you misunderstood my post or that I wasn't clear or both. I do not think that there is "an OOB problem" and I definitely don't think that OOB kids are personally a problem. There are definitely posters on this board who think that ending OOB feeder rights will solve the overcrowding issue, which was the original post I was responding to ("Time to get rid of feeder rights for OOB kids."). I categorically do not agree that that is the cause of the overcrowding but rather the other things that I mentioned - that DC parents try their hardest to buy within the Deal/Wilson feeder pattern and that with those kids staying in public school in higher numbers than historically was the case, the schools are overcrowded. I 100% agree that the issue is that the schools that feed into Deal/Wilson have more seats than Deal/Wilson can offer, which is why I said that I think the issue is that too many schools feed into those two schools (Wilson specifically, since there is starting to be at least grudging admission that Hardy is a not-totally-unacceptable alternative to Deal). I think that the OOB lottery historically gave motivated parents from all demographics a way to avoid a local struggling school and send their children to a more attractive school. In my experience (as the parent of a 3rd grader at a school that doesn't feed to Deal or Wilson), people play the lottery as many times as it takes for them to land "somewhere acceptable" and do not focus on the acceptability of the schools that they are zoned for. Every other week there is a post from someone with a preschooler who says that their IB school is "not an option" and every lottery season, the waitlists for even mediocre charters is hundreds of students long. All those kids have to end up somewhere by kindergarten. Unless parents start moving out of DC en masse, and the census data indicates that not only is that not happening but there are simply more children than previously, kids are going to have to start attending their IB schools. Not everyone is able to move. I think that getting rid of the OOB lottery would be a push in the right direction. |
Anonymous
Another Ward 4 parent agreeing here. I would guess enrollment at Roosevelt's feeder schools (elementary level) is strong and will continue up the pipeline. As housing costs have gotten so high, people aren't going to peel off for private like they may have in the past. |
Anonymous
DC could fill a true gifted school if it was truly rigours. Some deal families might pull their kids to put them in something smaller. But it would need to be way more than 1/4 of the space. You need more kids to to be able to pay for the extras. DCPS would never go for race blind admissions either and if it ever went more than 30% white through a test its not going to happen. I do think Oyster and Bancroft should feed to McFarland. As of now, Powell and Bruce MOnroe don't have big enough or acaemdically high performing students to make McFarland Spanish track worthwhile. We will probably move to WoTP (hey overcrowding) to avoid McFarland. |
Anonymous
I hope this is the same parent who occasionally proposes making Janney a school for west of Wisconsin families only - would be too rich if they now want to limit Wilson to the same demographic. As pointed out elsewhere there are other parts of the Wilson catchment that geographically make more sense to move. And I've long believed the big stumbling block here is actually the lack of a viable neighborhood based middle school in Ward 4. |
Anonymous
Won't McFarland become the more viable neighborhood-based middle for Ward 4? As more and more kids at Powell, etc. grow into it? |
Anonymous
That is the argument, but it's a hard sell to the people on the front end of that shift. For example, I have a 3rd grader and I am not enthusiastic about sending her to any of the middle schools she could get into. |
Anonymous
|
The stumbling block is a viable high school. Middle school goes by in an instant. Why go an iffy one if the high school that follows is awful?
DCPS’ application schools are both gems and a problem, siphoning off a thousand or more students combined. |
Anonymous
Can you please not confuse "gifted school" and (presumably STEM-focused) "test-in"? My PP was about the latter. I'd love for DC to have the former, but ***they are two separate types of schools**** Getting a few children "pulled from Deal" would not fill a public school for gifted children. Families would likely move into DC to send their 1/10000 kid to a school for gifted students. What I was talking about was a rigorous STEM-focused test-in school, that would probably need to start as a test-in track in an existing school, and McFarland would be a good candidate to host it, since 1- it is new, 2- so many UMC are extremely skeptical of what its quality will be by the time they child is of age for it and sound like they'll look elsewhere instead, and 3- realistically their stated mission is a fleeting one that won't get enough students to fill up the building soon. |
Anonymous
But there is plenty of space at EOTP high schools - Coolidge, Roosevelt and Cardozo all have plenty of seats. You just need a critical mass of students to move to those schools all at once and the place to get them is from a high performing neighborhood based middle school (or two). From what I understand lots of EOTP parents are basically happy with the neighborhood ES options - it is middle school when things go off the rails. So you need a way to bridge the gap to get to those empty high schools. |
Anonymous
As the parent of a young elementary student in DCPS, let me ask you candidly: what proportion of students at Coolidge, Roosevelt and Cardozo will leave high school without knowing how to read? |
Anonymous
You aren't listening. That critical mass chooses to move to the suburbs, apply to private or attend one of the application schools for high school BECAUSE IT MATTERS FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS. When you are 14 and old enough to navigate around the city on your own there is no reason to attend school in yoru neighborhood. The whole friend/neighbor thing wears off by middle school and is irrelevant in high school. |
Anonymous
I don't disagree with the principle - there is space and the children will have to go somewhere and there are not enough charter, application, and OOB seats for the number of students. The issue remains that the middle and high school options EOTP are not attractive to a lot of families. I used to work in with middle schoolers in Ward 4 and none of their parents were particularly enthusiastic about the high school options either, so it's not just an "upper middle class but not wealthy enough to buy into the Wilson feeder area" issue. My observation was that in a class of 25 kids, the 10 that were actively invested in learning were completely derailed if not actively antagonized by the 5-10 who were actively invested in disrupting class and that the other 5-10 kids in the room often fell somewhere between those extremes. In my middle and high school experience, in a class of 25, there were usually 15 people who were actually focused and 10 who didn't really care. We didn't have kids starting fights in classrooms with other students or with teachers. We didn't have kids just getting up and walking out. We didn't have kids skipping class to roam the hallways. It wasn't even a particularly good school district. The behavioral problems just were not as serious as I observed them to be here. There is a culture of apathy toward education that starts somewhere in late elementary, and until DCPS figures out how to keep kids engaged in learning after that time, the problems are going to persist. |