Jefferson Academy Kool-Aid

[Anonymous]

I think in 5 years, Brent will have 40 to 50 5th graders. 30 of them will go to Jefferson and the Jefferson people will claim victory. The anti-Jeff folks will point out that 20 kids left between 3rd and 5th grade and say they are right.

And this board will be up to 250 pages.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think in 5 years, Brent will have 40 to 50 5th graders. 30 of them will go to Jefferson and the Jefferson people will claim victory. The anti-Jeff folks will point out that 20 kids left between 3rd and 5th grade and say they are right.

And this board will be up to 250 pages.

At least that's a win for Jeff's ad revenue.

[Anonymous]

This kool aid tastes good. But it's not all that healthy

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Jefferson is serving only about 80 kids living in the catchment boundary. Brent is never going to send scores of kids to Jefferson by virtue of its size alone and the same will be true of Van Ness. So what is the rationale for keeping the school open when it's only half filled and badly in need of modernization? DCPS is incapable of seeing the forest for the trees, otherwise Eliot-Hine would have been modernized before Watkins to provide a suitable swing space. Maybe some Hill parents can coalesce around a plan to excess Jefferson so that Basis or another charter can have a proper middle/high school campus. After all, Henderson should be made to choke on her pronouncement that DCPS doesn't do middle school very well. In the absence of the NCLB waiver Jefferson would be just another of many failing schools in our city.

So where are all of these kids from VN and Brent going to go to Middle school?

See if you can get in touch with Adrian Fenty and ask why he surplused Hine.

So the answer to three deficient MS on the Hill is a fourth deficient MS? Hine was failing even when a much lower bar for failure existed at DCPS

Logic isn't your strength, is it? Hine was located on major bus line and above the EM metro station.

Hine was a no brainer to dispose of. It was a failing school which had even worse neighborhood retention than Jefferson. It had a good location but was in terrible condition and had no outdoor space.

If the discussion is about NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS, why do I care about transit access? Is that supposed to teach me about logic?

Should we discuss Jefferson or EH without giving consideration to transit options which impact how kids would get to school? A logical person might conclude that a middle school centrally located in Ward 6 with readily accessible transit options would be a win-win in terms of attracting a more economically diverse group of students from throughout Ward 6 and beyond. Even Brookland got a $120 million dollar facility when McKinley Tech was only 60 percent enrolled. Demolishing and rebuilding Hine would have made more sense than throwing millions at SH and deferring badly needed modernization of Nefferson and EH for more than a decade. If you want a neighborhood school then you need to think of a plan to make that happen. It never will as things currently stand.

There is no need to build a whole new school. Jefferson is 3 blocks from L'Enfant Plaza. EH is only a little further from Stadium Armory.

[Anonymous]

Call me racist or whatever, but the simple fact is that you need to get one solidly performing MS before you can get another. You're not going to get a solidly performing MS on the Hill by separating out the two best performing neighborhood elementary schools (Brent, Maury) and a very good non-neighborhood DCPS (SWS) from all of the solidly performing ones (Cluster, L-T, JO) in terms of feeder pattern. To get critical mass, you need as many "good" ESs as possible feeding in, so that 20% of each of those feeders giving the MS a chance is sufficient for the MS to turn.

Look at Deal. Feed every NW school with some high SES there even if the compromise is also feeding in lots of non-SES kids; that's totally fine. Most high SES families don't live in DC because they hate diversity (even more true of Hill residents, if I had to guess), but they want a critical mass of high SES before they'll take a chance. So, yes, after 10 years of zoning half the city to it, Deal is massively overcrowded: but because it actually works families are begging for it to stay like that! 10 years on, they redo boundaries, Deal will remain solid/overcrowding mostly solved and now Hardy has a legit chance to become the new Deal. If they'd worried about both Deal and Hardy 10 years ago and tried to split the difference, both would still suck.

Do the same thing here. Give everyone on the Hill feeder rights to SH and see what happens. It's not going to overfill in 1-3 years, it's just not. If it starts to get massively overcrowded, then it's working and we can worry about splitting the grade levels w/ E-H or Jefferson. I genuinely think it's the one politically palatable solution (test-in, which I'd love, is not going to happen) that might actually create a solid MS on the Hill. Because that MS isn't going to spring up out of nowhere because everyone distrusts DCPS for good reason, you have to do it at SH, which it's the one Hill MS that doesn't completely suck now. If in 5 or 10 years we're facing a Deal scenario? Yay! Now start working on Hardy... err, Jefferson or E-H.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jefferson is serving only about 80 kids living in the catchment boundary. Brent is never going to send scores of kids to Jefferson by virtue of its size alone and the same will be true of Van Ness. So what is the rationale for keeping the school open when it's only half filled and badly in need of modernization? DCPS is incapable of seeing the forest for the trees, otherwise Eliot-Hine would have been modernized before Watkins to provide a suitable swing space. Maybe some Hill parents can coalesce around a plan to excess Jefferson so that Basis or another charter can have a proper middle/high school campus. After all, Henderson should be made to choke on her pronouncement that DCPS doesn't do middle school very well. In the absence of the NCLB waiver Jefferson would be just another of many failing schools in our city.

So where are all of these kids from VN and Brent going to go to Middle school?

See if you can get in touch with Adrian Fenty and ask why he surplused Hine.

So the answer to three deficient MS on the Hill is a fourth deficient MS? Hine was failing even when a much lower bar for failure existed at DCPS

Logic isn't your strength, is it? Hine was located on major bus line and above the EM metro station.

Hine was a no brainer to dispose of. It was a failing school which had even worse neighborhood retention than Jefferson. It had a good location but was in terrible condition and had no outdoor space.

If the discussion is about NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS, why do I care about transit access? Is that supposed to teach me about logic?

Should we discuss Jefferson or EH without giving consideration to transit options which impact how kids would get to school? A logical person might conclude that a middle school centrally located in Ward 6 with readily accessible transit options would be a win-win in terms of attracting a more economically diverse group of students from throughout Ward 6 and beyond. Even Brookland got a $120 million dollar facility when McKinley Tech was only 60 percent enrolled. Demolishing and rebuilding Hine would have made more sense than throwing millions at SH and deferring badly needed modernization of Nefferson and EH for more than a decade. If you want a neighborhood school then you need to think of a plan to make that happen. It never will as things currently stand.

There is no need to build a whole new school. Jefferson is 3 blocks from L'Enfant Plaza. EH is only a little further from Stadium Armory.

Ah yes, the incredibly reliable Metrorail system! BTW, have you checked the MPD website for crime data in the area between SA and EHS/EH?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think in 5 years, Brent will have 40 to 50 5th graders. 30 of them will go to Jefferson and the Jefferson people will claim victory. The anti-Jeff folks will point out that 20 kids left between 3rd and 5th grade and say they are right.

And this board will be up to 250 pages.

No, not in the cards, 30 of them won't go to Jefferson, maybe half that number. The rest will scatter as per usual, to privates, the burbs, Stuart Hobson, Hardy, Latin, BASIS, maybe Latin 2 and BASIS 2 by then, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:+1. The Hill is in dire need of a new forum for parents to provide input on how to address the brewing neighborhood middle school crisis. The simple fact is that many families with kids currently in Hill DCPS elementary schools are going to wind up moving to the burbs if nothing changes. Brent, Maury and SWS parents have already lost access to Stuart Hobson short spectacular lottery luck, and many Cluster and Ludlow-Taylor parents won't use the school going forward. Jefferson is going to be a non-starter for families already at Brent, Tyler SI and Van Ness, other than perhaps a few die hards.

Few Hill families can afford private school from 6th grade up, and there aren't nearly enough spots in independent middle schools within easy reach of the Hill even for those who can. I don't like how the Brent PTA middle school committee is lobbying hard to gin up a massive investment in Jefferson without soliciting input from the broader school community first, to determine whether or not this is what most parents want. If I had a chance to respond to a survey on MS development options, or to vote in a PTA sponsored referendum on MS, I'd vote no on the Jefferson plan, with many others. This is the inconvenient truth school leaders must face at some point. The democratic process hasn't been subverted here; there has been no democratic process to avoiding the messiness of one. As a result, you're going to see a backlash over time, as the optimists crank up their PR machine to push the magical-thinking in Tues News, Brent neighbors, at PTA meetings etc.

If you don't like what the Brent PTA is doing, why not just speak to them?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:+1. The Hill is in dire need of a new forum for parents to provide input on how to address the brewing neighborhood middle school crisis. The simple fact is that many families with kids currently in Hill DCPS elementary schools are going to wind up moving to the burbs if nothing changes. Brent, Maury and SWS parents have already lost access to Stuart Hobson short spectacular lottery luck, and many Cluster and Ludlow-Taylor parents won't use the school going forward. Jefferson is going to be a non-starter for families already at Brent, Tyler SI and Van Ness, other than perhaps a few die hards.

Few Hill families can afford private school from 6th grade up, and there aren't nearly enough spots in independent middle schools within easy reach of the Hill even for those who can. I don't like how the Brent PTA middle school committee is lobbying hard to gin up a massive investment in Jefferson without soliciting input from the broader school community first, to determine whether or not this is what most parents want. If I had a chance to respond to a survey on MS development options, or to vote in a PTA sponsored referendum on MS, I'd vote no on the Jefferson plan, with many others. This is the inconvenient truth school leaders must face at some point. The democratic process hasn't been subverted here; there has been no democratic process to avoiding the messiness of one. As a result, you're going to see a backlash over time, as the optimists crank up their PR machine to push the magical-thinking in Tues News, Brent neighbors, at PTA meetings etc.

I don't understand this line of reasoning. You can refer to families IB for Cluster/LT who eschew IB for alternatives, but the families who remain at Watkins and LT mostly comprise the feeders to SH. Watkins, LT, and JO Wilson offer very few lottery 5th grade seats and SH offers very few, all of which speaks to demand for SH. There may be OOB students in that mix but it's trending more towards IB in lower grades with current demographic shifts and the numbers of younger ES students in both DC and within those boundaries.

Some of SH IB families opt for ES charters and some leave for MS charters but that's no easier for SH IB students than anyone else.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:+1. The Hill is in dire need of a new forum for parents to provide input on how to address the brewing neighborhood middle school crisis. The simple fact is that many families with kids currently in Hill DCPS elementary schools are going to wind up moving to the burbs if nothing changes. Brent, Maury and SWS parents have already lost access to Stuart Hobson short spectacular lottery luck, and many Cluster and Ludlow-Taylor parents won't use the school going forward. Jefferson is going to be a non-starter for families already at Brent, Tyler SI and Van Ness, other than perhaps a few die hards.

Few Hill families can afford private school from 6th grade up, and there aren't nearly enough spots in independent middle schools within easy reach of the Hill even for those who can. I don't like how the Brent PTA middle school committee is lobbying hard to gin up a massive investment in Jefferson without soliciting input from the broader school community first, to determine whether or not this is what most parents want. If I had a chance to respond to a survey on MS development options, or to vote in a PTA sponsored referendum on MS, I'd vote no on the Jefferson plan, with many others. This is the inconvenient truth school leaders must face at some point. The democratic process hasn't been subverted here; there has been no democratic process to avoiding the messiness of one. As a result, you're going to see a backlash over time, as the optimists crank up their PR machine to push the magical-thinking in Tues News, Brent neighbors, at PTA meetings etc.

If you don't like what the Brent PTA is doing, why not just speak to them?

Why do you assume that I haven't? You're either with team pro-Jefferson, or against them, no middle ground. Admins aren't invested in the issue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:+1. The Hill is in dire need of a new forum for parents to provide input on how to address the brewing neighborhood middle school crisis. The simple fact is that many families with kids currently in Hill DCPS elementary schools are going to wind up moving to the burbs if nothing changes. Brent, Maury and SWS parents have already lost access to Stuart Hobson short spectacular lottery luck, and many Cluster and Ludlow-Taylor parents won't use the school going forward. Jefferson is going to be a non-starter for families already at Brent, Tyler SI and Van Ness, other than perhaps a few die hards.

Few Hill families can afford private school from 6th grade up, and there aren't nearly enough spots in independent middle schools within easy reach of the Hill even for those who can. I don't like how the Brent PTA middle school committee is lobbying hard to gin up a massive investment in Jefferson without soliciting input from the broader school community first, to determine whether or not this is what most parents want. If I had a chance to respond to a survey on MS development options, or to vote in a PTA sponsored referendum on MS, I'd vote no on the Jefferson plan, with many others. This is the inconvenient truth school leaders must face at some point. The democratic process hasn't been subverted here; there has been no democratic process to avoiding the messiness of one. As a result, you're going to see a backlash over time, as the optimists crank up their PR machine to push the magical-thinking in Tues News, Brent neighbors, at PTA meetings etc.

I don't understand this line of reasoning. You can refer to families IB for Cluster/LT who eschew IB for alternatives, but the families who remain at Watkins and LT mostly comprise the feeders to SH. Watkins, LT, and JO Wilson offer very few lottery 5th grade seats and SH offers very few, all of which speaks to demand for SH. There may be OOB students in that mix but it's trending more towards IB in lower grades with current demographic shifts and the numbers of younger ES students in both DC and within those boundaries.

Some of SH IB families opt for ES charters and some leave for MS charters but that's no easier for SH IB students than anyone else.

Most of the high SES/white/in-boundary parents currently at Ludlow, Peabody/Watkins and JO Wilson in the lower grades are unlikely to stay the course for the upper grades, let alone chose SH. Even Brent and Maury, schools at least five years ahead of Ludlow in their development trajectories still lose many upper grades families to the burbs and privates. You'll see a slow steady uptick in the percentages of white and high SES families at SH in the next ten years, not a rush on a school without above grade-level offerings, particularly for math. SH is a mediocre school in an increasingly nice facility, no more. If SH is at 1/3 white ten years from now in a catchment area that's close to 80% white, I'll be surprised.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:+1. The Hill is in dire need of a new forum for parents to provide input on how to address the brewing neighborhood middle school crisis. The simple fact is that many families with kids currently in Hill DCPS elementary schools are going to wind up moving to the burbs if nothing changes. Brent, Maury and SWS parents have already lost access to Stuart Hobson short spectacular lottery luck, and many Cluster and Ludlow-Taylor parents won't use the school going forward. Jefferson is going to be a non-starter for families already at Brent, Tyler SI and Van Ness, other than perhaps a few die hards.

Few Hill families can afford private school from 6th grade up, and there aren't nearly enough spots in independent middle schools within easy reach of the Hill even for those who can. I don't like how the Brent PTA middle school committee is lobbying hard to gin up a massive investment in Jefferson without soliciting input from the broader school community first, to determine whether or not this is what most parents want. If I had a chance to respond to a survey on MS development options, or to vote in a PTA sponsored referendum on MS, I'd vote no on the Jefferson plan, with many others. This is the inconvenient truth school leaders must face at some point. The democratic process hasn't been subverted here; there has been no democratic process to avoiding the messiness of one. As a result, you're going to see a backlash over time, as the optimists crank up their PR machine to push the magical-thinking in Tues News, Brent neighbors, at PTA meetings etc.

I don't understand this line of reasoning. You can refer to families IB for Cluster/LT who eschew IB for alternatives, but the families who remain at Watkins and LT mostly comprise the feeders to SH. Watkins, LT, and JO Wilson offer very few lottery 5th grade seats and SH offers very few, all of which speaks to demand for SH. There may be OOB students in that mix but it's trending more towards IB in lower grades with current demographic shifts and the numbers of younger ES students in both DC and within those boundaries.

Some of SH IB families opt for ES charters and some leave for MS charters but that's no easier for SH IB students than anyone else.

Most of the high SES/white/in-boundary parents currently at Ludlow, Peabody/Watkins and JO Wilson in the lower grades are unlikely to stay the course for the upper grades, let alone chose SH. Even Brent and Maury, schools at least five years ahead of Ludlow in their development trajectories still lose many upper grades families to the burbs and privates. You'll see a slow steady uptick in the percentages of white and high SES families at SH in the next ten years, not a rush on a school without above grade-level offerings, particularly for math. SH is a mediocre school in an increasingly nice facility, no more. If SH is at 1/3 white ten years from now in a catchment area that's close to 80% white, I'll be surprised.

You speak anecdotally but the data paints a very different picture. Most schools have some attrition. There has been less scarcity of alternatives in the past 5 years in DC than the next 5 years will have. You just have to look at the numbers of rising 5th graders and the greater numbers behind them to see this trend. DCPS sees it, which is why they're betting more families will try to make the currently weak options better because they won't have a ton of alternatives for public school short of moving, which is a big expensive step in its own right.

Most of they suburbs worth moving to are just as expensive as DC and families committed to city living aren't a given to decamp. Families I know on the Hill would just as soon live in Fairfax as NW and don't really like either -- they'd already be there if they did.

SH already offers more honor courses than any DCPS MS other than Deal and Hardy. I don't care if SH is 1% white. It's not a factor. 1/3 white would be comparable to where Deal was about 3-4 years ago if you like perspective.

[Anonymous]

Stop it with praising the SH honors classes -- they aren't on par with Deal's and they are basically grade-level. This is not enough to attract parents of high performing students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Stop it with praising the SH honors classes -- they aren't on par with Deal's and they are basically grade-level. This is not enough to attract parents of high performing students.

Deal doesn't have honors classes. They do have Alg 1 and Geometry, in addition to Math 6, 7 and 8.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jefferson is serving only about 80 kids living in the catchment boundary. Brent is never going to send scores of kids to Jefferson by virtue of its size alone and the same will be true of Van Ness. So what is the rationale for keeping the school open when it's only half filled and badly in need of modernization? DCPS is incapable of seeing the forest for the trees, otherwise Eliot-Hine would have been modernized before Watkins to provide a suitable swing space. Maybe some Hill parents can coalesce around a plan to excess Jefferson so that Basis or another charter can have a proper middle/high school campus. After all, Henderson should be made to choke on her pronouncement that DCPS doesn't do middle school very well. In the absence of the NCLB waiver Jefferson would be just another of many failing schools in our city.

So where are all of these kids from VN and Brent going to go to Middle school?

See if you can get in touch with Adrian Fenty and ask why he surplused Hine.

So the answer to three deficient MS on the Hill is a fourth deficient MS? Hine was failing even when a much lower bar for failure existed at DCPS

Logic isn't your strength, is it? Hine was located on major bus line and above the EM metro station.

Not the PP to whom you're responding.

You are suggesting that the "strong logic" for a fourth under-enrolled, under-utilized, and low-performing MS in Ward 6 is that it's convenient to metro, and then criticizing someone else.

Legalized marijuana at work...