Faculty, student and family input on ethical issues DC privates

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great question., it is not just the Maret lease, but the Sidwell acquisition and probably other issues too.

+1

What they did to those old residents was no about Quaker values, but capitalism at its worst.

Try again. Those old residents’ ***landlord *** put their home on the market.

Was the world supposed to look the other way and collectively pretend the owner wasn’t selling?

Some residents are still there at a dollar per year.

If you start talking about ethical issues at all schools you’re opening up a Pandora’s box of all sorts of issues. This would mean questioning who gets on the governing board and why. It would include questioning why families from the same social group seem to be on the school boards year after year. It would also include questioning why the top four positions on a school board are all Republican males which does not represent the school community. So I think they’re all sorts of questions people could ask and they usually don’t have any luck getting answers so they give up questioning anything.

#complicit

Above post was in reference to complaints I hear about at other schools as well not necessarily at Maret btw.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is not a defense of Maret or this deal, but there are very few 90' baseball diamonds (those large enough for middle and HS baseball) in DC. Jelleff enabled Maret to have a baseball field, and Maret was in the process of building a strong baseball program. Maret does have a field, but its a K-12 school, and that one field is not enough to support all girls and boys middle and high school sports, nor is it large enough for HS baseball. Having had kids in GDS, which has its own field issues, the other area privates are somewhat accommodating in granting access to field space, but they use their own fields pretty heavily. It sounds like the first deal was necessary for both sides to get somethng they really needed at that time, but the current deal seems less advantageous for the District.

DPR has about 110 fields and about 70 them are baseball fields. Even though only about 15% of the kids who play sports on DPR fields play baseball or other diamond sports. DPR is way, way over-invested in baseball fields. It's a canard that there are few 90' baseball fields in DC. Just off the top of my head I can think of Fort Reno, St. Albans, Sidewll, St. Johns, GWU and AU west of the park.

It's not a canard. There are many, many little league sized baseball fields, which is great, but very few baseball fields city wide for kids to play on once they turn thirteen years old and need the larger field. When you add up the private and public schools throughout the District plus the leagues, supply does not come close to meeting demand. The private school fields you mention are not open to the public and the ability to lease field time from Sidwell, St. Albans and St. Johns is very limited, if available at all, and all these schools have varsity and JV teams and in some cases middle school teams that use these fields. Fort Reno is used by Wilson HS, and some of the area private leagues. Many of the other DC High Schools don't have their own fields, and those that do, like Banneker, use them or they get leased them out to other groups. The Nationals Youth baseball facility is used by Gonzaga and some other schools. The reality is that baseball fields are really big, and its easier to put in two multi-use fields that can be used for multiple sports. GDS is doing a major project and a baseball field was just not feasible because it would have meant sacrificing so much else. That's understandable, but it makes the logistics of fielding a baseball team very challenging. You can practice on a multi-use field, but you can't play games.

Compared to other sports baseball is rolling in fields. City-wide there are eight 90' baseball fields -- Banneker, Jelleff, Reno, Riggs-LaSalle, Brentwood-Hamilton, Mosley, Fort Greble, Turkey Thicket. Every ward except for 6 and 7 has one, Ward 5 has three. The soccer equivalent to the 90' diamond is the 100-meter field. There are no 100-meter fields in Wards 1, 2 or 3. The westernmost one is Fort Stevens, which is in Ward 4, on 13th street NW. Just in Ward 3 there are over 3,000 kids who play organized soccer, more kids than play baseball in the entire city. There used to be a 100-meter field at Fort Reno, but DPR allowed baseball groups to put up a fence that makes the field unusable for other sports.

There are over three times as many soccer players as baseball players in the city, yet DPR has three times as many baseball fields as soccer fields. Worse, it is actively moving facilities from other sports to baseball. Things may be tough for baseball, but they are far, far worse for other sports. And DPR is moving resources in the wrong direction.

[Anonymous]

That’s because soccer sucks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:That’s because soccer sucks.

Ten thousand players in DC feel differently.

[Anonymous]

Maret is not being ethical if they’re paying a below market price for access and their Board should be able to see that. And the fact that they haven’t backed away from this deal despite the bad publicity means that they know that for their budget of $1 million over a 10 year period that they are paying DC for exclusive access to Jelleff every weekday, they would be more likely to end up in Gaithersburg than a prime location in Georgetown. And then the Maret kids can know how the Hardy kids feel when they travel 1 hr to games.

[Anonymous]

You have a very shaky grasp of what “ethical” means.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You have a very shaky grasp of what “ethical” means.

The PP? No, certain private schools have a very shaky grasp of what "ethical" means, no matter how much they trumpet their civic responsibility in their glossy brochures.

[Anonymous]

The Washington Post has a new op-ed that gives more of a flavor of the ethical issues involved in the Maret exclusivity deal for Jelleff.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/local-opin...9-be05-f76ac4ec618c_story.html

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can someone give a brief description of the event that occurred without commentary?

See
https://www.change.org/p/mayor-bowser-private-schools-should-not-have-exclusive-rights-to-public-fields-make-jelleff-public?recruiter=1000133193&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=sms&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_abi&utm_term=share_petition&recruited_by_id=80a548f0-c78e-11e9-be24-7db67d90b55a&share_bandit_exp=abi-17484774-en-US&share_bandit_var=v0

And the MOST egregious part is , basketball aside, Maret isn't really good at any sport and no Athletic Field is going to change that. No matter how much $$$$ parents donate and how corrupt DC politics is,

I bet a bunch of Hardy MS students could whoop any Maret HS team with the exception of their girls Basketball team

[Anonymous]

Maret should do the decent thing and back out of the deal or at least agree to use the field much less. I guess they don’t really care what the average dc person thinks of them.

[Anonymous]

How about DC Boys& Girls Club faces off against Maret in a Football game and the winner gets the Fields.

The Rules:

Actual Maret students will have to compete ( no paying a sub DCPS kid to pinch hit for you )

Parents can't " coach " or Ref ( this includes paying the Ref's salary )

Honestly, I wonder what would happen if when Maret showed up to practice or play a game on the Jelef field if another team plus all of their parents were already there playing / occupying the Field as a form of public protest. What would the Maret school do ? Call the police ? Have the Hardy kids physically removed ?

It just doesn't square that a public field created to serve under served youth so that they could grow and develop through sport should be able to be privatized for the exclusionary use of kids who have so much .