Ludlow-Taylor principal suddenly leaving?
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Anonymous
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Yes, mostly bad luck at Ludlow for many years.
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Anonymous
what do you mean by "strange" job? |
Anonymous
AP by leadership committee. Head of special education moving, just for the year, into the “director” position? (Assume it is some kind of DCPS requirement that the school has an AP or Director given how it was explained.) Plan is to hold the job for the internal candidate (who has sort of been acting as a quasi-AP/ the source of institutional knowledge already) who isn’t in the pool yet. Interim principal committed to working with her to get her qualified; not exactly sure wha the requirements are/what she’s lacking. Internal candidate is heavily favored by teachers and parents, so if this all works out, it would be a very good way for the interim principal to ingratiate herself with the school. That said, in the interim, the school is basically officially in only her hands and I can’t say she’s started off on the best foot with parents. We’ll see. |
Anonymous
That seems like overreach. The school had stable, popular leadership for 4 years and it has among the longest average tenure of teachers in DC. This is a hard year — massive leadership turnover in a time of COVID and loss of T1 funding — but school is actually going OK so far. School got devices out to everyone who needed them already, even PKers (who got Surface GOs since DCPS drooped the iPad ball). Jury is still out on the new principal — stuck to her guns on a dumb decision and then completely rolled over without admitting it — but she’s definitely responsive and has been working her ass off, so we’ll see. |
Anonymous
I think they’re actually referring to comments about the interim principal. Folks commented she seemed passionate about at risk kids, so arguable the fastest gentrifying/now fairly gentrified school in DC was a weird choice. (I will say that she says the word equity a lot, but she’s mostly just expressed awe at the size of the PTA’s budget — which is quite modest by WOTP standards — and thanks for the PTA bailing her out of a massive budget hole the outgoing principal left her with.) She’s not the one who left though, that was the AP... who took a promotion to be the principal of a school in PG county. No idea why a principal was getting picked so late in the game over there, but they must be even more of a mess than DCPS. |
Anonymous
You sound new. In the last seven years, Ludlow has had four principals. SWS has had one. Maury and Brent have had two. |
Anonymous
I am not new. I understand that five years ago, LT went through two principals in two years... but there was then total stability for 4 years with the Principal/AP combo. Less than half the school was around pre-Principal Smith. |
Anonymous
| Maury parent. 4 years is nice, but not long enough to stabilize Ludlow. Principal Garvey stayed 10 years for us. Feel bad for you guys. |
Anonymous
There was some lawsuit with DCPS where assistant principals were being cut out of budgets but not “fired” so DC is required to find a position for them since they weren’t “fired”. I think that’s how the new AP ended up at Ludlow and instead of getting another external AP, the school decided to create the Director position to help the interim principal. The plan for this year sounds like the best option. If it’s the special education person I’m thinking of, he seems pretty good. Kids like him |
Anonymous
And we feel bad for your MS path. So we're even I guess. |
Anonymous
| We feel just as bad for your MS feed. We're getting "advanced" math, ELA AND science and social studies at Eliot-Hine this year. You only get math and ELA at Hobson. You have can have it. |
Anonymous
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No kids at either school but instability at the highest level is not good. It takes time for a principal to learn about a school, the students, teachers, strengths, weaknesses, and needs of the school. Then more time to plan a vision and strategy. It’s not effectively done in 1 or 2 years.
The more changes you have above, the more disruptive to the school and morale of the staff. |
Anonymous
Ummm- now you’ve got PC. I’d save your sympathy. |
Anonymous
Ha ha ha. You know you’re a booster when you try to claim EH is better than SH. More than half of the Maury kids who went to EH last year are already gone. |
Anonymous
Also, given that anyone can go to EH if they want to basically, that’s anyone’s MS not just yours. |