Cheh letter to OSSE on Ellington

[Anonymous]

Mary Cheh sent a remarkable letter to Hanseul Kang at OSSE today about the Ellington residency scandal. It had a couple of remarkable parts:

Last week I was disturbed to learn that half of the 100 students sampled at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts had originally been misidentified as District residents. Because of your failure to correctly verify these students' residency, not only did the District fail to collect at least $600,000 in student tuition, but it is also possible that spots were denied to students who are bona fide District residents in favor of students from outside of the District.

While an error of fifty students is bad enough, it is possible that your audit of the full student body at Duke Ellington will identify even more. It is key that this audit is accurate, meticulous, and swift. Once completed, I would like you to provide me with an account of the number of students attending Duke Ellington who are not District residents, broken out into those who paid tuition for SY 2017-18 and those who did not. In addition, please identify whether students from outside of the District took any spots at Duke Ellington that a qualified student who resides in the District could have filled.
...

It is my understanding that, due to how the school day is structured, only half of Duke Ellington is being used by students at any given time. As such, the school could be bifurcated into two campuses, Duke Ellington and Western High School, to help address crowding at Wilson High School.

I'm sure both of those are going to cause a lot of discussion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Mary Cheh sent a remarkable letter to Hanseul Kang at OSSE today about the Ellington residency scandal. It had a couple of remarkable parts:

Last week I was disturbed to learn that half of the 100 students sampled at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts had originally been misidentified as District residents. Because of your failure to correctly verify these students' residency, not only did the District fail to collect at least $600,000 in student tuition, but it is also possible that spots were denied to students who are bona fide District residents in favor of students from outside of the District.

While an error of fifty students is bad enough, it is possible that your audit of the full student body at Duke Ellington will identify even more. It is key that this audit is accurate, meticulous, and swift. Once completed, I would like you to provide me with an account of the number of students attending Duke Ellington who are not District residents, broken out into those who paid tuition for SY 2017-18 and those who did not. In addition, please identify whether students from outside of the District took any spots at Duke Ellington that a qualified student who resides in the District could have filled.
...

It is my understanding that, due to how the school day is structured, only half of Duke Ellington is being used by students at any given time. As such, the school could be bifurcated into two campuses, Duke Ellington and Western High School, to help address crowding at Wilson High School.

I'm sure both of those are going to cause a lot of discussion.

She is wrong about how the day is structured.

Maybe she should actually visit the school.

[Anonymous]

She should offer to be part of the team verifying residency in order to ensure transparency.

[Anonymous]

I'm glad that Mary Cheh is finally paying attention to the schools. Someone needs to and clearly the Mayor and Grosso are not up to the task.

[Anonymous]

Damn, the dirt hasn't even settled on Peggy's grave.....

But this is way overdue. And i have heard that Ellington students only use the classrooms for 1/2 the day from multiple sources. It came up frequently during the renovation discussions. The excuss for the high cost was that it was really 2 schools, each used 1/2 the time.

[Anonymous]

Not a Cheh fan but love this letter.
She could have waited a minute to start in on the Western High School part. Now it will look like she just is trying to get another white hs in NW.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mary Cheh sent a remarkable letter to Hanseul Kang at OSSE today about the Ellington residency scandal. It had a couple of remarkable parts:

Last week I was disturbed to learn that half of the 100 students sampled at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts had originally been misidentified as District residents. Because of your failure to correctly verify these students' residency, not only did the District fail to collect at least $600,000 in student tuition, but it is also possible that spots were denied to students who are bona fide District residents in favor of students from outside of the District.

While an error of fifty students is bad enough, it is possible that your audit of the full student body at Duke Ellington will identify even more. It is key that this audit is accurate, meticulous, and swift. Once completed, I would like you to provide me with an account of the number of students attending Duke Ellington who are not District residents, broken out into those who paid tuition for SY 2017-18 and those who did not. In addition, please identify whether students from outside of the District took any spots at Duke Ellington that a qualified student who resides in the District could have filled.
...

It is my understanding that, due to how the school day is structured, only half of Duke Ellington is being used by students at any given time. As such, the school could be bifurcated into two campuses, Duke Ellington and Western High School, to help address crowding at Wilson High School.

I'm sure both of those are going to cause a lot of discussion.

She is wrong about how the day is structured.

Maybe she should actually visit the school.

MAYBE the self-entitled non-DC resident contractor/political donor freeloaders which make up Duke Ellington should restructure how the building is used so that more DC taxpaying families could get out of their overcrowded classrooms and utilize the building to the full extent of its capacity. As a bonus, allow some of the elementary kids at Fillmore to use some of the space as Hardy grows. The one caveat is that a resurrected Western HS should have its scorecards separated from the decidedly unimpressive Ellington record. It is about time the Council exert some leverage over this place. The late Ms. Cooper Cafritz held sway over the council by leveraging contractor/donors who are also the school's big benefactors. I presume that the final show of deference to the school's founder will be an honorary street naming of that block of 35th Street NW, and then it is open season on this property.

[Anonymous]

I have a question that I haven't seen answered anywhere: When they did the audit of 100 students and found 50 were not DC residents, how were they selected? Did they pick 100 kids at random to audit, or did they pick the 100 most dubious records to start with?

It's a big problem either way, but if it was the former, holy moly. I don't see how the school can survive losing half its students.

[Anonymous]

Ellington bell schedule - http://www.ellingtonschool.org/about/bell-schedule/

There are ten class periods a day. Six regular classes, three art classes and lunch.

The academic classrooms are fully used periods 1-7.

[Anonymous]

Hasn't it been an open secret that Ellington has loads of non-dc kids that don't pay.

Also, they can start with staff kids. I personally knew two kids of staff who attended (now graduated) from out of state. I have no idea if they paid but I would guess no based on some other solid information.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ellington bell schedule - http://www.ellingtonschool.org/about/bell-schedule/

There are ten class periods a day. Six regular classes, three art classes and lunch.

The academic classrooms are fully used periods 1-7.

So 70% of the day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have a question that I haven't seen answered anywhere: When they did the audit of 100 students and found 50 were not DC residents, how were they selected? Did they pick 100 kids at random to audit, or did they pick the 100 most dubious records to start with?

It's a big problem either way, but if it was the former, holy moly. I don't see how the school can survive losing half its students.

The audit guidelines published on OSSEs website say that the 2017 audit was to pull 20% of all students files at random (previous years they checked 10% at random).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ellington bell schedule - http://www.ellingtonschool.org/about/bell-schedule/

There are ten class periods a day. Six regular classes, three art classes and lunch.

The academic classrooms are fully used periods 1-7.

So 70% of the day.

The 3-class arts block starts at 2:55 pm, when other schools are about to dismiss.

[Anonymous]

Whoa. I hate Cheh but I love this letter. She finally seems to get something about schools and parent's anger. Well, it's a start, I guess.

Maybe she'll throw Eaton under the bus some more to make up for her attention here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a question that I haven't seen answered anywhere: When they did the audit of 100 students and found 50 were not DC residents, how were they selected? Did they pick 100 kids at random to audit, or did they pick the 100 most dubious records to start with?

It's a big problem either way, but if it was the former, holy moly. I don't see how the school can survive losing half its students.

The audit guidelines published on OSSEs website say that the 2017 audit was to pull 20% of all students files at random (previous years they checked 10% at random).

So there's likely to be 250 out-of-District kids when the dust clears? I think that's the end of Ellington as we know it.