Hardy for 6th & Deal for 7th & 8th? DCPS Survey on Changing Feeder Pattern

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Make Jefferson Middle School, Brookland, and Stuart Hobson and other middle schools more competitive and attractive to make more appealing to parents for their children to attend. Make Coolidge a phenomenal high school to draw from Wilson. Think about what parents may be looking for--safety, networking and diversity--in addition to a great curriculum that will help prepare future global leaders, change-makers, tech and business stars, and responsible citizens. Start a sports management, media, and entertainment program at Spingarn High School to take advantage of Langston golf course.

Bump. But in the meantime, developmentally, it seems to be a strong idea to pull 6th graders into a different space than 7th and 8th graders. Poking around academic literature now to see what the experts say...

Pull the 5th and 6th graders together at Hardy and you'll solve some of ES capacity issues at JKLMM as well!

It blows my mind how people on this thread spout off "easy peasy" solutions as if you just snap your fingers. There a myriad issues to consider. Staffing, administration, families who are expected to deal with multiple campuses and commutes, extra curriculars that go across grades (sports). We are a Hardy family and happy with how our future looks there with our new principal and newly engaged PTO and increasing feeder school population. Just leave us alone. Capacity issues at JKLMM stem from DCPS being spineless when it came to rewriting the boundaries and addressing OOB policies. It's absurd to devise these new solutions that destablize exisiting schools by contemplating solutions that are so overwhelmingly complex (compared to the easier solutions...ie boundaries and OOB policies).

Not to mention that Hardy isn't big enough to hold the 5th and 6th grades form Deal feeders alone, let alone coupled wth those from Hardy. Just drop this dumb idea already.

What's interesting is that this proposal was floated by the head of the Wilson-Ward 3 feeder network group - who posted identifying that it was his idea before (didn't search for the thread, but you could). It wasn't for 5th and 6th, but 6th for Hardy and 7th and 8th at Deal. With the idea that it would limit the OOB/feeder numbers to Wilson by vastly lowering the number of OOB feeder kids that come via Hardy and some other reasons (and deal with the Deal overcrowding). His kids are IB for Deal. I'm not endorsing or not - but just to raise the context that it was presented by someone who has spent a lot of time on the issues vs. I also thought originally it was preposterous but now think it's not as ridiculous that anyone at Deal would want it. https://www.facebook.com/W3EdNet/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Make Jefferson Middle School, Brookland, and Stuart Hobson and other middle schools more competitive and attractive to make more appealing to parents for their children to attend. Make Coolidge a phenomenal high school to draw from Wilson. Think about what parents may be looking for--safety, networking and diversity--in addition to a great curriculum that will help prepare future global leaders, change-makers, tech and business stars, and responsible citizens. Start a sports management, media, and entertainment program at Spingarn High School to take advantage of Langston golf course.

Bump. But in the meantime, developmentally, it seems to be a strong idea to pull 6th graders into a different space than 7th and 8th graders. Poking around academic literature now to see what the experts say...

Pull the 5th and 6th graders together at Hardy and you'll solve some of ES capacity issues at JKLMM as well!

It blows my mind how people on this thread spout off "easy peasy" solutions as if you just snap your fingers. There a myriad issues to consider. Staffing, administration, families who are expected to deal with multiple campuses and commutes, extra curriculars that go across grades (sports). We are a Hardy family and happy with how our future looks there with our new principal and newly engaged PTO and increasing feeder school population. Just leave us alone. Capacity issues at JKLMM stem from DCPS being spineless when it came to rewriting the boundaries and addressing OOB policies. It's absurd to devise these new solutions that destablize exisiting schools by contemplating solutions that are so overwhelmingly complex (compared to the easier solutions...ie boundaries and OOB policies).

Not to mention that Hardy isn't big enough to hold the 5th and 6th grades form Deal feeders alone, let alone coupled wth those from Hardy. Just drop this dumb idea already.

What's interesting is that this proposal was floated by the head of the Wilson-Ward 3 feeder network group - who posted identifying that it was his idea before (didn't search for the thread, but you could). It wasn't for 5th and 6th, but 6th for Hardy and 7th and 8th at Deal. With the idea that it would limit the OOB/feeder numbers to Wilson by vastly lowering the number of OOB feeder kids that come via Hardy and some other reasons (and deal with the Deal overcrowding). His kids are IB for Deal. I'm not endorsing or not - but just to raise the context that it was presented by someone who has spent a lot of time on the issues vs. I also thought originally it was preposterous but now think it's not as ridiculous that anyone at Deal would want it. https://www.facebook.com/W3EdNet/

It's ridiculous because there are better solutions to achieve the goals, but he proposes a half-baked one because the reasonable ones are rejected by the incompetent people running the system.

Ending out-of-boundary feeder rights and moving a chunk of students to be in-bound at Hardy rather than Deal would be a much more straightforward solution and would have better outcomes (eg, reasonable grade sizes; more years at a given school, etc)

[Anonymous]

Just because you don't like their decisions doesn't make them incompetent.

DCPS answers to political leadership. There is not one elected official - mayor, council member - who supports ending OOB feeder rights.

The political leadership has told DCPS to take feeder rights off the table. Vent your anger at the right people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just because you don't like their decisions doesn't make them incompetent.

DCPS answers to political leadership. There is not one elected official - mayor, council member - who supports ending OOB feeder rights.

The political leadership has told DCPS to take feeder rights off the table. Vent your anger at the right people.

This. Any solution that's designed to build a moat around WOTP schools and make them harder to get in from EOTP WILL. NOT. FLY.

Until higher SES families vote in political leadership that is focused on excellence for the schools it's simply not on the table. DCPS is focused on the bottom of the barrel, not the top. This is not going to change.

They know exactly what they want to do about overcrowding: get you to move to private. They can put two kids from an ungentrified neighborhood in your place and get 1/10th of the complaints.

[Anonymous]

So the answer is to vote out current leaders who care more about OOB children than the children in our neighborhood schools, and make willingness to reform the education system a priority in deciding who gets our votes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So the answer is to vote out current leaders who care more about OOB children than the children in our neighborhood schools, and make willingness to reform the education system a priority in deciding who gets our votes.

Considering DC that 7 of DC's 8 wards benefit from OOB, you'll never get a majority on the council to support.

How about building good neighborhood schools with solid feeder patterns?

[Anonymous]

I think it is time to vote out the current mayor. She is not particularly interested in education besides saying a few platitudes. She has been cutting funding for schools in terms of day to day spending and renovations. She has no kids and appears to feel that the schools are good enough already. She has no interest in dealing with the overcrowding in Ward 3 or negotiating a contract with the teacher union.

[Anonymous]

She also has people working for her who used political connections to jump the line.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it is time to vote out the current mayor. She is not particularly interested in education besides saying a few platitudes. She has been cutting funding for schools in terms of day to day spending and renovations. She has no kids and appears to feel that the schools are good enough already. She has no interest in dealing with the overcrowding in Ward 3 or negotiating a contract with the teacher union.

On this board, education is the most important issue. But per the 2016 US census data, households with 1 or more children under the age of 18 are the minority in the city (of 266,000 households, 55,000 include 1 or more people under the age of 18). A mayor needs to balance everyone's needs -- a prioritizing education above all else is not a winning strategy or probably appropriate.

[Anonymous]

IB for Hardy. I like this idea because its good for 6th graders. They are a no-mans grade - too big for the little kids in elementary school and too young to run with 8th graders (but they try and get themselves in trouble). In any event, we have a 4th grader and have not ruled out Hardy. I suspect he won't go but his younger sibling might in a few years. The problem is more Wilson - I am not sending either kid there because of the size, and it seems like it might be better to enter a private school in 6th grade rather than 9th. But who knows?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:IB for Hardy. I like this idea because its good for 6th graders. They are a no-mans grade - too big for the little kids in elementary school and too young to run with 8th graders (but they try and get themselves in trouble). In any event, we have a 4th grader and have not ruled out Hardy. I suspect he won't go but his younger sibling might in a few years. The problem is more Wilson - I am not sending either kid there because of the size, and it seems like it might be better to enter a private school in 6th grade rather than 9th. But who knows?

Interesting. I think the size of Wilson is a plus (absent the crowding part). Properly staffed it is pretty ideal. So many of the private schools are so small to me. But maybe that's because DH and I went to public schools that were much bigger than Wilson.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it is time to vote out the current mayor. She is not particularly interested in education besides saying a few platitudes. She has been cutting funding for schools in terms of day to day spending and renovations. She has no kids and appears to feel that the schools are good enough already. She has no interest in dealing with the overcrowding in Ward 3 or negotiating a contract with the teacher union.

Not entirely true. She's beholden to the gray haired crowd in Ward 4. Those are the families that generations ago attended Coolidge and have wistful dreams of it being anything other than baby jail. They wanted to waste $200 million of taxpayer dollars for that toilet, and she went along with it.