Committee on overcrowding in the Wilson feeder pattern
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Anonymous
This year DCPS changed their policy. OOB kids can not be sent back to their IB school if they are late, even repeatedly. |
Anonymous
| Citation? |
Anonymous
The policy still exists, although principals have some discretion on how to implement it. See page 33 http://enrolldcps.dc.gov/sites/dcpsenrollment/files/page_content/attachments/SY18-19%20DCPS%20Enrollment%20and%20Lottery%20Handbook_0.pdf K-12 Out-of-Boundary Students Students who attend schools outside of their boundary should be aware that the continued availability of the seat at that school for the following year is contingent upon attendance. This policy aims to reduce the rates of truancy for out-of-boundary students, and also provide principals with recourse for out-of-boundary students with the most severe attendance issues that do not respond to attendance improvement interventions. The DCPS Out-of-Boundary Attendance Policy states that K-12 out-of-boundary students with more than 10 unexcused absences or 20 unexcused tardies may be asked to return to their neighborhood schools at the end of the school year, provided the out-of-boundary school has implemented and documented all of the required DCPS attendance interventions. No student may be asked to transfer midyear, but students with chronic attendance issues can be prohibited from re-enrolling at the school for the following school year, if the student does not comply with the DCPS Out-of-Boundary Attendance Policy. School principals will have discretion in enforcing this policy. The principal will base her or his decision on whether the student’s attendance problem is due in significant part to the distance the student travels to school. ? Read the Out-of-Boundary Attendance Policy: http://dcps.dc.gov/page/dcps-policies ? For more information on DCPS attendance policies and protocol: http://dcps.dc.gov/attendance |
Anonymous
Very hard to do at this site, unless Wilson wants to give up its track and field. It would be better to reopen Western High School at the Duke Ellington site instead of expanding Wilson further. Move Ellington to a more central location near a Metro stop, as its students come from around the city. A new WOTP high school could move right into the building with very little reconfiguration. |
Anonymous
Effectively, DC has three public education systems: the charters, the Wilson feeder pyramid, and the rest of DCPS. Here are enrollment numbers for the three systems over the past ten years: SY 2007-08 SY 2017-18 Change Percent Wilson Feeder 6,851 9,770 2,919 43% DCPS w/o Wilson Feeder 42,571 38,212 -4,359 -10% Charter Schools 19,733 43,340 23,607 120% Total 69,155 91,322 22,167 32% (I'm trying to present a table here. If it comes out garbled, each row has four numbers: the number of kids ten years ago, the number last year, the change in the number of kids, and the percentage change.) DCPS overall lost about 1400 students in the past decade, shrinking 3%. This is the conundrum that DCPS faces: except for the Wilson feeder pyramid, families are voting with their feet and leaving their schools, even though the school-age population overall is experiencing heavy growth. So do you put resources into the schools that people want to go to, or the ones they don't want to go to? I think the answer is both, but it's not an easy question. If DCPS wanted to, they could cut off the flow of OOB kids into the Wilson pyramid in an instant. But they don't want to, they'd lose most of those families if they did. They'd rather they went to neighborhood schools, but they have no way to force them. |
Anonymous
That ship has sailed. One solution to the over crowding at Wilson is to stop Oyster Adams middle school from feeding to Wilson. This school is in Kalorama/Dupont. Can they feed go to Mcfarland? |
Anonymous
Noticed that the Mayor just pulled the Shaw Middle school out from the neighborhood without any political support. The location has been given to Banneker High (application high school) so they can expand, and enroll a few more hundred students. As noted elsewhere on this website, a reason given by the Mayor was to reduce overcrowding at Wilson. |
Anonymous
Yep. They want to attract families to high performing schools in other parts of the city -- a carrot strategy. |
Anonymous
Ellington is not moving. The building is setup for arts classes. Much of the site is the massive, state of the art theater for performances. I don't see how it can be re-configured into a "normal" high school without throwing away another $50m-100m. The Ellington ship has sailed, Bowser said so in my neighborhood meeting just a few weeks ago. However, the old Western HS track and field is severely under-utilized. It is a large piece of property just two blocks from Duke Ellington. DESA uses it for occassional marching band practice, but since the school no longer fields any sports teams it's mostly just used as a community field for rec league sports. This is prime surplus DCPS property - if there is another WoTP high school, I imagine it will go here. It will likely be an application school, since no Charter could afford to buy the property and develop it from scratch. |
Anonymous
This data is interesting. Thank you. |
Anonymous
Adding on to this, they do see that families outside the Wilson feeder pattern will leave charters and return to DCPS for high school (SWW, Banneker, McKinley are all destinations for some kids). So they are adding more capacity there -- the new Bard HS, the Coolidge early college program, an expanded Banneker. |
Anonymous
None of this dialogue makes enough sense to me. How would making Hardy 5-8 reduce the number of OOB students in the pathway? What does it have to do with boundaries? What school's boundaries, anyway? Would adding fifth grade to Hardy be paired with removing fifth grade from its five feeder elementary schools? Or from some but not others? Would those elementary schools then "replace" fifth grade with ....lottery PK3?? Or change their PK4 from lottery to by-right?? |
Anonymous
Also, if you're going to add grades to the MS in order to alleviate overcrowding at the HS, would it not make more sense to add it on the other side of the cycle, i.e. make the MS 6-9 and the HS 10-12? |
Anonymous
The Ellington ship has sailed, and let's hope that a few people get thrown in the brig as a result -- for kickbacks and corruption! How else to explain the obscene cost overruns for this project? |
Anonymous
The idea is that if you make Hardy more appealing to IB families you reduce the number of people who can attend Wilson by-right. Because when IB families go elsewhere for MS, they still have the right to attend Wilson. At the same time kids who go OOB to Hardy also have the right to attend Wilson. If those OOB kids can be replaced with IB kids the total number drops. What it shows is how politically difficult it would be to prune back OOB feeder rights, because that would be a much simpler way of doing the same thing. |