Renting an apartment to be inbounds

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thank you both. So why is there a requirement to tell the school within 3 days when you exit the boundary but stay in DC? Should I fear an audit or a request for anything more than my paystub that I provided when we enrolled? Again we will still be in close walking distance to the school (no car) assuming we can get out of this terrible condo.

Since you’re already on their radar, I’d definitely report it within the 3 days. I’d email now and say something like “I’d like written confirmation of the policy. We’re looking for new housing and can’t guarantee we’ll stay inbound, and also don’t know when we’ll be able to move.” Then if they put that 6 month requirement in writing, escalate that bad boy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thank you both. So why is there a requirement to tell the school within 3 days when you exit the boundary but stay in DC? Should I fear an audit or a request for anything more than my paystub that I provided when we enrolled? Again we will still be in close walking distance to the school (no car) assuming we can get out of this terrible condo.

It's just an arbitrary policy, there's no rhyme or reason behind why it's three days as opposed to seven or seventeen. We moved out of bounds, informed the school and said "please update our address in the system." They had no way of knowing if it was within 3 days or 100 days of our move. You have to understand that there's a huge disconnect between the policy that's implemented DCPS-wide and day-to-day operations at a school. No one at the school investigates this sort of thing and they have no interest or capacity to do so. They have jobs and responsibilities entirely unrelated to your move. They collect the required verification once a year at enrollment because it's done for every single student attending the school and the district provides very clear forms and procedures. Same with the lottery and waitlist process, all centrally regulated with clear systems and procedures that schools follow. For the unusual case of someone moving OOB within a year, they just follow the published policy and try to get back to their normal responsibilities as quickly as possible. For the same reason, no one will care that you remain relatively close to the school, you are IB moving OOB and that's all that really matters. You could move halfway across the city or just over the catchment boundary line, it's the same. There's no audit, you don't resubmit your paystub until next year when you re-enroll. There isn't even the capacity to audit this sort of thing. The only capacity to audit that exists is for residency fraud, not boundary issues. Boundary is enforced via policy and documents rather than any sort of auditing process.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thank you both. So why is there a requirement to tell the school within 3 days when you exit the boundary but stay in DC? Should I fear an audit or a request for anything more than my paystub that I provided when we enrolled? Again we will still be in close walking distance to the school (no car) assuming we can get out of this terrible condo.

It's just an arbitrary policy, there's no rhyme or reason behind why it's three days as opposed to seven or seventeen. We moved out of bounds, informed the school and said "please update our address in the system." They had no way of knowing if it was within 3 days or 100 days of our move. You have to understand that there's a huge disconnect between the policy that's implemented DCPS-wide and day-to-day operations at a school. No one at the school investigates this sort of thing and they have no interest or capacity to do so. They have jobs and responsibilities entirely unrelated to your move. They collect the required verification once a year at enrollment because it's done for every single student attending the school and the district provides very clear forms and procedures. Same with the lottery and waitlist process, all centrally regulated with clear systems and procedures that schools follow. For the unusual case of someone moving OOB within a year, they just follow the published policy and try to get back to their normal responsibilities as quickly as possible. For the same reason, no one will care that you remain relatively close to the school, you are IB moving OOB and that's all that really matters. You could move halfway across the city or just over the catchment boundary line, it's the same. There's no audit, you don't resubmit your paystub until next year when you re-enroll. There isn't even the capacity to audit this sort of thing. The only capacity to audit that exists is for residency fraud, not boundary issues. Boundary is enforced via policy and documents rather than any sort of auditing process.

I should add: it's possible we resubmitted a paystub to verify our new address, I don't remember for sure if they asked us to do that. But certainly nothing more than that.

[Anonymous]

As a former family who lived in bounds for Janney when our kids were younger, but now live in a different ward, I remember feeling like Janney was so overcrowded and that may have been part of the reason why some families go a little nuts when it came to trying to root out families who they perceived as not belonging. I am sorry to say I might have got caught up in it a time or two myself. I felt like the classes were so full so I looked for a scapegoat in people trying to get in who didn’t live there. Now that our family lives in a different part of the city, I realize that that area is SO not like the rest of DC and the people who live there, amongst the wealthiest in the city, are unfortunately just not exposed to what most of DC is like which therefore informs there behavior. Having compassion is hard if you don’t live in someone else’s shoes and you’ve never lived outside your bubble. At the end of the day, we all pay city taxes and want a good education for our kids. Not in the future, but now. Some communities just don’t have the time or the money to build up their neighborhood schools. If you live near a food school, it’s partially luck.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a former family who lived in bounds for Janney when our kids were younger, but now live in a different ward, I remember feeling like Janney was so overcrowded and that may have been part of the reason why some families go a little nuts when it came to trying to root out families who they perceived as not belonging. I am sorry to say I might have got caught up in it a time or two myself. I felt like the classes were so full so I looked for a scapegoat in people trying to get in who didn’t live there. Now that our family lives in a different part of the city, I realize that that area is SO not like the rest of DC and the people who live there, amongst the wealthiest in the city, are unfortunately just not exposed to what most of DC is like which therefore informs there behavior. Having compassion is hard if you don’t live in someone else’s shoes and you’ve never lived outside your bubble. At the end of the day, we all pay city taxes and want a good education for our kids. Not in the future, but now. Some communities just don’t have the time or the money to build up their neighborhood schools. If you live near a food school, it’s partially luck.

This is what I have heard about our school (starting Kinder this year) as well. How does this scapegoating play out exactly? We are hoping to move to a building that is just a few blocks away and so still in walking distance but I don’t think I’d enjoy that kind of paranoia and tribalism even if we stay in bounds for the full year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a former family who lived in bounds for Janney when our kids were younger, but now live in a different ward, I remember feeling like Janney was so overcrowded and that may have been part of the reason why some families go a little nuts when it came to trying to root out families who they perceived as not belonging. I am sorry to say I might have got caught up in it a time or two myself. I felt like the classes were so full so I looked for a scapegoat in people trying to get in who didn’t live there. Now that our family lives in a different part of the city, I realize that that area is SO not like the rest of DC and the people who live there, amongst the wealthiest in the city, are unfortunately just not exposed to what most of DC is like which therefore informs there behavior. Having compassion is hard if you don’t live in someone else’s shoes and you’ve never lived outside your bubble. At the end of the day, we all pay city taxes and want a good education for our kids. Not in the future, but now. Some communities just don’t have the time or the money to build up their neighborhood schools. If you live near a food school, it’s partially luck.

This is really compassionate and impressive for DCUM. Thank you for sharing and for your open mindedness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a former family who lived in bounds for Janney when our kids were younger, but now live in a different ward, I remember feeling like Janney was so overcrowded and that may have been part of the reason why some families go a little nuts when it came to trying to root out families who they perceived as not belonging. I am sorry to say I might have got caught up in it a time or two myself. I felt like the classes were so full so I looked for a scapegoat in people trying to get in who didn’t live there. Now that our family lives in a different part of the city, I realize that that area is SO not like the rest of DC and the people who live there, amongst the wealthiest in the city, are unfortunately just not exposed to what most of DC is like which therefore informs there behavior. Having compassion is hard if you don’t live in someone else’s shoes and you’ve never lived outside your bubble. At the end of the day, we all pay city taxes and want a good education for our kids. Not in the future, but now. Some communities just don’t have the time or the money to build up their neighborhood schools. If you live near a food school, it’s partially luck.

This is what I have heard about our school (starting Kinder this year) as well. How does this scapegoating play out exactly? We are hoping to move to a building that is just a few blocks away and so still in walking distance but I don’t think I’d enjoy that kind of paranoia and tribalism even if we stay in bounds for the full year.

I'm a Janney family too. I know many families who are not inbound in my child's grade, and this grade for many years was the "bubble" grade. Honestly I never really thought about why they were at Janney, it was none of my business. I guess I'm not running in the crowd that looks for this sort of thing, trying to "scapegoat" these families and I'm glad. So PP, realize not everyone is looking for the worst in families or living in bubbles.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The policy: https://enrolldcps.dc.gov/sites/dcpsenrollment/files/page_content/attachments/SY22-23%20Enrollment%20and%20Lottery%20Handbook%20FINAL_0.pdf

Moving Out of Boundary After Enrolling

Where a PK-12 student has been attending an in-boundary school and then moves out of boundary while remaining in the District of Columbia, the student has the right to attend their new in-boundary school. The student may also continue to attend the current school through the end of the school’s terminal grade. All families are required to notify the school of any change of residence within three (3)
school days of such change.

After the terminal grade, the student has the right to attend the in-boundary school assigned for their next grade based on their home address and can apply to schools outside of the boundary via the My School DC lottery. They will lose their right to attend their old in-boundary feeder school and will need to use the My School DC lottery to apply as an out-of-boundary student to attend that school. For
information on options where a student moves out of the District of Columbia, see page 34.


The catch is that they don't actually send you back to your IB feeder school after the terminal grade. Everyone enrolled gets processed to enroll in the feeder school, since these are the only students that wouldn't have feeder rights, and apparently it's such a tiny percentage that it doesn't matter to OSSE. Or they just don't bother because DC government.

Wow, in my city this policy was de facto but not de jure, and now it is being challenged, though I still know tons of families who use old/fake/grandma's address to get into a "preferred" elementary school. I'm surprised that D.C. will allow someone who lived in a kindergarten zone for one minute to remain through fifth grade, but I also understand that they are dealing with human psychology and they've decided that making allowances for would-be white-flighters keeps some middle class families in the system, at least for longer.

I've learned that "word of mouth" about good and bad schools is often based on hearsay and old/bad information. Visit the schools yourself. Get over the logical fallacy that a school can't be good if people you know have rejected it. They may have rejected it just because everyone else they know did too. It creates a vicious cycle of self-reinforcing segregation.

We were zoned out of a preferred school and into a non-preferred school. What was puzzling is that the new school had nearly identical scores and is fully accredited, but when all the (mainly white, mainly affluent) parents from my neighborhood visited the school, the principal had to keep saying "Yes we ARE accredited" like a broken record because that was the word on the street, and why would the school's actual principal know better than my neighbor who rejected the school 12 years ago?

If you are angling to get into a preferred school, please do your due diligence to see what's what with your actual zoned school. You may be surprised at all the good things that are going on there that aren't being reported to you. People who spend the money for private or go to the trouble to rent a property elsewhere just for kindergarten admittance are unlikely to be reliable narrators about the actual conditions of the local school. How do schools "get better" anyway? Because somebody connected to you took the time to check them out, enrolled their kid, and then reported back. I guarantee you the people who've been attending the school for a long time already knew it was a good school. (Case in point: during a rezoning meeting, a mom from our now-zoned school stood up and said, "I don't know why you keep saying it's not a good school; it IS a good school!" and parents from our original school booed her. BOOED her. In front of children. For saying a school that had nearly identical test scores, just a higher poverty rate and a much smaller white population, was a good school. I mean, when you think about it, wouldn't the test scores being only a couple of points lower yet with a much higher poverty rate means it's the SUPERIOR school?) Don't be those booers who think a school is only good if their friends already go there.

So the test scores were the same or the test scores were a “little lower”?

[Anonymous]

Can someone help me understand why one would go through so many hoops instead of just moving to Montgomery or Fairfax County?

Serious question.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can someone help me understand why one would go through so many hoops instead of just moving to Montgomery or Fairfax County?

Serious question.

Our mortgage is $1,700 a month and our church and activities are in the city. Plus I grew up in the suburbs and much prefer the city. If we sold and tried to move back when kids are out of school, we’d probably triple our mortgage. Better to rent and rent for a few years and break even (or close to it) than permanently relocate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can someone help me understand why one would go through so many hoops instead of just moving to Montgomery or Fairfax County?

Serious question.

Our mortgage is $1,700 a month and our church and activities are in the city. Plus I grew up in the suburbs and much prefer the city. If we sold and tried to move back when kids are out of school, we’d probably triple our mortgage. Better to rent and rent for a few years and break even (or close to it) than permanently relocate.

Thanks for the explanation.

[Anonymous]

Preference for the city and carless life and same as PP - mortgage is $1800/mo. Have no desire to get a car (an extra $700/mo) and move to the burbs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can someone help me understand why one would go through so many hoops instead of just moving to Montgomery or Fairfax County?

Serious question.

not op (and not dealing with a similar enrollment situation) but spouse is a DC government employee and was hired with residency preference, so we have to live here for the first 7 years of employment, and the clock starts over with each promotion to a new position. If promoted to a high enough level, we have to live here as long as the job lasts.

[Anonymous]

We have one child and staying in our very affordable EOTP house will allow us to pick the middle/high school that’s the best fit for our child at that time. There’s a big difference between Hardy, Deal, BCC, Blair, etc. I don’t want to commit to one school pyramid now before we know what kind of learner our first grader will be. Maybe they’ll thrive in a big environment like Deal or maybe they’d do better at Hardy or somewhere in MCPS. Keeping our mortgage low gives us the flexibility to afford a rental in places we definitely couldn’t afford to buy.

[Anonymous]

hate lengthy commuting time. love walkable amenities. think kids actually benefit some from growing up in a setting where everyone is not the same socioeconomically. unconvinced that dcps is necessarily worse than the surrounding suburban school districts. dcps class sizes are often lovely (under 20).