Maury Capitol Hill

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't know why people are getting caught up in a SH/EH war. Shouldn't we be supporting both schools?

YES we should be thrilled that there are 2 decent MS options on the Hill, so that the MS feed will generate less anxiety in the boundary talks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I was pointing out that IB percentage for an underenrolled school isn't meaningful. Another poster took that as a direct attack on EH. It wasn't meant to be. It's simply a fact. Look at the IB percentages in Ward 8. They're almost uniformly high because no one wants to attend them and so only IB kids who don't win -- or know to enter -- the lottery are stuck there. Of course it's not anywhere near as extreme at EH, but the fact remains that it is well under capacity which causes it to have an artificially high IB percentage.

Except the IB percentage at EH is growing at the same time the school is growing. Growing IB percentages absolutely reflect growing neighborhood buy-in at EH.

[Anonymous]

On a side note, where are those EH kids planning to go for high school? What is the buy-in for Eastern from these Maury parents?
If I have a kid who is Walls material, sure, give EH a shot. But for those that it isn't, where do they ultimately end up?

[Anonymous]

For Eliot-Hine students, Banneker and McKinley Tech are not too far away. KIPP and Friendship charter high schools. Washington Leadership Academy. Bard, Ellington, Phelps, basically all over the place.

You can see this data here: https://edscape.dc.gov/page/student-enrollment-pathways

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:On a side note, where are those EH kids planning to go for high school? What is the buy-in for Eastern from these Maury parents?
If I have a kid who is Walls material, sure, give EH a shot. But for those that it isn't, where do they ultimately end up?

Banneker, McKinley, Catholic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:On a side note, where are those EH kids planning to go for high school? What is the buy-in for Eastern from these Maury parents?
If I have a kid who is Walls material, sure, give EH a shot. But for those that it isn't, where do they ultimately end up?

Banneker, McKinley, Catholic.

I know it has not gotten a ton of buy-in from feeder schools, but I do know several families who are at Eastern - either in the IB track, or in the Health Sciences Academy (https://naf.org/topic/health-sciences). For those of you who have not logged on to the Boundary Committee townhalls (which I think was how this whole thread started) , the focus areas of the study they list are: Updated DCPS school boundaries , Revised school feeder patterns , Suggested programmatic opportunities , and Added enrollment lottery preferences. Some of those may impact Cap Hill schools more than others, but they are discussing programs within schools as well, and if there should be changes/additional programs in any DCPS schools.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:It sounds like the Maury boundary would move further East if TPTB thinks the present boundary is over-gentrified. Maybe the people who need to worry are those on the western side of the Maury boundary.

There is nowhere for Maury's eastern boundary to go -- it runs to RFK. More likely they'd look at shifting the northern and southern boundaries. Though I think if there are shifts, you would see the western border move. It would be contentious though because Maury already sits towards the western end -- if you eliminate some of this blocks to the west of Lincoln Park from it's boundary, you will be shifting people who paid a major premium to be not only near Maury but near the park and Eastern Market. And they would likely be shifted to a school significantly further away, since Ludlow-Taylor already has a very large boundary and is pretty full. Unless you moved part of the L-T boundary up to JOW.

It gets very, very messy very quickly. Which is why if there's a redraw, it is likely to be quite minor. But you still might wind up with some unhappy folks.

The most natural change to the Maury boundary would be to flatten the top of the boundary and steal Miner's "tail." Pushing up the northern boundary of Maury a block or two at the Western end would have very little effect on demographics (unless you also bumped up the tail), since you'd carveout some of the gentrified L-T zone and a sliver of the most gentrified part of the Miner zone. You could shift the bottom part of the Maury boundary north in compensation & send those kids to Payne, but I'm not sure that has a huge effect on anything except moving a few very wealthy families to a school they may or may not use.

One thing to keep in mind is that both of the L-T & Maury districts are pretty narrow North-to-South. Look at the map and where Maury and L-T are stacked on top of each other is just East Capitol to H St... all of which is heavily gentrified central Hill. There's nowhere to go for non-gentrified real estate in that swath.

You can't give much of the L-T boundary to JOW by the way, because L-T is only a block from the Northern edge of the boundary... and the whole boundary is only from north of D to H; it's actually really narrow already. (Also, it goes unsaid that affected families would freak out entirely. There are many, many heavily involved L-T families on those blocks.) Unlike what the PP said, L-T is actually a small boundary... among the smallest in the area. But the school is full, so making it bigger would just mean weeding out OOB kids and with an IB rate approaching 2/3rds, I can't see why DCPS would back that either.

What you could do is move the Western edge of the Maury boundary to Watkins. Parents would freak out. As with the shift to Payne, it's taking the wealthiest families out of the zone and zoning them to somewhere they won't like as much. I think parents might balk even more, because there's a sense Payne is on the upswing with solid leadership and Watkins is very much the reverse.

Some might freak out. Others would be glad for the opportunity to attend Stuart-Hobson instead of Eliot-Hine.

This^.

Not really. Maury families are pretty happy at EH.

Stuart-Hobson is the preferred choice for most.

Agree. Maury has been doing a great job driving the lottery left behind families to EH as of late, but don't pretend they wouldn't cheer if they were suddenly rezoned to SH.

I think your information is about 10 years out of date …

I mean less than 10 years ago EH was on the list of the 10 worst schools in DC. So yeah, I guess things have improved since then. I still stand by what I said. The Maury mafia lobbies hard for EH because they don’t want peel offs, and it’s impressive. If the whole school were rezoned for SH though, they’d still be happy. Even if just for the much superior arts programs. EH has come a long way in a short time and Maury families deserve a lot of the credit. Still SH has a substantial number of families IB for EH and the reverse isn’t true… which isn’t surprising.

there is no “Maury Mafia” - just people who want to stay in the neighborhood and who are inclined to support whatever school their kid attends. So yes, if the whole school were rezoned to SH they’d also be supporting SH.

and BTW the inbound percentage at EH is actually much higher now than SH (40% vs 28%) and will likely be even higher at EH this year as I understand it is a big 6th grade class.

Comparing IB percentages as an indicator of UMC buy-in doesn’t really work when (1) one of the schools has Miner as a feeder and (2) isn’t full/ran through its waiting list. There are plenty of schools in Ward 8 with a high IB percentage; it’s not always a good thing.

IB percentage does mean something, but another interesting piece of data is the enrollment pathways here on Edscape - https://edscape.dc.gov/page/student-enrollment-pathways This is for the 2022-2023 school year, I am not sure when they will update it with this year's data. This page talks about all schools, but since this thread is talking about EH and Stuart, you can see where the kids came from. Last year there were less than 10 kids from Maury, Payne and Miner each that went to Stuart Hobson, so we don't know exact numbers. As for EH, in last year's 6th grade class there were 27 from Maury, 17 from Miner, and 12 from Payne. The earlier poster was correct that there is a bigger 6th grade class this year, because I think about 30 kids came from Payne, which hasn't happened in recent years - not sure about numbers from other schools. And the conversation about which schools are full/not full is also a bit more nuanced - schools hire teachers and plan for the year based on projections made the prior year. I am not sure about Stuart Hobson, but I know about 25 more kids arrived in 6th grade at EH than were projected, so they needed to do a little reshuffling, even though on paper they may not look at capacity/full.

Except that these numbers tell the story... There are more IB kids at SH (56 from Watkins, 29 from JOW & 27 from LT in the data) than in EH by a considerable margin in the class that the data is for; if EH's IB percentage is higher, it's just that EH can't attract kids through the lottery as well as SH can. That's not a good thing to be celebrated.

Are these SH numbers for 6th grade or all grades combined?

[Anonymous]

Those are the feeder #s just for 6th grade from Edscape.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't know why people are getting caught up in a SH/EH war. Shouldn't we be supporting both schools?

YES we should be thrilled that there are 2 decent MS options on the Hill, so that the MS feed will generate less anxiety in the boundary talks.

Decent? You need better standards.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was pointing out that IB percentage for an underenrolled school isn't meaningful. Another poster took that as a direct attack on EH. It wasn't meant to be. It's simply a fact. Look at the IB percentages in Ward 8. They're almost uniformly high because no one wants to attend them and so only IB kids who don't win -- or know to enter -- the lottery are stuck there. Of course it's not anywhere near as extreme at EH, but the fact remains that it is well under capacity which causes it to have an artificially high IB percentage.

Except the IB percentage at EH is growing at the same time the school is growing. Growing IB percentages absolutely reflect growing neighborhood buy-in at EH.

Maury also became a much bigger school in the past few years so of course you’d expect more kids going from Maury to Eliot Hine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:During the last boundary review, there was some discussion about combining Maury and Miner, like the Cluster schools.

How can I sign up for this?

Let’s MIN-AURY!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:During the last boundary review, there was some discussion about combining Maury and Miner, like the Cluster schools.

How can I sign up for this?

Let’s MIN-AURY!

Is it looking like the boundary survey will merge the Miner and Maury IB areas?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:During the last boundary review, there was some discussion about combining Maury and Miner, like the Cluster schools.

How can I sign up for this?

Let’s MIN-AURY!

Is it looking like the boundary survey will merge the Miner and Maury IB areas?

No.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:During the last boundary review, there was some discussion about combining Maury and Miner, like the Cluster schools.

How can I sign up for this?

Let’s MIN-AURY!

Is it looking like the boundary survey will merge the Miner and Maury IB areas?

No.

No chance. During the last boundary review, they did surveys around “choice sets,” which included Maury/Miner/Payne. They were strongly opposed. I haven’t even heard of any serious thinking along those lines this time around.

[Anonymous]

Future Maury parents…the block is not happy about a cluster idea.