Maury Capitol Hill

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This a whole process stinks of why folks governing with no skin in the game is a bad idea.

City wide metric improves, high priority goal achieved. High fives all around, job done.

Miner and Maury improving? Not a high priority, wont ever matter for the advisory committee.

Precisely.

I find it really interesting that instead of looking at how to attract higher SES families to Miner, the only thing they can think of is forcing the schools together. Also that SWS is apparently exempt from the clustering conversation. SWS is a 12 minute walk from Miner down F St. If they turned Miner into SWS at Miner and allowed IB Miner students preference, that would actually almost instantaneously create SES balance.

Hey, leave SWS out of this mess!

Do city-wide DCPS already have an at-risk set aside? If not, does anyone know if one is being contemplated as part of this study?

SWS already has the EA preference.

Only for PK3 and PK4 though. The idea would be to make it more grades, maybe all grades, and set aside rather than give a preference.

I would support this but it will have zero impact on kids at Miner and likely little impact generally because SWS is such a small school. I imagine the reason they have the preference for PK grades but not upper grades is that they have so few lottery spots available for upper grades as to make it pointless. Even if you agreed that 100% of available lottery spots for upper grades at SWS were EA set asides, you're talking a handful of spots per grade, sometimes none. Plus I'm not even sure that's the best thing for a kid who is genuinely at risk -- SWS can be insular and hard to adjust to for UMC white kids on the Hill if they are entering at 2nd or 3rd. It would be extra challenging for a child with genuine issues, and I'd worry that the curriculum would not do a good job at addressing deficiencies -- SWS is not very academically rigorous but relies heavily on the fact that most of it's population is high income and so kids are getting a ton of support/enrichment at home.

Plus those EA spots would be available on a city wide basis, not just to kids in the Miner boundary, so we're talking about helping like 0-5 Miner IB kids. Yay? It's meaningless.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This a whole process stinks of why folks governing with no skin in the game is a bad idea.

City wide metric improves, high priority goal achieved. High fives all around, job done.

Miner and Maury improving? Not a high priority, wont ever matter for the advisory committee.

Precisely.

I find it really interesting that instead of looking at how to attract higher SES families to Miner, the only thing they can think of is forcing the schools together. Also that SWS is apparently exempt from the clustering conversation. SWS is a 12 minute walk from Miner down F St. If they turned Miner into SWS at Miner and allowed IB Miner students preference, that would actually almost instantaneously create SES balance.

Hey, leave SWS out of this mess!

Do city-wide DCPS already have an at-risk set aside? If not, does anyone know if one is being contemplated as part of this study?

SWS already has the EA preference.

Only for PK3 and PK4 though. The idea would be to make it more grades, maybe all grades, and set aside rather than give a preference.

I would support this but it will have zero impact on kids at Miner and likely little impact generally because SWS is such a small school. I imagine the reason they have the preference for PK grades but not upper grades is that they have so few lottery spots available for upper grades as to make it pointless. Even if you agreed that 100% of available lottery spots for upper grades at SWS were EA set asides, you're talking a handful of spots per grade, sometimes none. Plus I'm not even sure that's the best thing for a kid who is genuinely at risk -- SWS can be insular and hard to adjust to for UMC white kids on the Hill if they are entering at 2nd or 3rd. It would be extra challenging for a child with genuine issues, and I'd worry that the curriculum would not do a good job at addressing deficiencies -- SWS is not very academically rigorous but relies heavily on the fact that most of it's population is high income and so kids are getting a ton of support/enrichment at home.

Is Maury any more academically rigorous? Genuinely asking.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This a whole process stinks of why folks governing with no skin in the game is a bad idea.

City wide metric improves, high priority goal achieved. High fives all around, job done.

Miner and Maury improving? Not a high priority, wont ever matter for the advisory committee.

Precisely.

I find it really interesting that instead of looking at how to attract higher SES families to Miner, the only thing they can think of is forcing the schools together. Also that SWS is apparently exempt from the clustering conversation. SWS is a 12 minute walk from Miner down F St. If they turned Miner into SWS at Miner and allowed IB Miner students preference, that would actually almost instantaneously create SES balance.

Hey, leave SWS out of this mess!

Do city-wide DCPS already have an at-risk set aside? If not, does anyone know if one is being contemplated as part of this study?

SWS already has the EA preference.

Only for PK3 and PK4 though. The idea would be to make it more grades, maybe all grades, and set aside rather than give a preference.

I would support this but it will have zero impact on kids at Miner and likely little impact generally because SWS is such a small school. I imagine the reason they have the preference for PK grades but not upper grades is that they have so few lottery spots available for upper grades as to make it pointless. Even if you agreed that 100% of available lottery spots for upper grades at SWS were EA set asides, you're talking a handful of spots per grade, sometimes none. Plus I'm not even sure that's the best thing for a kid who is genuinely at risk -- SWS can be insular and hard to adjust to for UMC white kids on the Hill if they are entering at 2nd or 3rd. It would be extra challenging for a child with genuine issues, and I'd worry that the curriculum would not do a good job at addressing deficiencies -- SWS is not very academically rigorous but relies heavily on the fact that most of it's population is high income and so kids are getting a ton of support/enrichment at home.

Plus those EA spots would be available on a city wide basis, not just to kids in the Miner boundary, so we're talking about helping like 0-5 Miner IB kids. Yay? It's meaningless.

This would be part of a larger city wide approach creating at-risk set asides for schools with a lower than 30% at risk population. It would basically fill seats until the school reached that percentage. This would help prioritize access for at-risk kids across the city - so not meaningless. More meaningful and more likely to achieve beneficial outcomes for many kids across multiple schools than this undeveloped cluster idea.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t know what they should do here. The SWS idea is interesting and I hadn’t thought of it, but it does make a lot of sense.

That said, I just want to reassure people with genuine safety concerns about Miner. It’s true it’s near starburst and there has been crime nearby, but for whatever reason, when we were there, it truly didn’t feel unsafe and those things weren’t impacting our lives. You don’t have to commute through starburst. You can take the streetcar or bus to 14th and H or to Maryland. It’s a cute and pleasant walk past a bunch of row houses. It is true there violent crime within blocks of the school, but that’s sadly the case in a lot of the hill, and like a lot of the residential pockets of the hill, the area around the school doesn’t feel unsafe at all. I looked forward to walking there every day with a baby and toddler, and I actually miss making the walk now because it’s just a very pretty stroll down Tennessee or F street or Emerald.

The school itself is nice. Not Maury nice, and they are always running out of basics like wipes, but it’s a happy feeling place. They have a pet turtle. The school also doesn’t feel chaotic. The kids are nice to be around, and we went to lots of fun activities in the evenings without any fear for safety, and even the older kids were friendly and pretty orderly for kids.

There are also some fantastic teachers and administrators there, truly. Several *still* text me to ask how my kid is doing. There was a particularly high needs kid in one of our classes, and the kid was getting lots of good, dedicated attention with what seemed like evidence-based practices. There are also wonderful families at Miner, including the families of at risk kids. Really nice parents who go to incredible lengths—often without any financial safety net or reliable work schedules—to support their kids. And i think my kid benefited a lot from realizing that the umc lifestyle isn’t the only one on the planet. So they have the raw materials to have a great school.

Like a lot of people, we left for a few reasons. First, we were not at all confident about teachers in the upper grades. Younger kids’ classrooms were beautiful and decked out, and older ones seemed more bare and sad, and we heard some troubling things about some upper grades teachers. Second, we want a diverse school, and we don’t want our kids only in school with other umc folks. That makes the nw schools unappealing, tbh. But at miner, the concentration of high risk kids is really disproportionately high, and that means attention is rightfully on those kids in most classrooms. That just makes it harder to feel confident your kid will get enough attention and just academic stimulation. And so many of the kids have major obstacles, it’s hard to imagine there being space for smaller but very real stuff (like an umc kid who is behind in reading or struggles to emotionally regulate). That problem seems like one of the fundamental issues with stark socioeconomic segregation, and it makes it really hard for even very dedicated people like the ones we met at miner to get traction. In contrast, at our new school, there’s a small number of kids who are behind, and they seem to have a whole team surrounding them to help. I noticed a kid in class acting out and expressed concern to the teacher (not complaining about the kid, but just flagging I wondered if he was ok and needed support) and I learned there was already a team wide effort to help this kid out. Third, the freaking PTA money and what it brings. Miner honestly has an awesome PTA. But good lord, the one at the new school is a machine. They raise a ton and it all goes to creating these joyful and enriching experiences for the kids. These super involved PTA parents also seem to catch *everything* and fix it asap. I truly don’t know how any of them have the time, but it’s like the school has a whole second league of administrators keeping on top of things. That’s another reason segregation is so bad. Some schools get that in spades, and others barely at all. The cluster *could* address a lot of this. If it happens, I hope the super strong parent community at Maury will pour their talents into figuring out how to make it work well instead of fleeing.

I think the implementation concerns around the cluster are serious, and the lack of apparent planning makes no sense. but i think there’s a scenario where this doesn’t *destroy* Maury.

As for the hill being targeted instead of northwest—I think it’s just more obviously feasible here because of the imbalance in schools so close together. But northwest should be getting attention on this front too! Have you looked at the at risk populations at places like Janney and Lafayette? It’s close to zero! Truly it’s maybe one or two kids. I think the culprit there is housing segregation and transportation issues. I don’t see how they fix the segregation up there without thinking about those issues in tandem. I don’t know much about urban planning, but I would love to see more mixed income and low income subsidized housing in northwest, combined with shuttles etc where needed.

The PTA stuff is a bit of a red herring I think. Doubling the school isn't going to double the PTA's fundraising; even if Maury parents' contributions stay at the same levels (no guarantee, if they move their kid elsewhere to get more academic support, or if they have to use more of their resources to get their kid individualized academic attention outside of school), the cluster school will be getting significantly less PTA support.

It's uncomfortable, but PTA fundraising/support is something that is mostly a function of the SES of the school population. High SES parents are always going to have more resources to support their kids, whether through the PTA or something else. It's never going to be equal. DC responds to this by allocating more funding for students/schools that are less likely to have these resources -- Miner gets a ton more money from the city than Maury (though Maury also gets less per student than the NW schools, which I've never really understood -- but I'm not deep in this stuff).

Those averages can be really misleading. It tends to be driven by the special education and at-risk allocations in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, and whether the school offers self-contained classrooms, which are costly per-student because the class size is much smaller. A few kids with 1:1 aides enrolling or leaving a school can cause the averages to shift.

This, thank you. The average kid at Miner is not getting more from DCPS than the average kid at Maury. It's just that there are some extremely high needs kids at Miner who are getting a lot more funding than most kids at either school, and that drives the dollars going to Miner way up. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Miner has several self-contained SpEd classrooms. It's stuff like that, as well as intervention and tutoring programs for at risk kids and those significantly below grade level. If you are a MC or UMC kid at Miner who does not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and not severely below grade level, you likely get LESS money/attention than a similar kid at Maury, where the money likely gets spread more evenly across the school.

And if we combine the schools, all the MC or UMC kids who do not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and are not severely below grade level can get less money/attention. A triumph.

[Anonymous]

Sorry, what is MC and UMC?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This a whole process stinks of why folks governing with no skin in the game is a bad idea.

City wide metric improves, high priority goal achieved. High fives all around, job done.

Miner and Maury improving? Not a high priority, wont ever matter for the advisory committee.

Precisely.

I find it really interesting that instead of looking at how to attract higher SES families to Miner, the only thing they can think of is forcing the schools together. Also that SWS is apparently exempt from the clustering conversation. SWS is a 12 minute walk from Miner down F St. If they turned Miner into SWS at Miner and allowed IB Miner students preference, that would actually almost instantaneously create SES balance.

Hey, leave SWS out of this mess!

Do city-wide DCPS already have an at-risk set aside? If not, does anyone know if one is being contemplated as part of this study?

SWS already has the EA preference.

Only for PK3 and PK4 though. The idea would be to make it more grades, maybe all grades, and set aside rather than give a preference.

I would support this but it will have zero impact on kids at Miner and likely little impact generally because SWS is such a small school. I imagine the reason they have the preference for PK grades but not upper grades is that they have so few lottery spots available for upper grades as to make it pointless. Even if you agreed that 100% of available lottery spots for upper grades at SWS were EA set asides, you're talking a handful of spots per grade, sometimes none. Plus I'm not even sure that's the best thing for a kid who is genuinely at risk -- SWS can be insular and hard to adjust to for UMC white kids on the Hill if they are entering at 2nd or 3rd. It would be extra challenging for a child with genuine issues, and I'd worry that the curriculum would not do a good job at addressing deficiencies -- SWS is not very academically rigorous but relies heavily on the fact that most of it's population is high income and so kids are getting a ton of support/enrichment at home.

Plus those EA spots would be available on a city wide basis, not just to kids in the Miner boundary, so we're talking about helping like 0-5 Miner IB kids. Yay? It's meaningless.

This would be part of a larger city wide approach creating at-risk set asides for schools with a lower than 30% at risk population. It would basically fill seats until the school reached that percentage. This would help prioritize access for at-risk kids across the city - so not meaningless. More meaningful and more likely to achieve beneficial outcomes for many kids across multiple schools than this undeveloped cluster idea.

How does this work for boundary schools that are required to enroll every child who lives in the boundary though? There are NW schools with almost no at risk kids in boundary, but they are at or close to capacity. How do these schools reach that 30% threshold without bigger schools or trailers or something? And also how do the at risk kids get to those schools if they aren't near public transportation and they are so far from the parts of the city where there are enough at risk kids to fill those spots?

I feel like what would happen with that suggestion is that you'd boost the percentage of at risk kids a a handful of skills on the East side of town, and that's it. Schools like Janney and Lafayette would offer a small handful of EA spots each year, mostly in upper grades, and they would never fill because of commute issues, and people would say "well I guess families with at risk kids just don't actually want access to these schools" and that would be the end of it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:SWS is a great point. Why is it not being included in this discussion? It does have Equitable Access but only for PK3 and PK4. Unlike Maury it doesn't have the challenges of serving all kids within a boundary. It's an outlier racially and by income. A much bigger EA preference or set-aside would be far easier to implement and achieve many of the goals the DME claims to have.

Ha, nice try but not gonna happen.

Why not?

It doesn’t have a boundary, for one, so not clear who would be clustering. But SWS is the original awkwardly white school on the Hill, without a doubt! Before Brent!

+1. People ask why the Cluster is so bad these days. It was great when SWS and the Montessori schools were both part of the Cluster. Of course DCPS came in and took them both out and made them into their own schools.

Interesting. How did that work? What did it mean that they were part of the cluster?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This a whole process stinks of why folks governing with no skin in the game is a bad idea.

City wide metric improves, high priority goal achieved. High fives all around, job done.

Miner and Maury improving? Not a high priority, wont ever matter for the advisory committee.

Precisely.

I find it really interesting that instead of looking at how to attract higher SES families to Miner, the only thing they can think of is forcing the schools together. Also that SWS is apparently exempt from the clustering conversation. SWS is a 12 minute walk from Miner down F St. If they turned Miner into SWS at Miner and allowed IB Miner students preference, that would actually almost instantaneously create SES balance.

Hey, leave SWS out of this mess!

Do city-wide DCPS already have an at-risk set aside? If not, does anyone know if one is being contemplated as part of this study?

SWS already has the EA preference.

Only for PK3 and PK4 though. The idea would be to make it more grades, maybe all grades, and set aside rather than give a preference.

I would support this but it will have zero impact on kids at Miner and likely little impact generally because SWS is such a small school. I imagine the reason they have the preference for PK grades but not upper grades is that they have so few lottery spots available for upper grades as to make it pointless. Even if you agreed that 100% of available lottery spots for upper grades at SWS were EA set asides, you're talking a handful of spots per grade, sometimes none. Plus I'm not even sure that's the best thing for a kid who is genuinely at risk -- SWS can be insular and hard to adjust to for UMC white kids on the Hill if they are entering at 2nd or 3rd. It would be extra challenging for a child with genuine issues, and I'd worry that the curriculum would not do a good job at addressing deficiencies -- SWS is not very academically rigorous but relies heavily on the fact that most of it's population is high income and so kids are getting a ton of support/enrichment at home.

Plus those EA spots would be available on a city wide basis, not just to kids in the Miner boundary, so we're talking about helping like 0-5 Miner IB kids. Yay? It's meaningless.

This would be part of a larger city wide approach creating at-risk set asides for schools with a lower than 30% at risk population. It would basically fill seats until the school reached that percentage. This would help prioritize access for at-risk kids across the city - so not meaningless. More meaningful and more likely to achieve beneficial outcomes for many kids across multiple schools than this undeveloped cluster idea.

How does this work for boundary schools that are required to enroll every child who lives in the boundary though? There are NW schools with almost no at risk kids in boundary, but they are at or close to capacity. How do these schools reach that 30% threshold without bigger schools or trailers or something? And also how do the at risk kids get to those schools if they aren't near public transportation and they are so far from the parts of the city where there are enough at risk kids to fill those spots?

I feel like what would happen with that suggestion is that you'd boost the percentage of at risk kids a a handful of skills on the East side of town, and that's it. Schools like Janney and Lafayette would offer a small handful of EA spots each year, mostly in upper grades, and they would never fill because of commute issues, and people would say "well I guess families with at risk kids just don't actually want access to these schools" and that would be the end of it.

That is why massively increasing the proportion at SWS is the perfect solution.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t know what they should do here. The SWS idea is interesting and I hadn’t thought of it, but it does make a lot of sense.

That said, I just want to reassure people with genuine safety concerns about Miner. It’s true it’s near starburst and there has been crime nearby, but for whatever reason, when we were there, it truly didn’t feel unsafe and those things weren’t impacting our lives. You don’t have to commute through starburst. You can take the streetcar or bus to 14th and H or to Maryland. It’s a cute and pleasant walk past a bunch of row houses. It is true there violent crime within blocks of the school, but that’s sadly the case in a lot of the hill, and like a lot of the residential pockets of the hill, the area around the school doesn’t feel unsafe at all. I looked forward to walking there every day with a baby and toddler, and I actually miss making the walk now because it’s just a very pretty stroll down Tennessee or F street or Emerald.

The school itself is nice. Not Maury nice, and they are always running out of basics like wipes, but it’s a happy feeling place. They have a pet turtle. The school also doesn’t feel chaotic. The kids are nice to be around, and we went to lots of fun activities in the evenings without any fear for safety, and even the older kids were friendly and pretty orderly for kids.

There are also some fantastic teachers and administrators there, truly. Several *still* text me to ask how my kid is doing. There was a particularly high needs kid in one of our classes, and the kid was getting lots of good, dedicated attention with what seemed like evidence-based practices. There are also wonderful families at Miner, including the families of at risk kids. Really nice parents who go to incredible lengths—often without any financial safety net or reliable work schedules—to support their kids. And i think my kid benefited a lot from realizing that the umc lifestyle isn’t the only one on the planet. So they have the raw materials to have a great school.

Like a lot of people, we left for a few reasons. First, we were not at all confident about teachers in the upper grades. Younger kids’ classrooms were beautiful and decked out, and older ones seemed more bare and sad, and we heard some troubling things about some upper grades teachers. Second, we want a diverse school, and we don’t want our kids only in school with other umc folks. That makes the nw schools unappealing, tbh. But at miner, the concentration of high risk kids is really disproportionately high, and that means attention is rightfully on those kids in most classrooms. That just makes it harder to feel confident your kid will get enough attention and just academic stimulation. And so many of the kids have major obstacles, it’s hard to imagine there being space for smaller but very real stuff (like an umc kid who is behind in reading or struggles to emotionally regulate). That problem seems like one of the fundamental issues with stark socioeconomic segregation, and it makes it really hard for even very dedicated people like the ones we met at miner to get traction. In contrast, at our new school, there’s a small number of kids who are behind, and they seem to have a whole team surrounding them to help. I noticed a kid in class acting out and expressed concern to the teacher (not complaining about the kid, but just flagging I wondered if he was ok and needed support) and I learned there was already a team wide effort to help this kid out. Third, the freaking PTA money and what it brings. Miner honestly has an awesome PTA. But good lord, the one at the new school is a machine. They raise a ton and it all goes to creating these joyful and enriching experiences for the kids. These super involved PTA parents also seem to catch *everything* and fix it asap. I truly don’t know how any of them have the time, but it’s like the school has a whole second league of administrators keeping on top of things. That’s another reason segregation is so bad. Some schools get that in spades, and others barely at all. The cluster *could* address a lot of this. If it happens, I hope the super strong parent community at Maury will pour their talents into figuring out how to make it work well instead of fleeing.

I think the implementation concerns around the cluster are serious, and the lack of apparent planning makes no sense. but i think there’s a scenario where this doesn’t *destroy* Maury.

As for the hill being targeted instead of northwest—I think it’s just more obviously feasible here because of the imbalance in schools so close together. But northwest should be getting attention on this front too! Have you looked at the at risk populations at places like Janney and Lafayette? It’s close to zero! Truly it’s maybe one or two kids. I think the culprit there is housing segregation and transportation issues. I don’t see how they fix the segregation up there without thinking about those issues in tandem. I don’t know much about urban planning, but I would love to see more mixed income and low income subsidized housing in northwest, combined with shuttles etc where needed.

The PTA stuff is a bit of a red herring I think. Doubling the school isn't going to double the PTA's fundraising; even if Maury parents' contributions stay at the same levels (no guarantee, if they move their kid elsewhere to get more academic support, or if they have to use more of their resources to get their kid individualized academic attention outside of school), the cluster school will be getting significantly less PTA support.

It's uncomfortable, but PTA fundraising/support is something that is mostly a function of the SES of the school population. High SES parents are always going to have more resources to support their kids, whether through the PTA or something else. It's never going to be equal. DC responds to this by allocating more funding for students/schools that are less likely to have these resources -- Miner gets a ton more money from the city than Maury (though Maury also gets less per student than the NW schools, which I've never really understood -- but I'm not deep in this stuff).

Those averages can be really misleading. It tends to be driven by the special education and at-risk allocations in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, and whether the school offers self-contained classrooms, which are costly per-student because the class size is much smaller. A few kids with 1:1 aides enrolling or leaving a school can cause the averages to shift.

This, thank you. The average kid at Miner is not getting more from DCPS than the average kid at Maury. It's just that there are some extremely high needs kids at Miner who are getting a lot more funding than most kids at either school, and that drives the dollars going to Miner way up. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Miner has several self-contained SpEd classrooms. It's stuff like that, as well as intervention and tutoring programs for at risk kids and those significantly below grade level. If you are a MC or UMC kid at Miner who does not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and not severely below grade level, you likely get LESS money/attention than a similar kid at Maury, where the money likely gets spread more evenly across the school.

And if we combine the schools, all the MC or UMC kids who do not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and are not severely below grade level can get less money/attention. A triumph.

One argument against this though is that the combined school, unlike Miner currently, would have a critical mass of kids like this which would enable the school to meet their needs because you'd be meeting the needs of hundreds of kids at once.

What happens at a school with demographics like Miner's is the there are so few kids like this that it's impossible to create programming for them. You wind up with kids who are reading above grade level just sitting in a corner doing lessons on iReady while the rest of the class does remedial work, because there aren't even enough kids doing above grade level work to create a small group for them. And unlike at other schools, you can't pull that kid out and send them to reading in the next grade up, which is one way DCPS differentiates when they have advanced kids. Because the kids one grade up are also below grade level.

Just like it benefits at risk kids to have a critical mass of similar kids in order to offer services that target their specific needs, it also helps kids who are advance or even just on grade level to have this.

As someone with a kid in a school like Miner who is above grade level in math and reading, I can really see how a cluster like what is proposed would be especially beneficial for kids like mine who have few if any peers at school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This a whole process stinks of why folks governing with no skin in the game is a bad idea.

City wide metric improves, high priority goal achieved. High fives all around, job done.

Miner and Maury improving? Not a high priority, wont ever matter for the advisory committee.

Precisely.

I find it really interesting that instead of looking at how to attract higher SES families to Miner, the only thing they can think of is forcing the schools together. Also that SWS is apparently exempt from the clustering conversation. SWS is a 12 minute walk from Miner down F St. If they turned Miner into SWS at Miner and allowed IB Miner students preference, that would actually almost instantaneously create SES balance.

Hey, leave SWS out of this mess!

Do city-wide DCPS already have an at-risk set aside? If not, does anyone know if one is being contemplated as part of this study?

SWS already has the EA preference.

Only for PK3 and PK4 though. The idea would be to make it more grades, maybe all grades, and set aside rather than give a preference.

I would support this but it will have zero impact on kids at Miner and likely little impact generally because SWS is such a small school. I imagine the reason they have the preference for PK grades but not upper grades is that they have so few lottery spots available for upper grades as to make it pointless. Even if you agreed that 100% of available lottery spots for upper grades at SWS were EA set asides, you're talking a handful of spots per grade, sometimes none. Plus I'm not even sure that's the best thing for a kid who is genuinely at risk -- SWS can be insular and hard to adjust to for UMC white kids on the Hill if they are entering at 2nd or 3rd. It would be extra challenging for a child with genuine issues, and I'd worry that the curriculum would not do a good job at addressing deficiencies -- SWS is not very academically rigorous but relies heavily on the fact that most of it's population is high income and so kids are getting a ton of support/enrichment at home.

Plus those EA spots would be available on a city wide basis, not just to kids in the Miner boundary, so we're talking about helping like 0-5 Miner IB kids. Yay? It's meaningless.

This would be part of a larger city wide approach creating at-risk set asides for schools with a lower than 30% at risk population. It would basically fill seats until the school reached that percentage. This would help prioritize access for at-risk kids across the city - so not meaningless. More meaningful and more likely to achieve beneficial outcomes for many kids across multiple schools than this undeveloped cluster idea.

How does this work for boundary schools that are required to enroll every child who lives in the boundary though? There are NW schools with almost no at risk kids in boundary, but they are at or close to capacity. How do these schools reach that 30% threshold without bigger schools or trailers or something? And also how do the at risk kids get to those schools if they aren't near public transportation and they are so far from the parts of the city where there are enough at risk kids to fill those spots?

I feel like what would happen with that suggestion is that you'd boost the percentage of at risk kids a a handful of skills on the East side of town, and that's it. Schools like Janney and Lafayette would offer a small handful of EA spots each year, mostly in upper grades, and they would never fill because of commute issues, and people would say "well I guess families with at risk kids just don't actually want access to these schools" and that would be the end of it.

That is why massively increasing the proportion at SWS is the perfect solution.

The DME contractor went through some of their modeling, but there are a lot of open questions. They estimated increases at all targeted schools, but at differing levels.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t know what they should do here. The SWS idea is interesting and I hadn’t thought of it, but it does make a lot of sense.

That said, I just want to reassure people with genuine safety concerns about Miner. It’s true it’s near starburst and there has been crime nearby, but for whatever reason, when we were there, it truly didn’t feel unsafe and those things weren’t impacting our lives. You don’t have to commute through starburst. You can take the streetcar or bus to 14th and H or to Maryland. It’s a cute and pleasant walk past a bunch of row houses. It is true there violent crime within blocks of the school, but that’s sadly the case in a lot of the hill, and like a lot of the residential pockets of the hill, the area around the school doesn’t feel unsafe at all. I looked forward to walking there every day with a baby and toddler, and I actually miss making the walk now because it’s just a very pretty stroll down Tennessee or F street or Emerald.

The school itself is nice. Not Maury nice, and they are always running out of basics like wipes, but it’s a happy feeling place. They have a pet turtle. The school also doesn’t feel chaotic. The kids are nice to be around, and we went to lots of fun activities in the evenings without any fear for safety, and even the older kids were friendly and pretty orderly for kids.

There are also some fantastic teachers and administrators there, truly. Several *still* text me to ask how my kid is doing. There was a particularly high needs kid in one of our classes, and the kid was getting lots of good, dedicated attention with what seemed like evidence-based practices. There are also wonderful families at Miner, including the families of at risk kids. Really nice parents who go to incredible lengths—often without any financial safety net or reliable work schedules—to support their kids. And i think my kid benefited a lot from realizing that the umc lifestyle isn’t the only one on the planet. So they have the raw materials to have a great school.

Like a lot of people, we left for a few reasons. First, we were not at all confident about teachers in the upper grades. Younger kids’ classrooms were beautiful and decked out, and older ones seemed more bare and sad, and we heard some troubling things about some upper grades teachers. Second, we want a diverse school, and we don’t want our kids only in school with other umc folks. That makes the nw schools unappealing, tbh. But at miner, the concentration of high risk kids is really disproportionately high, and that means attention is rightfully on those kids in most classrooms. That just makes it harder to feel confident your kid will get enough attention and just academic stimulation. And so many of the kids have major obstacles, it’s hard to imagine there being space for smaller but very real stuff (like an umc kid who is behind in reading or struggles to emotionally regulate). That problem seems like one of the fundamental issues with stark socioeconomic segregation, and it makes it really hard for even very dedicated people like the ones we met at miner to get traction. In contrast, at our new school, there’s a small number of kids who are behind, and they seem to have a whole team surrounding them to help. I noticed a kid in class acting out and expressed concern to the teacher (not complaining about the kid, but just flagging I wondered if he was ok and needed support) and I learned there was already a team wide effort to help this kid out. Third, the freaking PTA money and what it brings. Miner honestly has an awesome PTA. But good lord, the one at the new school is a machine. They raise a ton and it all goes to creating these joyful and enriching experiences for the kids. These super involved PTA parents also seem to catch *everything* and fix it asap. I truly don’t know how any of them have the time, but it’s like the school has a whole second league of administrators keeping on top of things. That’s another reason segregation is so bad. Some schools get that in spades, and others barely at all. The cluster *could* address a lot of this. If it happens, I hope the super strong parent community at Maury will pour their talents into figuring out how to make it work well instead of fleeing.

I think the implementation concerns around the cluster are serious, and the lack of apparent planning makes no sense. but i think there’s a scenario where this doesn’t *destroy* Maury.

As for the hill being targeted instead of northwest—I think it’s just more obviously feasible here because of the imbalance in schools so close together. But northwest should be getting attention on this front too! Have you looked at the at risk populations at places like Janney and Lafayette? It’s close to zero! Truly it’s maybe one or two kids. I think the culprit there is housing segregation and transportation issues. I don’t see how they fix the segregation up there without thinking about those issues in tandem. I don’t know much about urban planning, but I would love to see more mixed income and low income subsidized housing in northwest, combined with shuttles etc where needed.

The PTA stuff is a bit of a red herring I think. Doubling the school isn't going to double the PTA's fundraising; even if Maury parents' contributions stay at the same levels (no guarantee, if they move their kid elsewhere to get more academic support, or if they have to use more of their resources to get their kid individualized academic attention outside of school), the cluster school will be getting significantly less PTA support.

It's uncomfortable, but PTA fundraising/support is something that is mostly a function of the SES of the school population. High SES parents are always going to have more resources to support their kids, whether through the PTA or something else. It's never going to be equal. DC responds to this by allocating more funding for students/schools that are less likely to have these resources -- Miner gets a ton more money from the city than Maury (though Maury also gets less per student than the NW schools, which I've never really understood -- but I'm not deep in this stuff).

Those averages can be really misleading. It tends to be driven by the special education and at-risk allocations in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, and whether the school offers self-contained classrooms, which are costly per-student because the class size is much smaller. A few kids with 1:1 aides enrolling or leaving a school can cause the averages to shift.

This, thank you. The average kid at Miner is not getting more from DCPS than the average kid at Maury. It's just that there are some extremely high needs kids at Miner who are getting a lot more funding than most kids at either school, and that drives the dollars going to Miner way up. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Miner has several self-contained SpEd classrooms. It's stuff like that, as well as intervention and tutoring programs for at risk kids and those significantly below grade level. If you are a MC or UMC kid at Miner who does not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and not severely below grade level, you likely get LESS money/attention than a similar kid at Maury, where the money likely gets spread more evenly across the school.

And if we combine the schools, all the MC or UMC kids who do not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and are not severely below grade level can get less money/attention. A triumph.

One argument against this though is that the combined school, unlike Miner currently, would have a critical mass of kids like this which would enable the school to meet their needs because you'd be meeting the needs of hundreds of kids at once.

What happens at a school with demographics like Miner's is the there are so few kids like this that it's impossible to create programming for them. You wind up with kids who are reading above grade level just sitting in a corner doing lessons on iReady while the rest of the class does remedial work, because there aren't even enough kids doing above grade level work to create a small group for them. And unlike at other schools, you can't pull that kid out and send them to reading in the next grade up, which is one way DCPS differentiates when they have advanced kids. Because the kids one grade up are also below grade level.

Just like it benefits at risk kids to have a critical mass of similar kids in order to offer services that target their specific needs, it also helps kids who are advance or even just on grade level to have this.

As someone with a kid in a school like Miner who is above grade level in math and reading, I can really see how a cluster like what is proposed would be especially beneficial for kids like mine who have few if any peers at school.

DCPS does not do tracking at the elementary school level, so this would not happen. Kids of varying achievement levels would be spread across classes. In addition, studies show that academic achievement for all students, but especially low income students, declines at larger schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This a whole process stinks of why folks governing with no skin in the game is a bad idea.

City wide metric improves, high priority goal achieved. High fives all around, job done.

Miner and Maury improving? Not a high priority, wont ever matter for the advisory committee.

Precisely.

I find it really interesting that instead of looking at how to attract higher SES families to Miner, the only thing they can think of is forcing the schools together. Also that SWS is apparently exempt from the clustering conversation. SWS is a 12 minute walk from Miner down F St. If they turned Miner into SWS at Miner and allowed IB Miner students preference, that would actually almost instantaneously create SES balance.

Hey, leave SWS out of this mess!

Do city-wide DCPS already have an at-risk set aside? If not, does anyone know if one is being contemplated as part of this study?

SWS already has the EA preference.

Only for PK3 and PK4 though. The idea would be to make it more grades, maybe all grades, and set aside rather than give a preference.

I would support this but it will have zero impact on kids at Miner and likely little impact generally because SWS is such a small school. I imagine the reason they have the preference for PK grades but not upper grades is that they have so few lottery spots available for upper grades as to make it pointless. Even if you agreed that 100% of available lottery spots for upper grades at SWS were EA set asides, you're talking a handful of spots per grade, sometimes none. Plus I'm not even sure that's the best thing for a kid who is genuinely at risk -- SWS can be insular and hard to adjust to for UMC white kids on the Hill if they are entering at 2nd or 3rd. It would be extra challenging for a child with genuine issues, and I'd worry that the curriculum would not do a good job at addressing deficiencies -- SWS is not very academically rigorous but relies heavily on the fact that most of it's population is high income and so kids are getting a ton of support/enrichment at home.

Plus those EA spots would be available on a city wide basis, not just to kids in the Miner boundary, so we're talking about helping like 0-5 Miner IB kids. Yay? It's meaningless.

This would be part of a larger city wide approach creating at-risk set asides for schools with a lower than 30% at risk population. It would basically fill seats until the school reached that percentage. This would help prioritize access for at-risk kids across the city - so not meaningless. More meaningful and more likely to achieve beneficial outcomes for many kids across multiple schools than this undeveloped cluster idea.

How does this work for boundary schools that are required to enroll every child who lives in the boundary though? There are NW schools with almost no at risk kids in boundary, but they are at or close to capacity. How do these schools reach that 30% threshold without bigger schools or trailers or something? And also how do the at risk kids get to those schools if they aren't near public transportation and they are so far from the parts of the city where there are enough at risk kids to fill those spots?

I feel like what would happen with that suggestion is that you'd boost the percentage of at risk kids a a handful of skills on the East side of town, and that's it. Schools like Janney and Lafayette would offer a small handful of EA spots each year, mostly in upper grades, and they would never fill because of commute issues, and people would say "well I guess families with at risk kids just don't actually want access to these schools" and that would be the end of it.

Totally, but that's why some of this is a wild goose chase. Short of a new, pretty aggressive busing system, the upper NW enclave is always going to have schools that have a much easier student population than the rest of DC. If DC really makes an effort to perfectly even things out demographically at the remaining schools, resulting in MC (middle class) or UMC (upper middle class) not getting rigorous enough academics or enough individual attention at school, realistically it's going to have the effect of moving some of those families out of those schools (e.g., to private, or moving to upper NW). That results in again a higher proportion of high-needs students at the schools, which everyone has agreed is challenging, and is counterproductive to improving schools in areas outside of upper NW, because it is beneficial to have MC and upper MC families in the system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This a whole process stinks of why folks governing with no skin in the game is a bad idea.

City wide metric improves, high priority goal achieved. High fives all around, job done.

Miner and Maury improving? Not a high priority, wont ever matter for the advisory committee.

Precisely.

I find it really interesting that instead of looking at how to attract higher SES families to Miner, the only thing they can think of is forcing the schools together. Also that SWS is apparently exempt from the clustering conversation. SWS is a 12 minute walk from Miner down F St. If they turned Miner into SWS at Miner and allowed IB Miner students preference, that would actually almost instantaneously create SES balance.

Hey, leave SWS out of this mess!

Do city-wide DCPS already have an at-risk set aside? If not, does anyone know if one is being contemplated as part of this study?

SWS already has the EA preference.

Only for PK3 and PK4 though. The idea would be to make it more grades, maybe all grades, and set aside rather than give a preference.

I would support this but it will have zero impact on kids at Miner and likely little impact generally because SWS is such a small school. I imagine the reason they have the preference for PK grades but not upper grades is that they have so few lottery spots available for upper grades as to make it pointless. Even if you agreed that 100% of available lottery spots for upper grades at SWS were EA set asides, you're talking a handful of spots per grade, sometimes none. Plus I'm not even sure that's the best thing for a kid who is genuinely at risk -- SWS can be insular and hard to adjust to for UMC white kids on the Hill if they are entering at 2nd or 3rd. It would be extra challenging for a child with genuine issues, and I'd worry that the curriculum would not do a good job at addressing deficiencies -- SWS is not very academically rigorous but relies heavily on the fact that most of it's population is high income and so kids are getting a ton of support/enrichment at home.

Plus those EA spots would be available on a city wide basis, not just to kids in the Miner boundary, so we're talking about helping like 0-5 Miner IB kids. Yay? It's meaningless.

This would be part of a larger city wide approach creating at-risk set asides for schools with a lower than 30% at risk population. It would basically fill seats until the school reached that percentage. This would help prioritize access for at-risk kids across the city - so not meaningless. More meaningful and more likely to achieve beneficial outcomes for many kids across multiple schools than this undeveloped cluster idea.

How does this work for boundary schools that are required to enroll every child who lives in the boundary though? There are NW schools with almost no at risk kids in boundary, but they are at or close to capacity. How do these schools reach that 30% threshold without bigger schools or trailers or something? And also how do the at risk kids get to those schools if they aren't near public transportation and they are so far from the parts of the city where there are enough at risk kids to fill those spots?

I feel like what would happen with that suggestion is that you'd boost the percentage of at risk kids a a handful of skills on the East side of town, and that's it. Schools like Janney and Lafayette would offer a small handful of EA spots each year, mostly in upper grades, and they would never fill because of commute issues, and people would say "well I guess families with at risk kids just don't actually want access to these schools" and that would be the end of it.

That is why massively increasing the proportion at SWS is the perfect solution.

The DME contractor went through some of their modeling, but there are a lot of open questions. They estimated increases at all targeted schools, but at differing levels.

If they're estimating increases at all targeted schools, then are they also estimating decreases at "sending" schools? And how does that feed into their rationale for changing Maury and Miner into a cluster? If the at-risk preference/set-aside is already going to have an impact on Maury and Miner, then perhaps they won't be as demographically different in the future and it isn't worth making everyone's commute so much harder.

Does the contractor model the impact on people leaving Maury because it's no longer a well-performing school? Or does the DME not care about that at all?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t know what they should do here. The SWS idea is interesting and I hadn’t thought of it, but it does make a lot of sense.

That said, I just want to reassure people with genuine safety concerns about Miner. It’s true it’s near starburst and there has been crime nearby, but for whatever reason, when we were there, it truly didn’t feel unsafe and those things weren’t impacting our lives. You don’t have to commute through starburst. You can take the streetcar or bus to 14th and H or to Maryland. It’s a cute and pleasant walk past a bunch of row houses. It is true there violent crime within blocks of the school, but that’s sadly the case in a lot of the hill, and like a lot of the residential pockets of the hill, the area around the school doesn’t feel unsafe at all. I looked forward to walking there every day with a baby and toddler, and I actually miss making the walk now because it’s just a very pretty stroll down Tennessee or F street or Emerald.

The school itself is nice. Not Maury nice, and they are always running out of basics like wipes, but it’s a happy feeling place. They have a pet turtle. The school also doesn’t feel chaotic. The kids are nice to be around, and we went to lots of fun activities in the evenings without any fear for safety, and even the older kids were friendly and pretty orderly for kids.

There are also some fantastic teachers and administrators there, truly. Several *still* text me to ask how my kid is doing. There was a particularly high needs kid in one of our classes, and the kid was getting lots of good, dedicated attention with what seemed like evidence-based practices. There are also wonderful families at Miner, including the families of at risk kids. Really nice parents who go to incredible lengths—often without any financial safety net or reliable work schedules—to support their kids. And i think my kid benefited a lot from realizing that the umc lifestyle isn’t the only one on the planet. So they have the raw materials to have a great school.

Like a lot of people, we left for a few reasons. First, we were not at all confident about teachers in the upper grades. Younger kids’ classrooms were beautiful and decked out, and older ones seemed more bare and sad, and we heard some troubling things about some upper grades teachers. Second, we want a diverse school, and we don’t want our kids only in school with other umc folks. That makes the nw schools unappealing, tbh. But at miner, the concentration of high risk kids is really disproportionately high, and that means attention is rightfully on those kids in most classrooms. That just makes it harder to feel confident your kid will get enough attention and just academic stimulation. And so many of the kids have major obstacles, it’s hard to imagine there being space for smaller but very real stuff (like an umc kid who is behind in reading or struggles to emotionally regulate). That problem seems like one of the fundamental issues with stark socioeconomic segregation, and it makes it really hard for even very dedicated people like the ones we met at miner to get traction. In contrast, at our new school, there’s a small number of kids who are behind, and they seem to have a whole team surrounding them to help. I noticed a kid in class acting out and expressed concern to the teacher (not complaining about the kid, but just flagging I wondered if he was ok and needed support) and I learned there was already a team wide effort to help this kid out. Third, the freaking PTA money and what it brings. Miner honestly has an awesome PTA. But good lord, the one at the new school is a machine. They raise a ton and it all goes to creating these joyful and enriching experiences for the kids. These super involved PTA parents also seem to catch *everything* and fix it asap. I truly don’t know how any of them have the time, but it’s like the school has a whole second league of administrators keeping on top of things. That’s another reason segregation is so bad. Some schools get that in spades, and others barely at all. The cluster *could* address a lot of this. If it happens, I hope the super strong parent community at Maury will pour their talents into figuring out how to make it work well instead of fleeing.

I think the implementation concerns around the cluster are serious, and the lack of apparent planning makes no sense. but i think there’s a scenario where this doesn’t *destroy* Maury.

As for the hill being targeted instead of northwest—I think it’s just more obviously feasible here because of the imbalance in schools so close together. But northwest should be getting attention on this front too! Have you looked at the at risk populations at places like Janney and Lafayette? It’s close to zero! Truly it’s maybe one or two kids. I think the culprit there is housing segregation and transportation issues. I don’t see how they fix the segregation up there without thinking about those issues in tandem. I don’t know much about urban planning, but I would love to see more mixed income and low income subsidized housing in northwest, combined with shuttles etc where needed.

The PTA stuff is a bit of a red herring I think. Doubling the school isn't going to double the PTA's fundraising; even if Maury parents' contributions stay at the same levels (no guarantee, if they move their kid elsewhere to get more academic support, or if they have to use more of their resources to get their kid individualized academic attention outside of school), the cluster school will be getting significantly less PTA support.

It's uncomfortable, but PTA fundraising/support is something that is mostly a function of the SES of the school population. High SES parents are always going to have more resources to support their kids, whether through the PTA or something else. It's never going to be equal. DC responds to this by allocating more funding for students/schools that are less likely to have these resources -- Miner gets a ton more money from the city than Maury (though Maury also gets less per student than the NW schools, which I've never really understood -- but I'm not deep in this stuff).

Those averages can be really misleading. It tends to be driven by the special education and at-risk allocations in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, and whether the school offers self-contained classrooms, which are costly per-student because the class size is much smaller. A few kids with 1:1 aides enrolling or leaving a school can cause the averages to shift.

This, thank you. The average kid at Miner is not getting more from DCPS than the average kid at Maury. It's just that there are some extremely high needs kids at Miner who are getting a lot more funding than most kids at either school, and that drives the dollars going to Miner way up. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Miner has several self-contained SpEd classrooms. It's stuff like that, as well as intervention and tutoring programs for at risk kids and those significantly below grade level. If you are a MC or UMC kid at Miner who does not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and not severely below grade level, you likely get LESS money/attention than a similar kid at Maury, where the money likely gets spread more evenly across the school.

And if we combine the schools, all the MC or UMC kids who do not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and are not severely below grade level can get less money/attention. A triumph.

One argument against this though is that the combined school, unlike Miner currently, would have a critical mass of kids like this which would enable the school to meet their needs because you'd be meeting the needs of hundreds of kids at once.

What happens at a school with demographics like Miner's is the there are so few kids like this that it's impossible to create programming for them. You wind up with kids who are reading above grade level just sitting in a corner doing lessons on iReady while the rest of the class does remedial work, because there aren't even enough kids doing above grade level work to create a small group for them. And unlike at other schools, you can't pull that kid out and send them to reading in the next grade up, which is one way DCPS differentiates when they have advanced kids. Because the kids one grade up are also below grade level.

Just like it benefits at risk kids to have a critical mass of similar kids in order to offer services that target their specific needs, it also helps kids who are advance or even just on grade level to have this.

As someone with a kid in a school like Miner who is above grade level in math and reading, I can really see how a cluster like what is proposed would be especially beneficial for kids like mine who have few if any peers at school.

DCPS does not do tracking at the elementary school level, so this would not happen. Kids of varying achievement levels would be spread across classes. In addition, studies show that academic achievement for all students, but especially low income students, declines at larger schools.

Would it be a larger school, though? I thought it was going to be two schools the same size as they are now, just with a different distribution of grade levels.

DCPS does in-room differentiation, so high-performing kids can have a work group that's above grade level within their classroom. That's what people have at Maury and that's what they like about Maury. Will that still happen if Miner and Maury are combined, or will the proportion of high-performing kids be too small to produce viable ability groupings in each classroom? What kind of support will be provided for teachers as they attempt to differentiate across a wider range of performance?

These are the kinds of questions the DME doesn't want to answer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t know what they should do here. The SWS idea is interesting and I hadn’t thought of it, but it does make a lot of sense.

That said, I just want to reassure people with genuine safety concerns about Miner. It’s true it’s near starburst and there has been crime nearby, but for whatever reason, when we were there, it truly didn’t feel unsafe and those things weren’t impacting our lives. You don’t have to commute through starburst. You can take the streetcar or bus to 14th and H or to Maryland. It’s a cute and pleasant walk past a bunch of row houses. It is true there violent crime within blocks of the school, but that’s sadly the case in a lot of the hill, and like a lot of the residential pockets of the hill, the area around the school doesn’t feel unsafe at all. I looked forward to walking there every day with a baby and toddler, and I actually miss making the walk now because it’s just a very pretty stroll down Tennessee or F street or Emerald.

The school itself is nice. Not Maury nice, and they are always running out of basics like wipes, but it’s a happy feeling place. They have a pet turtle. The school also doesn’t feel chaotic. The kids are nice to be around, and we went to lots of fun activities in the evenings without any fear for safety, and even the older kids were friendly and pretty orderly for kids.

There are also some fantastic teachers and administrators there, truly. Several *still* text me to ask how my kid is doing. There was a particularly high needs kid in one of our classes, and the kid was getting lots of good, dedicated attention with what seemed like evidence-based practices. There are also wonderful families at Miner, including the families of at risk kids. Really nice parents who go to incredible lengths—often without any financial safety net or reliable work schedules—to support their kids. And i think my kid benefited a lot from realizing that the umc lifestyle isn’t the only one on the planet. So they have the raw materials to have a great school.

Like a lot of people, we left for a few reasons. First, we were not at all confident about teachers in the upper grades. Younger kids’ classrooms were beautiful and decked out, and older ones seemed more bare and sad, and we heard some troubling things about some upper grades teachers. Second, we want a diverse school, and we don’t want our kids only in school with other umc folks. That makes the nw schools unappealing, tbh. But at miner, the concentration of high risk kids is really disproportionately high, and that means attention is rightfully on those kids in most classrooms. That just makes it harder to feel confident your kid will get enough attention and just academic stimulation. And so many of the kids have major obstacles, it’s hard to imagine there being space for smaller but very real stuff (like an umc kid who is behind in reading or struggles to emotionally regulate). That problem seems like one of the fundamental issues with stark socioeconomic segregation, and it makes it really hard for even very dedicated people like the ones we met at miner to get traction. In contrast, at our new school, there’s a small number of kids who are behind, and they seem to have a whole team surrounding them to help. I noticed a kid in class acting out and expressed concern to the teacher (not complaining about the kid, but just flagging I wondered if he was ok and needed support) and I learned there was already a team wide effort to help this kid out. Third, the freaking PTA money and what it brings. Miner honestly has an awesome PTA. But good lord, the one at the new school is a machine. They raise a ton and it all goes to creating these joyful and enriching experiences for the kids. These super involved PTA parents also seem to catch *everything* and fix it asap. I truly don’t know how any of them have the time, but it’s like the school has a whole second league of administrators keeping on top of things. That’s another reason segregation is so bad. Some schools get that in spades, and others barely at all. The cluster *could* address a lot of this. If it happens, I hope the super strong parent community at Maury will pour their talents into figuring out how to make it work well instead of fleeing.

I think the implementation concerns around the cluster are serious, and the lack of apparent planning makes no sense. but i think there’s a scenario where this doesn’t *destroy* Maury.

As for the hill being targeted instead of northwest—I think it’s just more obviously feasible here because of the imbalance in schools so close together. But northwest should be getting attention on this front too! Have you looked at the at risk populations at places like Janney and Lafayette? It’s close to zero! Truly it’s maybe one or two kids. I think the culprit there is housing segregation and transportation issues. I don’t see how they fix the segregation up there without thinking about those issues in tandem. I don’t know much about urban planning, but I would love to see more mixed income and low income subsidized housing in northwest, combined with shuttles etc where needed.

The PTA stuff is a bit of a red herring I think. Doubling the school isn't going to double the PTA's fundraising; even if Maury parents' contributions stay at the same levels (no guarantee, if they move their kid elsewhere to get more academic support, or if they have to use more of their resources to get their kid individualized academic attention outside of school), the cluster school will be getting significantly less PTA support.

It's uncomfortable, but PTA fundraising/support is something that is mostly a function of the SES of the school population. High SES parents are always going to have more resources to support their kids, whether through the PTA or something else. It's never going to be equal. DC responds to this by allocating more funding for students/schools that are less likely to have these resources -- Miner gets a ton more money from the city than Maury (though Maury also gets less per student than the NW schools, which I've never really understood -- but I'm not deep in this stuff).

Those averages can be really misleading. It tends to be driven by the special education and at-risk allocations in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, and whether the school offers self-contained classrooms, which are costly per-student because the class size is much smaller. A few kids with 1:1 aides enrolling or leaving a school can cause the averages to shift.

This, thank you. The average kid at Miner is not getting more from DCPS than the average kid at Maury. It's just that there are some extremely high needs kids at Miner who are getting a lot more funding than most kids at either school, and that drives the dollars going to Miner way up. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Miner has several self-contained SpEd classrooms. It's stuff like that, as well as intervention and tutoring programs for at risk kids and those significantly below grade level. If you are a MC or UMC kid at Miner who does not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and not severely below grade level, you likely get LESS money/attention than a similar kid at Maury, where the money likely gets spread more evenly across the school.

And if we combine the schools, all the MC or UMC kids who do not have special needs, speak English as your native language, and are not severely below grade level can get less money/attention. A triumph.

One argument against this though is that the combined school, unlike Miner currently, would have a critical mass of kids like this which would enable the school to meet their needs because you'd be meeting the needs of hundreds of kids at once.

What happens at a school with demographics like Miner's is the there are so few kids like this that it's impossible to create programming for them. You wind up with kids who are reading above grade level just sitting in a corner doing lessons on iReady while the rest of the class does remedial work, because there aren't even enough kids doing above grade level work to create a small group for them. And unlike at other schools, you can't pull that kid out and send them to reading in the next grade up, which is one way DCPS differentiates when they have advanced kids. Because the kids one grade up are also below grade level.

Just like it benefits at risk kids to have a critical mass of similar kids in order to offer services that target their specific needs, it also helps kids who are advance or even just on grade level to have this.

As someone with a kid in a school like Miner who is above grade level in math and reading, I can really see how a cluster like what is proposed would be especially beneficial for kids like mine who have few if any peers at school.

TBH this is pretty much what my above–grade level kid does at Maury (though most of the rest of the class is more on grade level than remedial). DC doesn't have a great solution for this in elementary because they won't create a GT program or allow meaningful tracking in the schools.