Anonymous wrote:Is this new location " permanent"? Or another short term lease?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Do yo think they will close FS but expand SWW?
F-S should become a magnet school, just like Walls. Create proficiency or near-proficiency as an admission requirement, and it would become a great school, and enrolled close to capacity for the first time in the 21st century.
???? - (DUHHH !?!?) Its almost like saying 2+2=4. Any school with admission requirement will become a great school and get the attention of parents that frequent this forum and parents that don"t want to sacrifice our kids to see if it is possible to really turn around a school without displacing the "undesirables."
Francis-Stevens will follow the path carved by charters. I don't think you have to go the magnet route...parents will self-select by their willingness to cart their children across town for a decent program. Those that can't get in through lottery or open seats will woo the principal with their 'influence' as seen at other schools in this neighborhood.
Wait, isn't F-S a low-proficiency school right now? What motivation do parents have to cart their kids over there, now or in the near future, without some incentive?
Anonymous wrote:Lots of confusion/fustration going on here, which is understandable. Keep in mind:
1) There is no secret ELL ("English language learner") preference. There is an explicit ELL preference, in the form of the sibling preference. At preK3 and 4, for all schools except dual language, IB beats OOB sib. But for dual language programs, OOB sib beats IB at those grades. This ensures that Oyster and especially Bancroft will maintain large numbers of ELL for some years to come. But from K onward, IB is guaranteed a spot.
2) If you are getting confused about your odds in a single lottery versus lottery for every school, just keep in mind that what doesn't change is the number of spots and the number of people applying. Suppose there are 3,000 families applying for 1,000 "desirable" preK4 spots this year. Then 2/3 of families will not get into any of these, no matter the lottery method.
It may be emotionally/pyschologically more appealing to be entered into a different lottery for each school because we "feel" we have a better chance. But we don't have a better chance - there are still 3 people competing for each seat, in that example. You have the same chance overall of getting a seat. But with the new algo, a better chance of an efficient result.
You will never know your lottery rank, BTW. You will know if you had broadly good, medium, or poor luck, based on your acceptance/waitlist status.
3) Every year there have been schools that have empty seats at most or all grade levels in September. These are the ultimate "safety"s. It used to be that a number of schools EOTP but west of the Anacostia river fit into this category, but due to gentrification and the low odds of getting into the best charters, this is changing. In future years there may be no such thing as a safety for preK3/4. There will always be a safety school for K onward: your IB school.
4) If you desire certainty of an excellent school from K onward, this can only be achieved by moving IB for your chosen DCPS school. If you desire certainty for preK3/4, as explained above, even IB may no longer be a sure bet, so we all need to accept that DC does not offer universal preK3/4. We take our chances in the lottery and if it doesn't work out we pay private or stay at home. Them's the breaks... we can also get involved with local politics and advocate for more prek3/4 seats, at our own IB schools or city-wide.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:
I've tried for the last five hours to make sense of the idea that one lottery number across all the schools on my list is somehow more beneficial to everyone.
And it just doesn't. Make. Sense.
First, if I'm #10,000 out of 10,000 total applicants for PK4, there's no way I'm getting in to any school anywhere. If every school has a wait list that places me based on that number, I will be at the bottom every time. Even if I have preferences, I'll be the loser in every tie-breaker. That simply cant't be the way this thing is run.
What makes sense is that I get assigned a random number at each school on my list. So I could be #303 out of 303 applicants at my top ranked school--
...
At the same time (not in a different round) my tracking number is entered into a lottery at my number 2 choice. Again, I have no preferences, and this time I've got a great number--#3! ...
My third choice is my inbound school and my so-so number, let's say #36 out 85, doesn't get me a seat, but I'm still ahead of an OOB, single-child family who got a better number--unless they ranked the school higher than I did.
But if I have a single sucky number across all schools, and my next door neighbor has #8 across all schools, she has a better shot at getting a seat at my 12th ranked school than I do. At the very least, she has a better shot at our IB school, which is definitely somewhere on her list. I can't see how I'm supposed to wait, round by round, for my 10k number to make way for all other preferences at all schools. THEN I get to enter round 2 along with all the families who missed the March 3 deadline. And then it's an entirely new lottery number that gets drawn at each school, but this time we're all vying for fewer seats and mostly trying for the best possible wait list number behind everyone who's already on it.
And now, I am completely worn out by the whole shebang.
NP here, and I edited the above for brevity. Couple of things to think about (dcmom is 100% correct in everything she's written so this is just to explain further):
1) You are focusing on how bad it would be to be last in the single-number lottery, e.g. #10,000 out of #10,000. But you have not considered that you could also be last in every single one of the 12 individual school lotteries you enter under the previous model. And although we don't have the sizes of any of these lotteries to compare, we can safely say that if you have the absolute worst luck, you will not get into any school under either model.
2) This scenario in bold, where you get nothing in the first round - no lottery process can prevent this! There simply aren't enough spots at the in-demand schools. At least the current model makes it as efficient as possible ( efficient meaning no pareto-improving trades are possible, i.e., when the lottery is done, no-one can be made better off without making someone else worse off - this is what dcmom meant when she referred to "trades")
Anonymous wrote:I don't see how the following statement can be accurate if the process described above is correct: "Once I choose the school I'm applying to, I should rank them in the order that I actually want my kid to go. There is no benefit of being strategic in rankings."
If "The computer has everyone request a seat from their first choice school . . ." and then "the computer has everyone who did not get a spot in round 1 request a seat from their second-choice school," then it matters in what order you rank them.
To use Hill schools as an example: if I'm IB for Brent PK3 but slightly prefer the Reggio program at SWS, and don't like any other options, then I have a "strategic" decision to make. Let's say I have a 40% shot of getting a spot at Brent if I list it first but only have a 10% chance of getting into SWS by listing it first. In that case, I'd clearly list Brent over SWS, despite my preference, because by the second round Brent would be filled with other IB students. I'd basically be choosing between a 40% or 10% chance of getting into a school I find acceptable.
Anonymous wrote:This is a question:
Let's pretend I am applying with no special preferances for PreK4.
I am applying to schools A, B and C.
My lottery # for PreK4 is 280.
so for schools A, B and C - anyone who has a lottery # less than 280 will across the board have priority in front of me?
Anonymous wrote:Do people really ride the bus to school?