Reply to How is the meeting at Dunbar going?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just got home--it was long, but I was glad I went. I was in the Cardozo breakout group. Here are the new things I learned (much of what they said was very clear in the proposal):

- 43% of students are at-risk, which confirms my view that if the at-risk preference is adopted, then the middle class will not have any OOB options--they will go charter or leave if they have a terrible in-boundary option.
- They flashed a screen of the schools that had under 30% at-risk, where the preference would apply, and it included some schools that I thought were more diverse--including Francis-Stevens. It was so fast that I wasn't able to write them down, it's just that F-S stood out to me. They really need to make that information public.
- The confirmed that under the new proposal, a principal would have no discretion to keep a family if they get in IB and then move OOB--the family would be able to stay only until the end of the academic year, unless they are high-risk. I think this is great and would prevent a lot of gaming of the system. 
- In terms of how they would create room at overcrowded schools for the 10% minimum OOB population, they gave the example that at Janney, it is 8% OOB so they would only have to increase by 2%. And they said that at the elementary school level, this would not be by grade--they could have 10% in any combination of grades they want. So they could reserve those spots for kids in the upper grades if they wanted. But there was no good answer when it came to how can you physically put kids in the space. 
- In the breakout, people were pretty skeptical of the middle school choices. One person pointed out that the CHEC feeders are not dual language schools, and the proposal only lets people who have dual-language-only options in elementary school have an alternative. The response was that CHEC is a program that is appropriate for someone who has never studied Spanish before. (The question asker was very skeptical of this answer.) Similarly, some Ross parents seemed concerned that the new Center City Middle School would not attract people from the feeder schools. And Francis-Stevens parents talked about how the shrinking of the boundary might mean that the middle school only has ten in-boundary kids per grade.

My biggest concern coming out of this meeting is the middle class issue--with 43% of people getting at-risk preference for the good schools, that tells me that the rest of us will have no luck. That's probably fine if you are in a rising school, but that's not my situation at all. [/quote]
The proposal gives us the 'neighborhood schools' that we asked for, just not the ones that we wanted.[/quote]

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