Reply to Why is the overcrowding issue so complex?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote

The point is that WOTP schools are not being favored. DC rightly or wrongly distributes $ based on per pupil funding. Wilson has 2000 students. It is the largest HS in DC although average/small by suburban standards. Anacostia HS has around 200 students which is way too small for a HS. Wilson is able to achieve economies of scale that is just not feasible. Wilson can keep its librarian because it overall has more money to play around with. It is hard for Anacostia HS to justify paying a librarian for 200 students. Look all over MD and VA - you will not find such tiny middle and high schools. That is because it is very difficult to provide all the opportunities that kids need at these underenrolled tiny schools. Ballou and Anacostia should be combined into one bigger school but that is apparently off the table because of neighborhood gang rivalries. [/quote]

Great points and this is an issue at the MS level as well.

It is hard to have a adequate or at least cost effective electives and extra curriculars with a small student body.  Are you going to hire separate French and Spanish teachers and pay them a full salary to each teach one class a day?  Meanwhile Deal has 4 full time spanish teachers per grade.

Most of the underenrolled MS and HS also have trouble fielding sports teams - most HS have no JV teams at all and regularly forfeit even their varsity games because they don't have enough kids.  Deal meanwhile has 120 kids trying out for 20 spots on the baseball team and then the team barely gets to play any games because the other schools can't field a team.

You don't need 2000 kids in a high school to reach an economy of scale and field a full slate of teams but you need way more than 200 so this is another example of where cramming so many kids into Deal/Wilson is bad for both the kids who get in and the kids who don't and on top of that costs a lot of extra money for sub optimal outcomes.[/quote]

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