Reply to Can anyone tell me the story of Stuart-Hobson?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reposting because the quotes got messed up:

The fact that people who live OOB for Watkins and LT (both of those schools have a majority OOB population) are choosing to attend SH is meaningless. They are doing that because their options are WORSE. What people on the Hill want is strong elementary schools and a strong middle school. They don’t have that, so they are voting with their feet. You seem to think that because there are worse DCPS schools that people are fleeing to fill Hill ES and SH, that somehow negates the fact that people who actually live IB for these schools don’t attend. It does not.[/quote]

+1. We left Watkins because it's too crazy, and we're IB. It's no neighborhood school. [/quote]

How do you think schools get to be IB? Overnight? Do you think Maury was always IB? Can we also address the irony that you pulled your kid out of your IB school because it was too crazy....and since you presumably didn't pull them out of school entirely, now they are not IB kids at their current school? Does your kid pull down the scores and quality of the education? Or is that just other OOB kids?[/quote]

Some of the frustration expressed here emanates from the snail's pace of change at LT and SH in the last decade.  I've lived IB for both for over 15 years.

Positive change hasn't even been slow but steady.  SH saw a big drop in IB enrollment when many new charters were opening, and after Watkins lost Cap Hill Montessori and SWS in a two-year period, taking 7 or 8 years to recover.  LT had the same problem during the Cobbs years.

Meanwhile, we've watched Maury go from around 1/4 IB/high SES to nearly 2/3 in just five years, and Brent do the same in under a decade.  For its part, LT is on it's third principal in five years and stubbornly remains a Title 1 school. Parents get fed up waiting around for both LT and SH to take off despite the local buzz about impressive test scores, teaching, facility upgrades etc.
[/quote]

Your timeline for Maury and Brent's changes is way off.  Community members, Tommy Wells, DCPS (albeit reluctantly) started engaging with those schools in 2003 or 2004 - 13-14 years ago!  The single best thing to happen to Maury and Brent was the creation of the 3-year-old program piloted at Maury, Brent and Tyler.  LT's principal at the time stood in the way of LT having a 3-year-old program.  Had LT had a 3-year-old program, LT and Stuart-Hobson would be on a different trajectory.  Without that 3-year-old program, IB LT families found their way into Brent and Maury when anyone could get in; their siblings followed which then further slowed IB attendance at LT.  So now you have IB LT families building up Brent and Maury and at the same time further weakening LT because of the word on the street about the school - families with older children IB for LT talk up Brent and Maury but not LT.

LT has risen above the challenges that it faced 13-14 years ago.  Some would say that even back then, the teaching was good, but hard to decipher because of demographics - I can't speak to that.  What is clear is that currently LT is educating well - the past several principals have done a lot to improve staff morale and engage parents and then DCPS and facilities have also made the school a more attractive option.

But please don't make it out that Brent and Maury saw their changes in five years - they were a long time coming and the environment they came up in had fewer charters and fewer IB families attending other DCPS.  Also - Brent was the first ES to be modernized - that was not a coincidence.[/quote]

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