Reply to How many freshman at Wilson this fall?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think that DCPS should offer free transportation to a less crowded option for any kid zoned to Wilson, whose parents feel that Wilson is the "crisis" that needs to be fixed in DCPS.  Seems as though parents would be flocking to that option.

Except that DCPS already does offer this, through the OOB process, and Wilson parents don't take the opportunity.  Why not?  Because there is no "crisis" and Wilson's students are some of the best served in the city.  
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DCPS offers free transportation (via Metro) for all students already. [/quote]

Which is why I said that DC alreadybdoes offer it?

My point is that any parent who thinks Wilson’s enrollment is the biggest “crisis” DCPS faces and worthy of resources is a hypocrite if they don’t take advantage of the free transportation to underenrolled options.[/quote]

Because the kids who are left behind at under enrolled schools lose critical resources due to low head count.   Because adding a daily two hour commute to a students life is two hours less they could be studying, working or volunteering.  Because shuttling thousands of kids across the city is bad for the environment.  Because continuing to expand Deal and Wilson is fiscally irresponsible when the city has 20,000 excess seats elsewhere in the city.    [/quote]

Here is the problem.  It is not just about available seats, it is about the available seats, the quality of the programming and teachers AND ALSO the preparedness of the student cohort.  Wilson has the cohort that no other non application DCPS high school in the city has.  That is why parents want to send their kids there.  That is the piece that cannot be replicated by construction or teacher hiring.  That is the resource that needs to be shared in a single school.  The problem is no one in a position to make decisions  can say that.  [/quote]

But the Wilson cohort is huge and with the demographic changes that DC is undergoing it is no longer even a purely WOTP cohort.

Just a few years ago Wilson was half its current size and was a majority black school and was still very desirable.

It really is not a stretch that DCPS that you could replicate the Wilson of even 5 years ago and have more of the students at the 2nd "Wilson" attend a school in their own neighborhood.

If you duplicated the Wilson cohort at another school you'd also draw back a bunch of kids from the charters & application schools to their neighborhood HIgh School.

It really feels like a lot of people think there is some magic to attending school in Ward 3 (and have false baselines about how good Wilson actually is) - it is the demographics at Wilson that are the most important thing and with the changes in DC's population in the last 10 years it really would not be hard to duplicate the Wilson mix in at least one if not two more neighborhoods.

And if you did that Wilson (both of them) could perhaps still continue to accept low-income OOB kids who would really benefit from attending Wilson instead of all the kids from Shepherd Park and Crestwood and 16th Street Heights and Mt Pleasant etc who are responsible for a big part of the schools population growth all while attending a school much closer to where they live.

Or we just continue with this craziness and see if we can squeeze every middle class kid in the city into Wilson at the expense of the greater good and eventually their own safety and education.[/quote]

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