Reply to Low In Boundary at Hearst?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a ward 3 parent I am getting a bit tired of hearing I can see it from my house/ it is two blocks from my house arguments.  There is a larger picture of education needs in this city than just your family.

Providing feeder rights is a way to ensure that children that have benefited from the OOB lottery continue on a strong educational path with their elementary school peers.  We need this in this city.  It is equally compelling to me to providing sibling entrance to schools families have been zoned out of a particular school.

I am not an oyster parent/family, but I find the idea of their changed feeder to Cardozo much more disturbing because it it's academic achievement is so far below Wilson.  THAT is unacceptable even though they cannot "see" Wilson from their front yards.

This is the kind of myopic thinking that makes the rest of the city dismiss ward 3 as completely self interested twits.
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Except that the self interested twits pay the lion's share of the tax bills while other spend their time smoking crack[/quote]

Just go ahead and move to the burbs already.  Seriously, I don't want to be neighbors with someone as small minded as you.

The small minded twit position I identified was worrying about a great v great in 2 years school that would apply to families with children not yet in school (because families with children in school will not be moved).  DC has to make decisions for the good of the city. I completely agree that no child should be moved to a lesser performing school, but whining about the importance of walking to school when there are children that trek across the city daily to get access to a decent school (and count themselves lucky to be able to do so)  just doesn't get my sympathy and I doubt it will get the sympathy of the majority of voters that, newsflash, do not reside in ward 3.

Worst case scenario for my family is that my kids may have to go to Hardy and if they cannot get into a magnet may have to go private if we lose the Wilson lottery (or Wilson is not worth attending in 5 years because of stupid decisions by the city).  I am more concerned with actually focusing on what can improve DC schools for more children and less on the fact that a few families may have to walk 8 blocks instead of 3 for elementary school.[/quote]

Well, I'm guessing it won't be productive to try to reason with a name-caller ("twit!") but here's a try: (a) what is working and sensible in Ward 3 may not be the right thing for other parts of the city, and that's OK - if I lived in a neighborhood with a really unacceptable neighborhood school I would drive to the moon to do better for my child - but I don't have to, luckily.  The point is to find a solution that helps both (probably the x% OOB set asides, given that DCPS has given up on the hard to fix schools) but (b) the boundary shifts for Janney Murch Hearst are NOT going to alleviate overcrowding. As we saw with the Deal and Wilson renovations, a nice new building will attract even more families then the DCPS planners plan for. So for Murch you will zone out not just "a few families" as you say but 4 or 5 large rental and condo buildings plus dozens of single family houses, and then you will still have crowded schools in 5 years (and the same car-jams at drop off because the drivers will still drive). Moreover, the rentals, condos, and smaller houses on Alton, etc. are for many of the families that moved here the only affordable place that could guarantee our kids a path to a good set of schools: we moved because of walking to Murch/Deal/Wilson. Which leads me to (c): you want Ward 3 to think about the rest of the city and the big picture, but the boundary shifts in Ward 3 are so minimal that we can suspect that they are SYMBOLIC: they exist only to placate parents in NE and SE etc. who would complain resentfully "why aren't you also moving boundaries in NW?" And, sorry, but I will complain if I am trying to be be forced to do something that doesn't make sense and doesn't achieve any good for narrow-minded me nor for the larger, more serious problems that DCPS faces in other parts of the city.[/quote]

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