Reply to Petition to keep School-Within-School (SWS) a true neighborhood school!

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Reply to "Petition to keep School-Within-School (SWS) a true neighborhood school!"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hell0.  At least at Brent we fought for two or three years for a solution to the middle school problem on Capitol Hill.  We polled and met and researched and came up with multiple scenarios that would keep parents in our local middle schools.  These ranged from consolidating feeder patterns to controlled choice options among the three middle schools, to seed programs to start small and then when critical mass was gained located on the bigger middle schools.  Ideas also included feeding Brent and Maury to Stuart Hobson. We had to fight to actually allow a feed from Brent to both Eliot Hine and Jefferson rather than just Jefferson to avoid the idiotic scenario DCPS favored which was Maury to one middle school, Watkins to another and Brent to another.  We didn't demand anything, but laid in their laps multiple ways that they could capture the rising numbers of neighborhood families coming out of hill elementary schools before the charters grabbed them.  Their "plan" was to wait for the growing numbers of Hill elementary graduates to get high enough so they would eventually naturally feel comfortable moving on to these middle schools all together.  The result? As we predicted and told them would happen years ago, the fifth grades are emptying out as the neighborhood jumps to charters.

So People have been focused and working on these issues for several years now but have been told to ****off.  Maybe it is time for a second wave of activism around this.  Come up with a plan and get someone elected around it[/quote]

When I hear people talk about how the Capitol Hill community needs to build a great MS through parental involvement, I can't help think of this.  I watched from the outside, but it was still incredibly demoralizing.  You had a large collection of smart, engaged parents with a strong track record of building a successful school (people forget how far Brent has come so quickly) and they couldn't get any traction with DCPS.  Then I'm told by DCPS that Eliot Hine will be a superb option, so no harm, no foul.

Where is the incentive for parents to try again?

As others have said, the best answer is to start by feeding Brent, SWS, and Maury into their own MS.  Unless you exclude schools like Ludlow-Taylor, Payne, and Miner, it will be much harder to get the necessary initial buy-in.  That's the harsh truth.[/quote]

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