Reply to Holy cow. In terms of crowding, we haven't seen nothing yet.

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Holy cow. In terms of crowding, we haven't seen nothing yet."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Looks like the good news is that between the two sectors there are 108k seats of capacity.[/quote]

The 108K figure is "programmatic" capacity, which is a bogus number they made up when the Ward 3 schools started getting crowded. So while every Ward 3 school is now overcrowded, some by hundreds of students, they report that the "programmatic" capacity is 7062 and current enrollment is 6800.

"Programmatic" capacity ignores the size of the building, it just takes the number of classroom teachers and multiplies by maximum class size.

On the DME website you can see the 2013 master facilities plan. Appendix A has a list of schools, with their capacities:

https://dme.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dme/publication/attachments/DC_Public_Education_FMP_Appendix_A.pdf

These are the old-fashioned, facilities-constrained capacities. For example, in 2013 Key had a capacity of 320. It now has a "programmatic" capacity of 400. Nothing has been added to the building in the past four years (other than several dozen students!).

Here are all of the Ward 3 schools, with their 2013 capacities:
Deal 	   1090
Eaton     415
Hearst    180
Janney    570
Key         320
Murch     488
Mann      270
Oyster    350
Stoddert 320
Wilson  1600
Total	    5603

So in 2013 DCPS had the capacity of the ten schools at 5603. Four years later it's up to 7062. Wow! They've added 1460 seats in four years! What's amazing is with a few exceptions, they've done that without making the buildings any bigger! They've done it by making up a new measure called "programmatic capacity" which would be better called "let's imagine a number that means we don't have to deal with crowding."

Here are just the elementary schools:

Eaton	 49,100 	415	118.313253
Hearst	 17,400 	180	96.66666667
Janney	 84,400 	570	148.0701754
Key	 50,000 	320	156.25
Murch	 47,700 	488	97.74590164
Mann	 21,903 	270	81.12222222
Stoddert	 64,750 	320	202.34375
			
			
Total	 335,253 	 2,563 	 131

Sorry it's so jumbled. First column is building gross square footage, second column is capacity, third column is square footage per student. Back in the naive days of 2013, DCPS promoted a standard of 150 square feet per student for elementary schools. In those days, only Key and Stoddert exceeded it. For middle school the standard was 170 and 192 for high school.

Wilson	 376,448 	1600	235.28
			
Oyster	 47,984 	350	137.0971429
			
Deal 	 181,000 	1090	166.0550459
 
By those standards, Oyster and Deal were already crowded back then. Wilson has room for 1960, which is about where it is today.

I'll argue that the true capacity of the Ward 3 schools was about what was published in 2013. We don't have 200 empty seats, we have about 1200 kids -- over 20% -- above capacity.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics