Reply to Ranking assistance - Cap Hill/Brookland area

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How would you all rank the following schools at the ECE level primarily, then from 1st-5th. Interested in any particular notes(heavy screen use/lack theirof, great pta, warm environment, fun curriculum etc.) on any or all as well. Thank you.

Ludlow
School within School
Peabody
Burroughs
YuYing
LAMB
ITDS
DCB
Stokes-Brookland[/quote]

Ok, OP. I have kids in older grades (one upper elementary, one middle) but will rank these based on what I know. I live IB for a Hill elementary not on this list, to give you a sense of my locations:

1) Ludlow, because it is a great school with a good sense of community and it is close to my home (though not my IB, so I'd be unlikely to get in for PK, but not impossible -- I'd still likely rank it first due to the combination of location, academic acceptableness, vibe, and having a decent MS feed that is also very convenient to my home)
2) SWS. Also very close to my home, we know tons of families there. I like that it is small and the kids seem really nurtured and happy. My impression is that it is great for ECE but also that it can be weaker in academics for upper grades, so I'd go into it knowing we'd probably supplement quite a bit in later grades and also knowing that our academic focus might be a little bit (like a tiny bit) counter to the crunchier vibe of this school.
3) Peabody. Also really close to our house, we know people who have gone and liked it. Huge drawback here is that Watkins is not that close to our house, so we'd probably be looking to lottery for K or 1st to a school closer (like Ludlow or Brent).

Then there are a number of schools I would rank before any of the others on your list. These include: Payne, JO Wilson, Chisolm, Van Ness, maybe CHML, maybe Two rivers. Of these, Payne and Chisholm are the only two I'd intend to stay at through 5th, so we'd be in a similar situation as with Peabody -- looking to lottery into Ludlow or Brent (or Maury, I suppose) in K or 1st.

4) ITDS. We looked at this school closely when we did our lottery and I liked a lot about it, plus the fact that it goes through MS is appealing because, as a Hill family, we stress about MS. But it is just frankly not that close to where we live and I drove the commute multiple times when we were considering it and just did not want to do it daily for 8 years.
5, 6, 7 (tie)) Yu Ying, LAMB, and DCB. We know people at all these schools and if we did language immersion, these would be our preference. I don't want to commute to either of them, so I'm glad we didn't get in, frankly. I don't know many Hill families who commit to these commutes, and all the people we know at these schools live in neighborhoods like Brookland, Edgewood, LeDroit Park, and Petworth -- neighborhoods with fewer good DCPS options and in many cases much shorter commutes.
8) Stokes-Brookland. Same here, I am only ranking it lower because we know a family who had a bad experience here, which is the one thing distinguishing it from the others. But it might have just been them. Immersion can be tricky and it's not right for all kids. I think we would have tried harder for an immersion school if we lived in Brookland but we don't and had other good options and didn't want the commute.
9) Burroughs. I don't know a ton about this school. My impression it has improved since we did our lottery apps. But I don't get the sense it's any better than the strong Hill DCPS schools, plus it has an inferior MS feed (IMO) so I probably would not rank at all. Of course, if we lived in Brookland, I'd probably look at it the way I currently look at a school like JO Wilson or maybe Payne (I view Payne as a good and improving school and JOW as having strong potential and maybe a few years behind Payne).

I say all this as the parent of older kids who is much more focused on MS and HS at this point. A couple things I learned as we went through this and also sent kids to two different Hill elementariness are:

- Most ECEs in DC public schools are fine. Actually better than fine. DCPS has fantastic PK with amazing teachers (most have masters in early childhood and are just great people -- never met a dud and I've met a lot of DCPS PK teachers). I think K is a little better at charters which tend to have more nurturing K experiences which is my preference -- DCPS gets a bit more academic. But then I have found DCPS tends to have stronger academics 1st-5th than a lot of charters. Not all, but a lot. With all that we complain about DCPS (and I complain all the time) having seen it from both sides, the quality of teaching and the curriculum is actually pretty darn good. It's still public so there are lots of things I'd change. But overall we've been happy with our DCPS experience and I am glad we switched from our charter.

- Immersion is something you can go for in the PK-K lotteries and then you let go of it. We lotteried for immersions and only got two offers -- one for Stokes East End and one for LAMB's old South Dakota campus. We wound up turning them down because we heard Stokes EE has a lot of issues with retaining teachers and overall academics, and we knew if we went to that LAMB campus (already not a good commute) we'd have to shift to commuting to the 14th street campus when it closed, which would have been an insane commute for us. No regrets on either. It would be cool if our kids had done immersion but the truth is that there are few immersion campuses truly convenient to the Hill (except Chisolm, which I've heard great things about but was not true immersion when we were doing the lottery) and we ultimately prioritized a combination of a neighborhood school and academics. I'm happy with where we wound up and we stopped lotterying for immersion after our oldest started K because it just didn't make sense to us to try for it anymore.[/quote]

OP here. Thank you SO much for such a well thoughtout and insight reply. This is extremely helpful, as are all of the replies and viewpoints. Very much appreciate it!

I asked the initial question in a fairly flat manner, as we are trying to discern how the difference in teaching environments, the difference in teaching instruction(even at the ece level), determine how proficient the immersion aspects are delivered by various schools, to help inform a decision on how much weight we would want to put into it as well.. ie not being able to easily assist with homework in other languages etc., how involved is a pta, how are good the before and after care programs and extra curriculars, how stable and happy are the teachers.. and so on.. its tough to glean alot of this from open houses and school tours, so the parental purview has been a huge help thus far.[/quote]

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