Reply to What are the thoughts on Maury Elementary??

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "What are the thoughts on Maury Elementary??"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I'm a parent with children in Maury's upper grades. There are a couple of things that both questions and answers aren't getting entirely right. My comments in no particular order:
- I'm generally not into "Brent this but Maury that" but since the poster reviving this thread brings it up here my comment on that: Brent is the one peeling off in 5th grade (2 classrooms sized down to one), Maury is not. About half of Maury's 5th grade are transferring to Eliot-Hine and half to Stuart-Hobson. 
- The differences in demographics (race as well as income) you're seeing between grade levels are primarily a reflection of neighborhood gentrification over time, not a reflection of attrition. To the extent there is attrition at Maury (no bigger than many DCPS and charters), it's a combination of different things: parents ultimately vying for (immersion) charters, parents whose second children didn't get into Brent and who're waiting for their Kindergarten spot "by right" there, and growing families who want a bigger house with a yard in the suburbs. I also know a family or two who transferred to Watkins to get in line for Stuart-Hobson MS. But there are actually more families who're inbounds for the Cluster but go to Maury because they prefer it over Watkins.
- Looking at Maury's OOB percentage, you'll need to take into account that the Maury boundaries are minuscule compared to other ES boundaries. So, absent a tidal wave of school age children (right about now happening for ages 6 and under), Maury has a large share of OOB children, always has and always will. Currently, many are from other parts of Capitol Hill (Payne, Watkins/Cluster, Tyler, Ludlow-Taylor, and Brent for the reasons I mentioned). And some are families slated for Miner but whose parents attended Maury in an era when the boundaries were different. In the upper grades, I venture to claim that there are also a significant number of children whose grandparents live within the school boundaries, either in multi-generation households or kids residing with these relatives during the week.
- Race doesn't easily correlate with income in Maury's upper grades because Maury historically had a reputation as something of a parochial school that happened to be public and thus attracted middle class African-American families from other parts of the city. With the parochial touches disappearing, some of those families switched to private schools.
- Maury was severely under-enrolled in the early 2000 and almost slated to close. During that time, it also went through several cycles of re-branding, shifting resources, school mergers, new principals, with DCPS off and on granting extra teachers, specials, a Spanish exposure program, magnet status, on/off, on/off etc. I'd say, it took growing enrollment numbers, DCPS resources decentralization, and a principal with a vision to put it back on a growth path towards a new identity as a highly diverse school that strives to provide "a personalized inquiry-based learning environment that educates the whole child" (http://mauryelementary.com/culture/philosophy). Not fully fleshed out until recent years, but that depiction is largely what we've experienced at Maury.[/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