Reply to Can Gentrifers Use Their Skills and Resources to "Make" a Great School?

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Reply to "Can Gentrifers Use Their Skills and Resources to "Make" a Great School?"

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[quote=Anonymous]I think Ross is a very unusual case. As earlier posters noted, the neighborhood became wealthy very fast, and that plus families banding together pushed it over the edge to gentrifcation.

As for Powell or any other DCPS elementary in Ward 1, good luck. I say this as a parent for several years at Bancroft, which is similar (boundaries include a wealthy neighborhood; dual language as a selling point).

Bancroft is 71% FARMs right now, so far more gentrified than Powell, Tubman, Bruce Monroe, etc. (all listed in profiles at 99% FARMs, which is incorrect but all the same means they are way behind Bancroft.) We have a great, hard-working PTA. I and many other higher SES parents spend huge amounts of time working to improve the school (from raising money for field trips and extracurriculars, to helping out in our kids' classrooms). But despite all this work, Bancroft's FARMS figure has fallen only a few percent in the 4+ years my family has been at the school.

Why? Several reasons. One, despite Mount Pleasant's wealth, our boundaries still include a lot of low income families (in apartment buildings mostly). The rest of Ward 1 has even more poor families and thinking you can flip a school to non-Title I in this area is probably completely unrealistic, no matter how much parents organize. Two, higher SES families come to Bancroft in droves for PK3 knowing they will move in PK4 (WOTP or to charters). This means they take spots from families who might have stayed. Three, other families stay a couple years longer, but still bail because while they may talk a good talk about wanting diversity and in some cases have even been very involved with "improving" the school, in their heart they really want to be at a higher SES charter or WOTP school rather than at a school that is still mostly low income Latino families.

I think they leave because of a combination of fear of the unknown (will my kid be challenged etc.), other options being so easy (Eaton has many Mt P families), and pure snobbishness. [/quote]

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