Reply to Mayor Bowser to Make Education Policy and Personnel Announcement

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]... Look, the only viable answer to Deal overcrowding is to reduce enrollment.  And unless we're prepared to go to some crazy all-city lottery, that means neighborhoods with other middle school options will need to be shifted out of Deal's orbit.  For better or worse, that puts places like Crestwood and Shepherd Park on the bubble.  Whatever political favors got called in to press Mayor Bowser to tweak the plan are just temporary bandaids.  Real solutions, and real progress for our city's middle schools, just got delayed by another 5-10 years.[/quote]
Yeah because cutting the 12 kids from Crestwood and the 30 from Shepherd are going to make things A-ok at Deal. [/quote]
Well, according to the Code for DC map (http://edu.codefordc.org/#!/school/405), you're exaggerating substantially how few students come to Deal from those neighborhoods.  Here is a sample of the Deal students from some other areas and how they might reduce enrollment:

Shepherd Park area - 64 students
Takoma area - 63 students
Crestwood/Petworth area - 128 students
Mt. Pleasant area - 107 students
Total - 362 students

Deal enrollment without those students - 943 (back what it was in 2011)[/quote]
Your numbers don't dispute what the PP wrote about Crestwood and Shepherd Park. Your numbers are for all 3 years at Deal (so actually fewer than the 30 students per year that PP suggested for Shepherd) and Crestwood is lumped in with Petworth, which is a very large area. Those kids from Petworth are all OOB at Hearst, Eaton, etc. [/quote]
First, I don't think PP's reference to "12 from Crestwood" and "30 from Shepherd" ever suggested it was a per-year number.  If that's what she meant, then she was being misleading by not including the multi-year totals.  Either way, it's indisputably a large number of kids coming from those neighborhoods to Deal, so removing them from the Deal boundary would help relieve overcrowding.  Second, I get that Crestwood is lumped together with Petworth and other neighborhoods, so it's tough to get a read on exactly how many kids (total or per-year) are attending Deal from just Crestwood.  But my point still stands that if the 128 kids from those collective neighborhoods begin attending another middle school besides Deal, it will help reduce overcrowding at Deal.  (And just so we're clear, I know it's unlikely to be those exact same 128 kids, because they'll have grandfather rights even before today's "tweaks," so we're really talking about a roughly equivalent number of future kids.)

I stand by my view that the only way to reduce enrollment at Deal is to shrink the boundaries.  And those neighborhoods are the clearly obvious choice to be removed, because they are farthest away and because there are other middle schools that could absorb the kids.  I hear the other PP's point about instead shifting the southern boundary of Deal, and pushing more kids to Hardy.  That's a hypothetical option too, if Hardy has the capacity to absorb the excess.  My sense is that Hardy is more limited because of it's location.  [/quote]

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