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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just a friendly reminder that neighborhood schools are a choice as well.  There is no fundamental right to go to your neighborhood school.  School districts adopt systems to identify how they will distribute seats to schools.  DCPS has long been a neighborhood school system with a lottery system for available seats.  The feeder rights for OOB students has now been in place almost a decade.

Cities like NY give a preference but no guarantee of a spot in a neighborhood school.  SF has a complete lottery system.  Seattle long had a choice system with a neighborhood preference to a cluster of schools.

DCPS could adopt a number of ways to solve the overcrowding problem.  Doing away with the right for OOB students to follow a feeder pattern is one option but not the only and not necessarily the most politically palatable.

My youngest starts Deal in the fall.  How they solve this will not have an impact on my kids so I really do not have a dog in this fight other than property values.

All of you parents that recently bought into upper NW and think this can be easily solved by cutting off feeder rights to OOB students likely did not participate in this discussion last time it was actually on the table  in a boundary review.

I think it is wise to think about a solution that betters the system for all DCPS students, not just your child's path.

[/quote]

I really don't know what you are trying to say in this post.

There is no such thing as a fundamental right when it comes to what school you can attend.

Right now in DC you have the right to attend the school whose boundaries you live within.  In the case of Deal and Wilson those boundaries are illogical and enormous.

Now perhaps what you meant to say is that the right is not set in stone and can be taken away and that is true.

But practically speaking the alternatives to such a system at the MS and HS level would be to go to either an all merit based application system or a pure lottery system where everyone is equal and scattered around the city randomly.  The former would do almost nothing to address inequality or access to the select schools while the latter would almost certainly fail and cause lots of middle class families to flee.

I don't think new boundaries and sticking with neighborhood based schools will necessarily cause so many middle class families to flee - knowing where their kids would be attending middle and high school would give those families the chance to be engaged with DCPS and the DC Council years before their kids actually get to those schools and to make sure those schools were up to their expectations but sending the kids to random schools would make that impossible.   Unfortunately DCPS has been screwing around for years when it comes to getting a high quality middle school up and running in Ward 4 which is the needed bridge to get these kids to some other high school besides Wilson.

And the swipe from the PP at Upper NW parents shows how misinformed this poster is - the demographic that is going to most vociferously fight any changes is the same demographic most causing the problems in EOTP schools and that is the new UMC families who do whatever they can to avoid sending their kids to their neighborhood EOTP schools whether by going the charter route or finding ways to squeze into Deal/Wilson. If you want to know what it looks like when white people riot then zone Crestwood out of Deal.

The people on here screaming about closing OOB feeder rights are overestimating its role but mostly I think conflating OOB and neighborhood schools - Deal still has enormous boundaries and draws kids from much of NW DC.  I think there are some UMC families from both sides of the park that are a bit surprised at how diverse Deal is but the fact that we've got a lot of UMC white families crossing the park to attend a diverse school suggests it should not be impossible to get them to attend a diverse school EOTP and that hopefully points the way to solving the overcrowding here.[/quote]

I am the PP you are responding to.  I am an upper NW parent that was very engaged in the last boundary review.  Things like a city-wide lottery to the middle and high schools were on the table.  My swipe was to the parents that are blaming OOB feeder pattern is just a response to the entitlement expressed in their posts that their children have a right to their in boundary schools that is stronger than those that get in through the OOB process.  The rules of the OOB process are just as embedded in the law as the boundaries and changing that iis not so simple as just deciding to stop it.  The mayor did not win her job in upper NW, there are other parts of the city that DCPS is responsive to and upper NW is lucky that no one in the city wanted to do away with the boundary system, even those with what you would consider sucky IB schools.[/quote]

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