Reply to DC Begins School Boundary Study

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m always amused by y’all trying to kick Shepherd out in the name of overcrowding. Shepherd is such a tiny school. [/quote]

Shepherd + 1/2 Lafayette would create a stronger cohort at Wells/Coolidge. I am always amused by the entitled Chevy Chase and Shepherd Park families who think it's too challenging to take Military/Piney Branch in the morning, and then want to restrict equity access at OOB at Deal/J-R. We see you. [/quote]

UMC Takoma Elem family here.  I support Shepard being zoned to Wells because I thing it makes sense geographically but I hate the narrative that we need students from other schools to come to Well’s to save us.  I have been paying close attention to Wells and am looking forward to send my kid there without any new boundaries needed.  I’m far more curious to see how many kids wind up in the new Walter reed developments and where they wind up.[/quote]

Cool story. Not sending my (non-white, minority religion) DD to Wells unless the number of IB students goes up. Have toured school, met principal (seems great), but MS is fairly universally the worst time in a kid's life, and unless we improve Coolidge (which has been bad for 20+ years and where a kid was stabbed last week) you will not get IB participation in large numbers for Wells. Ward 4 is the most diverse ward in the city - so increasing IB buy-in will keep the school diverse by most metrics - but getting a critical cohort of Lafayette/Shepherd families is going to save Coolidge which will ensure Well's future. [/quote]

What is large percentage to you.  It is 68% inbound  so far?  Also curious why you assume that oob students are necessarily worse than in bound?[/quote]

The boundary participation rate for Wells is 25%, Coolidge is 21%; Takoma is 35%. In contrast, Lafayette has a boundary participation of 92%; Deal is 74%; and J/R is 68%.  Ward-wide, Ward 4 has a high level of education for women - the education level of the mother is the single biggest predictor of academic success for any student. There are also benefits in terms of community building when there is buy-in into the school. [/quote]

I’m confused by these boundary participation rates.  Why not look at the % of the students at the school who also live in bounds.  From the school profiles on the DCPS website the percent of kids enrolled in schools who are in bounds for the school are:
78% Deal
64% Jackson-Reed
62% Wells
62% Hardy

92% Janney
88% Murch
88% Lafayette 
78% Mann
77% Hearst
74% Brightwood
72% Eaton 
70% Takoma
63% Shepard 
58% Whittier

So yes.  The West of the park schools do have somewhat higher percentages of the students at the school being from within their boundary but not outrageously so.  I bet if there were as many charter options as close to Lafayette and Deal as there are to Takoma and Wells the numbers would be even closer.  I’m sure a good number of Lafayette families would choose Language immersion or Montessori charter if given the option and Deal families might choose charters like Latin or DCI more frequently if they were closer.

So my question remains.  [b]Why is a cohort of 60-70% of the students being from the in-bounds area not a large enough cohort of in-bound students to consider the school?[/b]  
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Go ahead and consider it all you like. But for most people, in-boundary percentage and capture rate is only one factor. Other factors are academic performance, academic offering, and student behavior. Most people consider those too.

The percentage of students who love in-boundary can be misleading. Imagine a school that is doing very badly. It has 100 students who love in-boundary, but nobody else is willing to travel to it. The other 900 students living in the boundary choose not to attend. 100% of it's students are in-boundary, wow! Excellent school!

Now imagine a school that is doing well. 90% of the students living within its boundary attend, but it has a big building so it takes a lot of OOB kids as well. The result is an IB percentage of 50%. Terrible school? No. That is why people don't really find that metric valuable. It exists more for DCPS planning purposes.

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