Reply to Question for Supporters of New WotP High School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]
Hi Jeff, Mount Pleasant parent here. We don't know each other, but thanks for your excellent website!

I would appreciate it if you (and others) could please stop using "Ward 3" as shorthand for the high-SES, well-educated subset of Wilson (and Deal) families.

There are a number of us who meet or exceed this implied Ward 3 demographic/income standard and who deliberately chose to live within the Wilson boundary but EOTP, for example in Mount Pleasant. As you are probably aware, row houses in Mt P routinely sell for $1m+ now, so it's not really income or wealth that divides us anymore, just preferences.

What unites us is that we all bought our houses in part because they are IB for Wilson.

Our neighborhoods have been IB for Wilson for decades - we are not part of this OOB population to which you refer - and we hope to remain part of the Wilson (and Deal) communities for many years to come.

I hope you will advocate to keep Mt P part of Deal and Wilson, and not, as a PP has done on this thread with the map she/he drew, re-district us into Roosevelt or whatever the latest idea is for an EOTP school. 
 
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Hi Mount Pleasant Parent:

I sure that it was not intentional, but your post comes off as pretty obnoxious and self-unaware. I also live in a neighborhood in which homes routinely sell for $1m+, that has been zoned for Deal and Wilson for decades, which is united by residents having purchased homes zoned for Deal and Wilson, where we hope to remain a part of the Deal and Wilson communities for many years to come, and in which we are not part of the Deal and Wilson OOB community.

Going by your logic, there would be no need for me to start this thread in the first place. In fact, [b]I am not sure your logic requires revisiting boundaries at all other than to perhaps compare real estate appraisals and remove those neighborhoods below the Mt. Pleasant benchmark.[/b]

There are multiple ways to approach the very real overcrowding problems facing Wilson and, to a lesser extent, Deal. One way is to fight for pieces of the current pie and tell those left without a piece to go blow. Current political realities are such that my neighborhood likely would fair pretty well under that scenario. Mayoral candidate Bowser has only outlined three strong positions regarding the boundary process and one of those is that my neighborhood should retain its traditional rights to Deal and Wilson.

Another approach is to increase the number of pies. That is the approach we've been discussing in this thread. [b]I resent your implication that I would settle for an educational opportunity for my family that would not be at a level acceptable to your family. [/b]Both you and I purchased homes that had rights to a Deal/Wilson level education. I would not accept anything less than a Deal/Wilson level education for my family and I wouldn't expect you to do so either. I don't have an opinion on the Roosevelt boundaries and whether or not Mt. Pleasant should be included. But, your attitude that because you paid a lot for your house you shouldn't be part of a solution that creates additional pies is troubling and unhelpful. [b]If you want to ensure that your rights to Wilson are protected, the best thing you can do is help create a Roosevelt that is equal or better than Wilson. Then, families such as mine would attend by choice and you could have Wilson to yourself.[/b]

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Mt P parent again - thanks for your reply. Probably there are many on DCUM who know where you live, because of previous posts that you have made, but I do not know where you live, so I can't reply to what you write with regard to your own neighborhood.

Regarding your first statement in bold: I'm going to ignore the real estate appraisal comment, but otherwise, yes, my logic is that there is no need to redraw boundaries so long as there are OOB students at a school, whether by feeder rights or other paths. In most school districts across the country OOB is only offered when a school is not full with IB students. It is a basic principle of fairness that you solve an over-crowding problem first by reducing or eliminating OOB and only then, if overcrowding remains, by reducing the geographical IB area. For example at the ES level, Janney is now full of IB students and thus it no longer accepts OOB. That's how it is supposed to operate. I don't see any proposals to shrink the Janney IB area in order to accept more OOB. Yet there are some, like the other poster on this thread who is posting proposed boundary maps, who would propose to carve Mt P out of Wilson and, presumably, allow OOB students from feeders to continue attending Wilson. This is unfair - shrinking boundaries should be a last resort. First, you reduce OOB.

Re: your second statement - again, I don't know where you live so I don't understand your comment - are you within the Roosevelt boundary proposed in the maps on this thread?

Re: your third statement in bold above, this doesn't make sense in the context of the proposals in this thread. The boundary maps in this thread show Mt P assigned to Roosevelt, so it would appear that if I help create Roosevelt, as proposed here, I likely will lose the Wilson access, right?

In general you seem overly optimistic about the prospects of this new school, but that's another discussion.

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