Reply to Replicating ATS success — what are exact differences

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]ATS should mandate 2/3rds of slots for lower socioeconomic and minority students, similar to how Montessori does their prek. I have no problem with ATS existing or being a home for attentive parents. But it should favor disadvantaged every step of the way. And, please don't tell me its FRL rate is similar or better than other schools, that is truly irrelevant. Its FRL needs to be twice the worst neighborhood school, and its student demographics needs to flip the stats of U.S. public. Then you know it's really serving those who need it in our society. [/quote]

This is an interesting comment, but I think that APS just needs to offer more schools that use the ATS model.  This is a public school district.  It’s unfair to offer a product like ATS- the literal best public elementary school in Virginia- when it benefits so few of the taxpaying population.  I would be fine with them setting aside percentage for students receiving FRL, but there’s no getting around the fact that we need more ATS slots for everyone.[/quote]

All of the options are built and supported by the fact that there is demand for 125%, maybe 175%, of capacity, but no more. As a public system, you don't want to build an option building that then depends on you struggling to fill it every year. As others have noted here, there are huge swaths of APS system that do NOT want rigid ATS for their kids. And if your answer is,fine, don't build buildings, just implement inside current schoools, then I strongly suggest you look into the lessons learned from the failures of "schools win schools" in APS. Long story short, nothing makes a local school more like a civil war battleground than when you ty to divide up its classrooms between very different pedagogies. See Montessori experience at Drew. [/quote]

But demand for ATS is almost 200% of current capacity. Way more than demand for other options. [/quote]

Yes, the waitlist could fill another school.  And I guarantee that there are some families who don’t bother with the ATS lottery because it’s  such a long shot. They could easily have the interest for a second program, and then maybe they could assign students to the school geographically like with Key and Claremont.[/quote]

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