Reply to CHARTERS MAY MERGE AT WALTER REED (The DC International School, IB Diploma Programme)

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Reply to "CHARTERS MAY MERGE AT WALTER REED (The DC International School, IB Diploma Programme)"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Like I JUST said, I am Chinese and have never felt what the "high SES AA" parent who doesn't even go to the school says I have felt. It's so rich----The school is great, 99% of us Chinese parents are happy as hell with it, and I just wish the parents WHO AREN'T EVEN AT THE SCHOOL AND LIVE IN MD would shut up. I j[/quote]

On the last thread, I was "WOTP" guy, who left YY for my fine IB school.

I think I know the "high-SES AA" family who departed for a MoCo immersion school.  One of the things that didn't work for us at YY, although there were some fine teachers, is the way that administrators and parents tended to think like the independent school crowd.

The comment above illustrates the point.  Wait a minute, we tried YY, and so did the other family.  We're DC taxpayers and so are they (owning a home in the District).  The school isn't Sidwell, where, if you aren't involved, you don't have a dog in the fight.  Public monies are behind charters.  It was, if you don't like the way we do things, get out of town.

I can attest to the fact that there are Cantonese speakers, self included, who have privately approached charter board members to ask if another Chinese immersion school might have a shot at seeing the light of day.  We didn't take the issue to the DC Public School Charter Board, we quietly sounded out the situation.  Off the record, we were told that our bilingual population was far too small to support a second school, where Cantonese was the language of instruction in the lower grades, as at immersion schools in the Bay Area.  There are roughly 20x as many Spanish speakers in the city (and even 5x as many Ethiopian immigrants).

It seemed clear that we would hit a wall, in part because many of the bilingual families don't feel like public schools serve them, not just YY.  As I said on the earlier thread, most of the Chinese families we knew at YY weren't reallly bilingual.  And they did seem pretty happy.  Committed dialect speakers, like us, tend to go their own route, at good IB schools or in MoCo, as has been explained.

We hope that the DCI planning goes well because it would be excellent for the city to have another high-performing middle school appealing to a diverse group of families.  We wish you folks well.

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