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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ok, but if you bought a house between 2014 and today, you knew the deal with DCPS and lottery odds.  All the data was available if you cared to look. To cite just one example,
Latin MS was impossible back then, too

So the rest of DCUM finds it “annoying” to listen to the complaints and occasional whines from this cohort now that Oscar and Genevieve are 8 and Eliot Hine is still Eliot Hine. You made your bed. [/quote]

Well I will just speak to myself, but we bought in 2014 before we had kids and didn't really know that much about schools. I had a general idea about elementary. Our IB was a Title 1 and still is. We looked at a place IB for L-T (also Title 1 back then and incredibly close to where we actually bought) but we were already at the top of our price range and that place went for over, so we couldn't swing it. We didn't know much about MS.

Also, and to be clear I'm not blaming anyone for the situation we are in, but this is just to give you an idea of how this happens: we had several friends on the Hill who had kids at Brent at the time (IB).  We couldn't afford anything IB for Brent, but they told us "oh Brent wasn't that great when we moved here -- I'm sure other schools will improve the same way Brent has." That was true for L-T and Maury but not for all schools. I'm really not sure how I was supposed to guess that Maury was going to become such a sought-after school -- it would not have occurred to me to find out when they were slated for a new facility and I'm not sure I would have known how to look that up back then anyway (keep in mind, I did not have kids!).

The other thing our Brent friends told us was that they were very excited to send their kids to either their IB (Jefferson) or S-H if they could lottery in. They told us these MSs were on the upswing and so was Eastern and it was only a matter of time, and weren't we lucky that we'd be able to take advantage of their efforts when our kids finally aged into those schools. Here's where those friend's kids attended MS: BASIS, Latin, MCPS, a private Catholic in VA, Massachusetts. Not one of those kids spent a single day at either Jefferson or S-H. But back when those kids were in 2nd/3rd grade, their parents were extremely enthusiastic about those schools. Well now my kids are in those grades. Our own IB has struggled to retain IB families and lost so many to charters. It might be on a Maury/L-T path but it also might not, and we'll be through it by the time that happens anyway. And looking at MS, we are far less inclined to tell new families that we are definitely going to our IB, and we certainly don't talk up Eastern, the way our friends did back in 2014. We saw what happened. We are more realistic, both for ourselves and for new families entering our school or considering it.

So... that's how it happens. Believe it or not, none of us has a crystal ball. Some people get lucky, some people think they can do something and it turns out they can't, and so on. Patting yourself on the back because you made what turned out to be a very fortuitous real estate choice and getting angry at families who are simply trying the best they can is a bad look, and I suspect it will come back to bite you.[/quote]

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