Reply to Ward 6 Needs to Boot Joe Weedon

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If a referendum on SH's fate was held tomorrow, with only Ward 6 residents permitted to vote, I'd wager than 3/4 of those who voted would vote to change SH's status.  What good is a "neighborhood" MS to us when it serves more students from Wards 5, 7 AND 8 than Ward 6? The question has been asked for decades, with the myopic Cluster leadership blocking change.

Weedon's certainly not an easy ed advocate to deal with, but he's not wrong in advocating for DCPS to use the SH building differently in the context of promoting neighborhood schools.  I'd like to see SH become an elementary school serving the East Hill (since Payne and Miner don't serve their neighborhoods at all well) and EH renovated to become a pan Ward 6, Deal-like middle school with serious honors classes.  As things stand, the Hill won't have middle schools most parents are comfortable with for another 20 years.  No good.  [/quote]

How is turning SH into an elementary school going to help with the population you feel is "not served" by Payne and Miner?  Are you going to do some kind of weird gerrymandering boundaries?

What makes you think that Ward 6 parents will send their kids to a renovated EH?

And more importantly, the REASON that kids get in OOB to from Wards 5, 7, and 8 into SH is because Ward 6 parents ARE NOT SENDING THEIR OWN KIDS.  It's rich of you to blame the OOB students. [/quote]

That misses a key point -- very few OOB students get into SH off MS lottery.  Almost all get in from the feeders (Watkins, Ludlow Taylor and JO Wilson).  About 2/3 of that is Watkins and the JO Wilson/LT split the other 1/3.  Peabody is 75% IB and likely loses families to charters early by not having enough PK spaces for IB.  Watkins and LT IB % has been trending upwards and both were 29% last year, up from low 20s the year before.  JO Wilson is up to 25% IB.  Most of that momentum is in the lower ES but it still represents incremental improvement in retention.  Let's face it - this isn't upper NW

They're no different than the other Hill schools like Brent and Maury that get hit in upper ES, mainly for 5th. Brent and Maury probably have higher retention through 4th but all bets are off by 5th.[/quote]

no, that's my exact point. Ward 6 parents are chosing not to use their neighborhood schools in general, opening up those seats to OOB students who then feed to SH. You can't blame the OOB students. [/quote]

So blame Ward 6 parents for choosing not to use their neighborhood school (when only around 1/3 of them are in-boundary for SH), rather than incentivizing them to use it by offering the sort of program they're looking for? Granted, you can't blame OOB students for using Hobson, but you can certainly blame DCPS for failing to offer the challenge and rich curricular and extra-curricular offerings most high SES Ward 6 parents are looking for.  E.g. Deal is offering Mandarin, Arabic, French, [b]7th grade algebra and 8th grade geometry[/b] while Hobson is offering none of these classes. BASIS is offering 5th and 6th grade algebra to students who can test in, 7th grade algebra to the rest, and AP World History to 8th graders. The several strongest Ward 6 elementary schools--Brent, Maury and SWS-don't feed into SH, leaving most high parents coming out of the other Hobson feeders (really just Watkins for the time being) reluctant to use the school.

When I asked how my mildly math gifted child would be served at SH, I was told that DC would be put in front of a computer during math classes. Sorry, eleven year olds don't learn math well without a teacher or tutor on hand to teach it to them. What we're going to see in the next decade are slightly increases in the percentage of high SES and white students using Hobson year on year, from under 20% to maybe one-third.  Not a bad result, but nothing to cheer about in a catchment area that's overwhelmingly high SES and white. Without a strong Ward 6 MS on the horizon, most of the current parents of babies and toddlers will hit the road by MS. Ward 6 could do a lot better. At least Joe Weedon gets it.

[/quote]

Where are you getting your information?  SH offers both Algebra and Geometry.  This is flatly wrong.  SH also offers Spanish.  It's 1/3 the size of Deal and its budget reflects that[/quote]

SH offers Spanish as an after school option. That's not equivalent to the language offerings at Deal.[/quote]

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