Reply to New principal: how to improve Oyster-Adams

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Improve it from what to what? Higher overall scores? Higher percentages of advanced students? Improvement in Spanish grammar? One building? A better website? Keep more IB families no matter how high the % of non-Spanish speaking families?

None of these things matter to DCPS. O-A is about as good as it's going to get in terms of quantitative measures. The new principal looks like she was put in there as part of the overall DCPS middle school retention effort. They are going to throw a lot of stuff at the middle school grades for 3 years or so to see if they can stem the tide of flight to charters.

But there is no long-term strategy for the school or any of the dual-language programs in DCPS. It has been completely absent from the entire DME process.

To improve the qualitative elements of the school that many families complain about, all she needs to do is fire the MS AP, move the 4-5th grade AP to the lower grades at Oyster building, hire a superb Dean of Students, get rid of some entrenched staff who have been coasting on the success of individual teachers.

We're IB and bilingual at O-A and have had mixed results. We're contemplating leaving for many reasons, but we're wondering what dual language schools will be better? The only dual immersion secondary school is CHEC.

An easy to use web platform would be great, but first there needs to be consistency in teaching and well-organized administration. Like PP said, many of the crises were self-made or poorly communicated. It would be pretty easy to improve some of the basic operations at O-A.

The elephant in the room is whether it can or will continue as many things to many people. How long can it stay as a neighborhood, bilingual, inclusion, two campus, PK-8 school, that feeds into an English-only high school?[/quote]

Lol—Oyster has been a bilingual neighborhood school for OVER 40 years, so I'm certain that it will successfully continue down that path.  A PK-8 school is also not the issue here.  There are many parents who do not want a dual immersion school after 8th grade.  Those that do can try their luck with WIS and DCI.  Since Monica is gone, the most likely thing that will drop is the emphasis on the inclusion program.
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