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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Guys, DCPS is never going to approve a middle school that will be de facto segregated. They just will not. Come up with some other ideas.[/quote]

SH (513) + EH (266) + Jefferson (377) combined (1156) is still substantially smaller than Deal (1463).

If you combined the feeders for all of those schools -- Ludlow/Watkins/JOW + SWS/Maury/Payne/Miner + Brent/Van Ness/Tyler/Amidon-Bowen -- your school would not be segregated at all. It would be diverse with the majority of kids feeding from T1s but with plenty of kids to support actually advanced classes.

The question would be where to put it. Eastern has 735 students and is very close to EH, which is massively under-enrolled, so the most obvious option would be to split the 3 grades between those two facilities and put Eastern at either SH or Jefferson; I'm assuming SH would be the better fit location & size-wise and it's a nice facility. There are obviously other possibilities too. [/quote]

Agree with this.

I also feel like this strategy could have a much faster "lift all boats" effect because a new school that pulled all these populations together could offer both (1) programs geared toward accelerating kids performing below grade level as well as outreach to high risk populations, and (2) programs to support kids excelling academically who want to pursue higher level courses as they prepare for high school. Like if you combined the budgets and facilities of these schools, you can take advantage of some economies of scale and reach the needs of more kids than are currently being served by these schools.

Just to give you a sense of where I'm coming from, I grew up in a smallish town (10k population, but isolated) and they consolidated schools in this way and it's one of the best things about my education. My highs school was fully half FARMs students but since there were no private options, it's also where the doctors and lawyers and business owners sent their kids. The school had a ton of outreach for kids who needed it -- free meals, after school programs, tutoring, etc. And it also had a decent amount of support for high achievers -- AP classes, tons of clubs and academic groups, etc. I had friends who lived in million dollar homes with pools and vacationed in Europe, and friends who were on welfare and lived in small apartments in single parent families. And lots of people in between. The school had a 90+% graduation rate. I can't remember the college rate  but it was well over 50% (maybe somewhere between 60 and 70%) which means lots and lots of FARMS kids were getting some form of college education.

And before you ask, diverse population. Very few black families in town but about 50% non-white Hispanic, plus a significant Native population. Also, a significant percent of the white families were rural and/or poor. So lots of diversity in all directions.

I'm not saying it was perfect, but I've experienced a school that managed to be a lot of things to a lot of kids all at once, with the added benefit to all of us that we learned how to interact within a truly SES diverse community. I feel like the Hill has the opportunity to do this because even though some wealthy families on the Hill will always bail for private, the cost of private in this area makes it prohibitive for most families. So really you are just competing against charters. And if you offered families a chance to send their kids to a large, well-funded, racially and economically diverse school that offered programs designed to meet their needs, why on earth would most of those families choose to bus their kids across town to a charter?

I just feel like people throw up excuses but I truly do not understand why this isn't an obvious solution, and I don't understand why the assumption is that the school will be segregated when the whole problem is that the existing schools are segregated (in that too few white, MC and UMC families send their kids there).[/quote]

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