Reply to Stoddert and Key to get expansions

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As already noted, Shepherd can feed Coolidge via the New North middle school in the DME' plans; Oyster and Bancroft can feed MacFarland and Roosevelt along with the other bilingual programs. Those three schools had 197 5th graders last year.

If DCPS wants to avoid the visual of kicking out only schools with substantial percentages of non-white students, they could also send Lafayette to Coolidge, which would add another 101 5th graders a year out of Wilson's feeder pattern and be more balanced--two schools to Coolidge and two to Roosevelt.

Adams won't be needed as a middle school if Oyster fed MacFarland. One option is to add another 200ish elementary students (Adams' capacity) to Oyster by putting  grades PK-2 at Oyster and 3-5 at Adams. That would allow more kids (and potentially high-scoring kids) to go on to MacFarland and Roosevelt. It could pull a few Ward 3 families who want bilingual education away from Wilson (helping overcrowding), allow for more PK spaces in the Oyster boundary (so all the pissed-off parents of big kids could be matched by happy parents of toddlers, giving DCPS cover for the decision), and counteract the decline in OOB lottery places WoTP. No boundary adjustments would be required.[/quote]

Lafayette is both ward 3&4 and the largest ES in the city with very vocal parents. The political hurdles to this plan are massive.[/quote]

Then they're going to have to manage having their kid be one of 2000 students at Wilson. Bancroft and Oyster and Shepherd have vocal parents too. So do some of the neighborhoods zoned out of Wilson in the last boundary change. [/quote]

They don't have 850 students though.[/quote]

Before they tear them out of Wilson, they'll have to tear them out of Deal.  It makes no sense to maintain OOB feeder rights for some from all over the District into, say, Hearst (just an example - not picking on Hearst) but tell Lafayette that after Deal they need to attend Roosevelt.  You could end up with a student from Shaw going through Hearst - Deal - Wilson, and a student IB for Lafayette (in a house less than a mile from Deal/Wilson) going through Deal to Roosevelt?

If this is an attempt to ration the resources, it won't work to play with the HS without changing the MS.[/quote]

I agree. It should be Shepherd and Lafayette to the New North middle school described in the DME plan, and then on to Coolidge. This requires the New North middle school to be built. That could be a whole new building, or another option would be to take one of the existing ECs that feeds into Coolidge (Takoma, LaSalle-Backus, Brightwood, and Whittier) and make it New North middle school, and adjust the boundaries of the remaining 3 schools to accommodate the PK-5 students at all 4 ECs. Oyster (expanded so it serves PK-2 and Adams serves 3-5) and Bancroft should go to MacFarland and then Roosevelt.

At the same time, or even before (since it doesn't require construction), I would like DCPS to end the rule that an OOB spot at elementary qualifies you for a seat at the destination middle and high school. One way to cushion the blow is to start it with the kids who start in PK3 in the 2019-2020 school year, so it won't affect middle school enrollment until 2026. That seems too slow to me though. A better way would be to give a preference in the lottery to kids who are enrolled OOB in a feeder school. Where that preference should go relative to sibling and proximity preference is something DCPS would have to figure out. [/quote]

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