Reply to Stoddert and Key to get expansions

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They are going to have to create another by-right HS WoTP, right?

To me, it's only a matter of time.[/quote]

Or change the feeder pattern and route some students to another by-right high school.[/quote]

Or stop letting kids who got into an elementary or middle school OOB continue on through the feeder pattern. If you get a lottery spot at Hearst, you're there through 5th grade and that's the only guarantee you get. Deal figures out how many extra spaces it has and does a lottery for them (DCPS could give a preference for OOB kids at feeder schools though personally I'd rather they didn't). Same with high school.

There are fewer than 1000 IB kids at Wilson now. The school is not out of room by any means. Having some of the OOB kids attending their IB high schools (which should get more funding for things like honors and AP classes even if the classes are tiny at first, extracurriculars, guidance counselors, etc.) would be better for those schools and better for traffic and better for the district as a whole.  [/quote]

The way OOB feeder rights work is destabilizing to public education in the rest of the city. [/quote]

Depends on your POV.  Many people would say that decoupling address from school patterns is one of the factors that keeps people invested in public education in one form or another.

Forcing families into schools they don't like and don't trust led to white flight generations ago and then black flight (more of a DC phenomenon).  So far, there is massive under-capacity across the system with very few exceptions.  You can [i]entice[/i] families to try a school they're on the fence about, but you can't [i]force[/i] them.  Human nature hasn't changed in a decade.  [/quote]

You misunderstand me. I'm not anti-OOB at all, schools are public property and should be for everybody.

What I'm specifically calling out is the feeder process. If a kid gets a seat at a Deal feeder for Pre-K3 this year, under the current policy he is guaranteed a seat at Deal until 2029 and at Wilson until 2033. If a kid gets a seat at a Deal feeder for 5th grade she is guaranteed a seat at Deal until 2021 and at Wilson until 2025. There is a strong motivation for families to lottery into elementary schools with a better feeder pattern, even if the elementary school itself is no better than their current one. That is destabilizing for the school that is left. There is a strong motivation to lottery into a better feeder pattern for 4th or 5th grade, which is destabilizing for both the new school and the old school. Deal and Wilson have effectively lost the ability to control their enrollment, because more students have the right to attend than the schools can hold, and those rights are locked in until 2033. That is destabilizing. Under the current system families who have poor luck in the lottery are out of luck, and need to either move or leave the public school system.

A more rational system would be you lottery into a school and stay as long as you stay at that school, but each new school has a new lottery at the entry year.

The argument that is often made that it is important to preserve class cohorts from elementary to middle school. Unfortunately, the reality is that Deal is the only middle school in the city where that happens already. I'm not IB fo Deal, I put my kids through my IB elementary, and by the time they got to fifth about 60% of the kids who were there in kindergarten were gone. Of that class, a couple went to the IB middle school, a handful got into Deal by hook or by crook, and the rest scattered, going to charter, parochial, or private, or moving. So yeah, preserving cohorts is good, but it isn't happening in most of the city today, and it doesn't outweigh the destabilizing influence of the current OOB feeder rules. [/quote]

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