Reply to 21,000 new students in DCPS/charters by 2026?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The current boundaries are already set to be reviewed in 2024. Take a deep breath. [/quote]

you realize that is way too late. They review in 2024, fight about it until 2025 and then grandfather in a all the kids so the parents are screaming so no real boundaries change until at least 2030 at the earliest.  How many more trailers can janney take.  Can Deal hold 3000 kids?   Time to get rid of feeder rights for OOB kids.[/quote]

My guess is that by 2024, the OOB problem will be close to having worked itself out. The lower grades have admitted very few OOB children in many years. The upper grades are full to bursting. As long as that trend holds, which no one has any reason to doubt, all the feeders will be full of neighborhood children. The problem is that because those schools are the ones that parents trust, DC parents do their damnedest to buy within those districts, leading to the large class sizes of IB children that already exist.

I think that the answer is that there are too many schools that feed into Deal and Wilson and that the only way to solve the problem of overcrowding at Deal and Wilson is to reduce the number of students who are zoned to attend them by right.

Strengthening other schools is a related issue, but it's ultimately a separate issue. I would personally be in favor of eliminating the OOB lottery all together, but I know that that will never happen in DC.[/quote]

I wish you could hear yourself.

There is no "OOB problem" -- unless you consider poor kids mixing with richer kids a problem, but I won't accuse you of that. Schools in the Wilson feeder pattern have a crowding problem, and the rest of DCPS has an enrollment problem. There is some chance that the enrollment problem might fix itself due to demographic shifts, but there is no chance the crowding problem is going to fix itself. The schools that feed Wilson and Deal have more seats than Wilson and Deal; for the foreseeable future those feeder schools are going to be full, which means the schools they feed are going to be overcrowded.

Re: eliminating the OOB lottery. The lottery is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is that DC schools vary tremendously in their attractiveness. If all schools were relatively comparable, the lottery would be a way for students to pick the school offering that suits them best, and it would be a minor part of the landscape. Today there are stark differences in school quality and the lottery is a make-or-break proposition for the families who participate. [/quote]

PP here. I think you misunderstood my post or that I wasn't clear or both.

I do not think that there is "an OOB problem" and I definitely don't think that OOB kids are personally a problem. There are definitely posters on this board who think that ending OOB feeder rights will solve the overcrowding issue, which was the original post I was responding to ("Time to get rid of feeder rights for OOB kids."). I categorically do not agree that that is the cause of the overcrowding but rather the other things that I mentioned - that DC parents try their hardest to buy within the Deal/Wilson feeder pattern and that with those kids staying in public school in higher numbers than historically was the case, the schools are overcrowded.

I 100% agree that the issue is that the schools that feed into Deal/Wilson have more seats than Deal/Wilson can offer, which is why I said that I think the issue is that too many schools feed into those two schools (Wilson specifically, since there is starting to be at least grudging admission that Hardy is a not-totally-unacceptable alternative to Deal).

I think that the OOB lottery historically gave motivated parents from all demographics a way to avoid a local struggling school and send their children to a more attractive school. In my experience (as the parent of a 3rd grader at a school that doesn't feed to Deal or Wilson), people play the lottery as many times as it takes for them to land "somewhere acceptable" and do not focus on the acceptability of the schools that they are zoned for. Every other week there is a post from someone with a preschooler who says that their IB school is "not an option" and every lottery season, the waitlists for even mediocre charters is hundreds of students long. All those kids have to end up somewhere by kindergarten. Unless parents start moving out of DC en masse, and the census data indicates that not only is that not happening but there are simply more children than previously, kids are going to have to start attending their IB schools. Not everyone is able to move. I think that getting rid of the OOB lottery would be a push in the right direction. [/quote]

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