Reply to DC Begins School Boundary Study

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "DC Begins School Boundary Study"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Leaving Lafayette in its current feeder pattern and just moving Shepherd makes sense in that it would give Deal and Wells equal number of feeder schools, and not require Lafayette kids to cross the park. But I think it's politically infeasible to remove only Bancroft and Shepherd from the Deal/JR feeder patterns because those schools have the highest populations of Black and Hispanic students.

Two things that would make the boundary reassignments more palatable would be a commitment to working with DDOT and WMATA on the buses required to get kids where they need to go, and a promise to offer honors English and math...the 6th grade classes would be for kids who score 4s and 5s on the 5th grade PARCC, and 7th and 8th would be based on the previous year's performance and teacher recommendations.[/quote]

Kids have been crossing west across the park to attend Deal/JR for decades. Why can't Lafayette kids cross it east (apart from the unsaid reasons)?[/quote]

They definitely can and I would suggest the committee recommend that. The pushback I anticipate is that it leaves Deal underenrolled and Wells overenrolled. But that's fixable: the former by opening up OOB spots, which Lafayette kids would be free to lottery for, and the latter by shifting a middle school grade into the Coolidge building. People may also complain that shifting Lafayette will increase traffic. It would help to offer a bus like the current "Deal bus" that crosses the park and takes kids to and from Wells.

Part of this process is figuring out what makes sense. The other, and maybe bigger, part is figuring out which groups will organize and complain about changes that make sense overall but are seen as harming them (largely by moving their kids or their homes into feeder patterns that have more poor kids). Those groups won't come out and say they don't want their kids going to school with poor kids or that their property values will drop. They will talk about reducing overcrowding, maximizing building capacity, traffic, feeder pattern cohesion, curriculum, how bad it will be for Title I schools to lose that designation, safe street crossings, extracurricular offerings, historical neighborhood boundaries, and literally anything else... but somehow their concerns will always lead to them advocating for their kids going to a richer rather than a poorer school.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics