Reply to Two Rivers elementary families -- what is your MS plan

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You can read the board meeting minutes here. To its credit, Two Rivers' minutes are a lot more substantive than what you get from many schools. If you skim the minutes for the past few years you can kind of piece things together.

https://www.tworiverspcs.org/who-we-are/team/board-partners/[/quote]

Disagree. The Board was absent when needed most. They sat and watched it happen. [/quote]

Oh I agree the board was asleep at the wheel as to the actual problems. They failed to intervene for a long time. I'm just saying their minutes are somewhat informative. If you compare to what various other schools' minutes look like, some are revealing basically nothing, and some haven't made any minutes public for several years.[/quote]

Transparency is great but the truth is at most schools you don't need to comb through years of meeting minutes to "figure out what went wrong." Either nothing went wrong or a school's challenges are obvious. TR is unique in that it should be doing at least as well as other similarly situated charters in terms of retention, behavior, and test scores. And it's not-- it's in a downward spiral.[/quote]

Can you give us the play by play of exactly what happened at Two Rivers over the past 5 years? Because it's obvious that a downward spiral occured, but I'm not sure of anything more specific than that.[/quote]

Pre-Covid things were going okay but there were already signs of issues that needed to be addressed. Some grumbling among middle and upper elementary parents about academics. One of the challenges of having a large cohort of UMC families is that they tend to be demanding. And unlike many other charters TR doesn't have a teaching philosophy or selling point that tends to attract parents willing to be forgiving (which charters like SWS, CHML, Lee, Stokes, YY, and LAMB all have). There were also frustrations with the 4th Street campus which was/is aging and very tight.

But the bright spot was the Young campus and the MS. Even parents who were getting a bit restless viewed this as a good direction. This was 5 or more years ago when fewer families viewed SH or EH as viable options, and before Latin Cooper opened. The feeling was that if the MS was successful, TR families could lock in 10 years of solid education. Similar to what ITDS has done. In fact ITDS's current trajectory is what I think many TR families had in mind when the Young campus opened.

Then Covid. Obviously it sucked for everyone and TR faced a lot of the same challenges, including internal divisions on when it was safe to go back in person. TR chose to stay closed pretty much the maximum length of time and I think at the time they believed this choice has the support if most families. But the reality was more complex. A lot of families actually thought they could have opened sooner (safely) and simply didn't express this out loud because the vibe in DC made that an unpopular  thing to say. But many of these were the families who even pre-Covid were starting feel like the academics at the school were not great. So they started leaving. En masse. Some lotteried into other charters (including the aforementioned ITDS which is close by, though small). But many also started going IB. The biggest shift was at LT, which used to have lot of boundary kids at TR. This attitude totally flipped by 2021 or so. But  other Ward 6 schools had similar if less dramatic shifts.

The loss of a lot of middle and upper elementary kids hurt TR 4th but they still had plenty of buy in at the ECE level. What really took the hit was Young, which was floundering aggressively. The school couldn't retain many of the really invested families into MS. This resulted in under enrollment, low test scores, and a lot of behavioral issues. As this problem got worse it only made the defections from the elementary campuses worse. This has cycled all the way down to early elementary. PK is really the only level that hasn't been hit by this but even there... it seems a lot easier to get a PK spot there these days.

Now layer on top of this: massive administration failures in responding to these issues as they unfolded, especially at the MS. Teacher attrition. A tendency to revert to ra-ra platitudes and meaningless edu-speak when asked pointed, important questions about the direction of the school. Yes they've replaced some of these people. But they've also papered over a lot of things-- some of the "new" administrative staff are actually returning or just shifted around between schools. I think they actually have a lot of trouble recruiting competent administrators.

As a result there is still not really any plan to turn this around. They need a total overhaul that probably starts with the curriculum. They need to be offering something meaningfully competitive with what DCPS is offering, especially around math acceleration and perhaps around writing. Again they don't have immersion or Montessori or Reggio Emilio to draw people in and make them buy in.

I think that pretty much brings us up to speed.[/quote]

This is a good summary... I would add that Two Rivers claimed some sort of "expeditionary learning" model but people just don't care about that the way they care about language and Montessori. It's not very clear to me what caused Young to flounder. But the common theme, I think, is not enough attention to core academics, and parents getting sick of how the school was underperforming its demographics. ITDS, though it's far from perfect, is pretty solid academically and has a lot of kids getting 4s and 5s. Lots of Two Rivers kids (and faculty and an admin, for better or for worse) came over to Inspired Teaching over the past few years.

PP doesn't mention the opening of Latin Cooper, but I do think that had an impact on Two Rivers at a vulnerable time. I'm not sure exactly how many kids came over, but introducing 95 desirable 5th grade seats, plus however many 6th grade seats, in the initial school year 21-22, made it much easier for people to leave Two Rivers. It certainly took a bite out of ITDS' 5th and 6th grade classes, freeing up space for Two Rivers kids at ITDS (of which there are many).[/quote]

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