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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Honestly, this feels like a place where we should be lifting up Black and Latino voices, not white voices (which is the majority of DCUM). My answer is some mix of I don't know and it depends.

I am white - I do want my kids to go to a diverse school. For me, that means a school that has a good percentage of Black and Latino students, and at least enough white students that my kid doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - I think sending a kid to a school, in America, where there are only a single digit number of kids of their race in the whole school, no matter what race that kid is, is asking a lot of someone really young. Everyone has different priorities, but for me, Garrison and John Lewis are the kinds of schools I want my kid to attend (and we're attempting to lottery to both of them this year).

As to whether DC Prep should try to diversify, or whether schools EOTR should try to diversify, that's a question for the Black community, not a question for me.

It does seem to me like the place where integration is a reasonable goal is places where inbound participation is very low for particular races. There are plenty of white families inbounds for Cleveland, for HD Cooke, for Tubman - why aren't they attending? That's a worthwhile question to ponder. And if there are schools, for example, WOTP that are 70% white and aren't seeing inbound participation from families of color, that's worth digging in to as well. So I do tend to agree with a previous poster that inbound buy in is valuable, and broadly considered to be valuable (even by people like me who are opting out of our IB) and often in DC increases school integration. [/quote]

Why are you opting out of your IB?[/quote]

I'm not going to answer detailed questions about this because it would make me pretty identifiable, but I'll say in general terms: Lack of academic peers for my advanced kids, and some social challenges.

But I will say that my experience in having my kids at a DCPS, evaluating schools, learning about the DC school landscape, and navigating this with my own family has shown me that [b]NONE of these issues, in DC at least, are simple, and there are no easy answers.[/b] And the only people claiming there are easy answers ("well if DC just did X, everything would be better") generally live in the suburbs (like the Bethesda guy quote upthread). These issues are incredibly complex. [/quote]

I'm in a different area of the city, and I agree with this. When my oldest was a baby, I saw this pretty simply - well, if everyone just went to their IB, everything would be better! But my kid is in middle elementary, and we actually are at our IB, and in talking to families that left, or families I know in the neighborhood that never even started at their IB, the reasons people leave vary tremendously, and most (though not all) of them are very sympathetic. From issues with housing (if everyone is in a two bedroom starter home, lots of people are going to leave before middle school), language immersion (lots of strong feelings on either side), people's tolerance for uncertainty, issues at schools that don't have anything to do with race (aftercare quality/availability, screen time, commutes, etc), and interestingly, many UMC families of color's reluctance to take any risk with their child's education, which I really understand and respect - they're working with challenges that my (white) kids aren't ever going to have to deal with, like educators making negative assumptions about their kids, and they just want their kid at the best school they can get into. I respect that.

None of these issues are an easy fix, and some of them you may not even want to fix (like language immersion preferences). [/quote]

And, if everyone went to their IB, there would be a massive logistical problem! You can't just double the student enrollment without unwinding all the mergers and consolidates and sell-offs and leases over the past 30+ years![/quote]

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