Reply to s/o Future of Oyster-Adams

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[quote=Anonymous]I think if Marie Reed reaches the achievement levels and popularity of Oyster, and gets a nice modern building (both likely prospects IMO), it will soon be overwhelmed with demand from local residents and face a problem similar to Oyster's: that there are not enough OOB spaces to balance the demographics to achieve the linguistic and socioeconomic diversity you want for a dual-language program.

There are other models of bilingual instruction that can work, but I think there is tremendous value in this two-way bilingualism project.  Especially for lower-income immigrant Hispanic kids who get access to it.  I think it is worth trying to preserve it.  And that means increasing the capacity of the schools that are doing it, in the prosperous locales where they are now situated.

The only location where there is significant room to grow is the Marie Reed campus.  How about if DCPS, instead of renovating the awful MR building for the same 400 or so students it currently serves, built a big new middle school building that could serve 1000+ students.

Give the Adams building (hopefully improved and perhaps even expanded) to Marie Reed, and shrink the area that feeds Oyster so that it can keep taking out of boundary kids (and achieve the diversity goals that are so critical to its identity).  Then Oyster and Adams (aka MR) elementaries both have dual language programs that feed into dual-language Marie Reed Middle (maybe grades 4-8 or 5-8).

I have kids at Oyster, and I have my little quibbles with how they do things, and I share some of the above-discussed concerns about the effectiveness of the Spanish instruction and the math and science curriculum.  But overall I think it's a great school that offers something really special.  And it's my neighborhood school.  I want it  to stick around, and to succeed at what it does.  I think some kind of partnership with Marie Reed in which DCPS makes a big investment in school capacity is going to be vital.  [/quote]

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