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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Murch has children who are still bussed from their underperforming school. There is only a handful left but Murch used to be a "receiving" school. Once the kids are in they became part of the community and continued through 5th grade. That system has changed and isn't done any longer.

If you follow the lottery you will see that Murch hasn't had seats open in the lottery for a number of years. Some kids do get in off waitlist in pre-k but typically less than 5.   The few OOB kids account for very few of the 200+ kids over capacity the school is. Capacity is 488 and Murch is close to 700 (680 or so). [/quote]

Just to put those numbers in perspective, almost half of the learning space is outside of the main building (the 488 includes the 1980 temporary space holding 5 classrooms). Now, 17 or 18 rooms are in trailers (including admin space). That's the size of an entire elementary school. If I'm not mistaken, Murch's trailer space is larger than the entire capacity of Ross or Hearst. The feasibility study will tell us whether or not a new building can accommodate the current population, let alone the projected growth; and if not, more adjustments will have to be made, which was noted in the second proposal. A lot is still up in the air. But that doesn't change the fact that all of those kids, whether some are rezoned to Lafayette or Hearst or a new elementary school in Ward 3 the size of Murch's trailers, will feed to Deal and Wilson. The current second grades at Murch, Janney, and Lafayette alone will send 15 6th grade classes to Deal in 2017.[/quote]

Reading this, [b]I wonder why Hearst isn't just repurposed as a neighborhood school [/b]if there is so much capacity demand in the immediate area.  For years Hearst has served a largely OOB population.  I would shift that capacity to IB before building a new school in Ward 3.  It's unclear where a new elementary school would go in W3, although the Second District police site on Idaho Ave. would make a lot of sense because it is surrounded by a lot of space currently used for vehicle storage and adjacent to student-rich areas like McLean Gardens.  Besides, mega-fortress stations are so passe -- the trend in policing for the last several decades has been toward much smaller, neighborhood centered police facilities (like the one on Dupont Circle).  The property could better serve as a new public school site.[/quote]

Perhaps you didn't see the 37 page "Murch Boundary" thread.  The panel tried to nibble at this in the first proposal and got ripped to shreds for it. You know, because "no student should be moved from a higher performing school to a lower one."[/quote]

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