Reply to Future of Brent Pk3?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DCPS, Brent principal and PTA board have made it clear that they don't want to ditch PreK3/mixed-age classes. Issue is not being discussed seriously.  If you really need a PreK3 somewhere on or around the Hill, you'll get a spot by the start of school from your 12 choices, probably at an AppleTree campus. You just can't apply only to super popular programs. try JO Wilson, Miner, Payne, Walker Jones, Amidon etc. They're all decent for that age group.

I wouldn't dismiss a number of 150+ if you're willing to jump in after the school year starts. You'd be surprised how low schools will still dip into waiting lists come late Sept. or early Oct.

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This is simply not true any more. None of the schools on or near the hill are a guarantee for PK3 or 4 even after the school year starts. We never got off the waiting list at Payne or Tyler (traditional not Spanish) or Van Ness last year. The schools are all improving. They are all on people's communizing route in. There are more and more young families staying on the Hill and trying their neighborhood schools, in part because they can't get into charters. And for Brent families some of the schools you mentioned are far away and in the opposite direction. People tend to live on the hill because they love a walkable community. Two miles each way twice a day is not walkable with small kids.

And to the poster who said that the Brent boundary is fine, what are you smoking? The school is not big enough to accommodate all the in bounds kids. When next year's kindergarten class starts (the one that had 40 or so in bounds kids wait listed for PK3) where are they going to put them? Or are they just going to cram them all into the existing classrooms and have 40 kids in a K class. They either need to expand the school or shrink the boundary. The boundary review was a joke because it didn't do any forward projections. Five years ago you could lottery into Brent out of bounds, now you can't even get in if you are IB, yet they used the upper grades OOB stats to say the boundary/capacity was fine.[/quote]

No politician in their right mind would push to shrink Brent's boundary.[/quote]

Brent is a mosquito on the back of the DCPS elephant.  It's cute that inbound parents whose kids might not get into PK think they are a matter of concern at the top of anyone's action list, when the overwhelming number of schools are struggling to serve poor and at-risk kids.  [/quote]

not a Brent parent and I totally disagree.  DCPS recognizes its middle school problem and it will not be able to improve MS performance without more buy in from neighborhood schools. Schools like Brent and Maury provide the largest pools of this demographic.   Economic diversity benefits those at risk students, but if they ignore the broader needs of their constituents they'll continue to get the toughest cases with the worst prospects for academic success.  The more affluent parents also bring great social capital, and as much as some Hill parents bash the Cluster (I'm not a Cluster parent either), they've historically been effective at advocating for their schools in a way that Jefferson and Eliot Hine have not.[/quote]

Elementary and middle schools are apples and oranges.  It's next to impossible to have effective advocacy for middle schools because it's only three years and parents are already thinking about HS by the end of 7th Grade.  Deal is Sui generis by virtue of its size and commonalities shared by higher-SES families.[/quote]

it may be 3 years but parents with multiple children are more concerned about the big picture than the three year window per child[/quote]

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