Reply to Future of Brent Pk3?

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Future of Brent Pk3?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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.

[/quote]

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]

why did Brookland get built?  or Stuart Hobson modernized?  [/quote]

You clearly weren't part of the charade that was the Ward 6 Middle School Plan.  The Cluster and SH receives more than its fair share because of the articulation path and, more importantly, political clout of some of its leadership from outside the Ward.  Is it any wonder that DGS has spent five years trying to figure out how to make a school like Brent ADA compliant?  I can't speak to Brookland but am fairly certain that politics played a major role in the decision to build a $120 million school.  [/quote]

which is it?  is it "impossible to have effective advocacy for middle schools" or is it impossible for YOU to effectively advocate for MS?  You've contradicted yourself with that argument.[/quote]

There is no contradiction.  The Cluster has been able to effectively advocate by leveraging its unique structure.  By all appearances, it has paid off handsomely in terms of modernizing SH and restoring funds for the modernization of Watkins both for new windows last summer and a gut overhaul next year. [b] It's also no coincidence that half of the Watkins and SH population is from Wards 7 and 8[/b].  That's distinctly different than one-off middle school advocacy issues like Jefferson or EH where a handful of parents are pushing for modernization and curricular changes and yet still have the ability to jump from the sinking ship before middle school.  Henderson complains that she felt that she was burned by Brent parents after "giving them everything they wanted" a few years ago.  And there's not a great deal of sympathy for a school with a history of going "downtown" over issues like celebration policies, changing from Mandarin to Spanish, mixed age classrooms, etc.  DCPS will pay lip service to Brent parents in an effort to placate them but there's no political will or muscle to make things happen in the part of Allen or Wells before him.  That's how the rubber meets the road in DC politics, not grassroots organizing and advocacy by some rich, white families.  And let's please not conflate throwing money at politically-connected construction firms with successful advocacy.  [/quote]

total BS  -- it's can easy and lazy to conflate OOB numbers with Wards 7 & 8 but that doesn't make it true.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics