Reply to How does a 'safety" school turn into a highly regarded one?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]One of those reasons: JKLM (and Stoddert) parents squatting in EOTP schools until they get by-right entry to K. Let's just stop that.

Oh, you just stop that. You know full well that Ward 3 parents are a tiny fraction of the churn. The vast majority are EOTP parents who play the lottery again and again until they get into one of the few highly regarded schools, and if not, they move. Very few plan on staying at their IB school beyond PreK, unless it happens to be one of the few desirable ones.[/quote]

For one, we can afford to actually pay for one of our many excellent neighborhood nursery schools.  I can't think of a single household in which the parents said, You know what?   Let's drive from 39th and Fessenden over to Woodridge every day, twice a day, and then back to our jobs at Farragut North so we can save the $10K we'd spend on PS3.[/quote]

It's quite a bit more than $10K/year to get the full-time preschool that public PK is, which makes it even more outrageous for the PP to suggest that the few families WOTP who may actually lottery for PK3 should be ineligible for doing so just because they have a guaranteed good option starting in K. Even so, you are right that they are so rare as to not have any impact on the "improvement" or lack thereof of EOTP schools, which is entirely driven by the lottery carousel in which most EOTP parents participate. The only WOTP family I have ever met who sent their kid to PK3 EOTP was at Appletree. I bet the actual data, if anyone has it, would support this anecdotal impression that it's a non-factor. It's a myth fueled by resentment against WOTP families.[/quote]

We will gladly GTFO your pk3 programs over yonder, as soon as Ward 3 is granted the boon of One. SINGLE. DCPS pk3 class, or charter school (at any grade).  You cannot, in the meantime, tell us to go back to Ward 3 when there is no there there. If we had these programs in our neighborhoods, we would not invade the ones in yours.[/quote]

OK, cool. Let's shrink the boundaries at a bunch of WOTP schools so there is enough room for PK3 classes at each. As West and Brightwood shift out of being ECs, there will be more room for elementary students there, so Lafayette and Murch can have some of the eastern part of their boundaries shift to schools across the park, and Hearst can shift to Powell (if you want, combine the Hearst and Powell boundaries and each family can indicate a preference for the traditional school or the bilingual one).  Some of Oyster's boundary can move to the bilingual schools to the east, or just make Adams another bilingual elementary school and send the kids from there, Oyster, Marie Reed, Bancroft, Powell, etc. to MacFarland and Roosevelt). We could also end the ridiculousness of having SWW at FS (it's not SWW; it just means DCPS saves paying for one principal) and make Francis-Stevens PK3-5 with a bigger boundary. It could go to Hardy and then all the folks salivating over Hardy's IB percentage could be happy.

Given the freakouts people had over moving WOTP school boundaries by a couple blocks in the last reassignment process, I don't think it's going to happen. But I agree--all schools should have PK3. It's just that most folks IB for schools without it are unwilling to move school boundaries in order to accommodate it.[/quote]

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