Reply to 3/29 Lottery Results

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reading this thread is interesting because I can see both sides of every issue. I'm a lottery veteran (this will be our 5th year) and have seen it work well and also seen it screw people over. It's a tough system, but probably more fair than the old system where there were no charters or all city schools at all and going to a school outside our IB was nearly impossible.

But really the whole conversation just makes me very tired, and the more angry and defensive people get in these conversations, the more tired I get. We recently made the decision to move before our kid hits high school, and making that decision definitively has been such a relief. To just be done with this whole mess.

That's ultimately my biggest complaint about public school in DC. Not the lottery or sibling preference or "boundary fraud" or whatever. It's that the entire system is just exhausting and it never stops -- from PK to high school, there's some level of angst over your kids education and whether you've made the right choices with regards to the lottery, where you live, DCPS v. Charter, etc. It's draining. Right now we're looking at neighborhood outside DC and looking at high schools and the idea of just moving into a school district and then submitting enrollment paperwork and that's the end of it is so amazing.[/quote]

I hear you. Except, our friends did this. Then discovered their MoCo zoned school was not serving their child -- with newly diagnosed ADHD -- at all well. And so, they have to go private because there are no other choices. Nothing is as easy as it should be or I remember from being a kid!![/quote]

But they likely would have wound up with the same choice in DC. As a parent of a kid with ADHD, I don't find the lottery to be helpful. Most charters are pretty bad with special needs and IEPs -- most parents of SN kids I know in the district will recommend sticking with DCPS, which tends to be more responsive and where the SN infrastructure is very well established. Some DCPS are better than others, but if your IB isn't doing a good job with yours, it's a total crapshoot whether you could get into another that would be any better, and sometimes it's hard to evaluate that from the outside anyway unless you can talk to families with similar issues who have been through it.

Basically if you have a child with SN, you have to get used to using all the resources at your disposal (and also learn how to get more resources at your disposal). I'm actually a bit surprised your friends went with a private because you have more rights at a by-right public school and if you make a stink about things, they pretty much have to provide your child with accommodations and services deemed necessary for your kid. A private does not. But the dirty secret in DC is that even though charters are also required to provide these accommodations, many do not, or are very ineffective at doing it even when they want to (charters have a harder time retaining SpEd staff, in part because they often do not pay as well). Charters in DC have a much lower percentage of kids with IEPs than DCPS schools, and there are multiple reasons for this but one of them is that a lot of families don't have a great experience with IEPs at Charters.

Anyway, long story short, everyone assumes that more choice is going to be better for kids with special needs, but that's not necessarily the case. There's no reason for your friends to assume that if they'd stayed in DC, their child's needs would have been better met, even with the lottery as an option.[/quote]

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