Reply to Please explain relevance of "OOB crowding" to the DCPS boundary review process

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]With regard to Hearst - how can a school that is using trailers not require expansion to meet current student capacity?

I don't mean any disrespect, I just want to know what you mean by "not expanding Hearst."[/quote]

Perhaps we just understand different things by the word "expanding".  Clearly they are expanding the size of the building.  Sounds like that is what you meant, and if so, you are completely correct.  I thought you meant expanding the student population.  That they are not doing.  They are taking the existing population, many of which are in trailers, and creating permanent space.  Moreover, they are adding common space -- multi-purpose room, cafeteria, library, etc -- that never really existed in the 1930s building.[/quote]

Considering a) the crowding at Deal and Wilson, and b) the OOB feeder policy, it makes absolutely no sense to size any Deal feeder for more than its IB population.  DCPS is just making promises it can't keep. It made no sense to add trailers at Hearst when any crowding was entirely the result of a voluntary decision to admit more OOB kids than the building could hold. Rather than expanding the building they should have started reducing the number of kids admitted each year for PK and K.[/quote]

Well, that horse has left the barn, so no need to keep re-hashing whether they should have made Hearst into a PK -5 school, that happened years ago now. It was formerly only up to 3rd grade, and the kids went to other schools for 4th and 5th, so it is not that they added entire classrooms to each grade. I think you are understandably concerned about Deal overcrowding, but Hearst did not single-handedly create the crowding at Deal.

Rhee maybe shouldn't have promised feeder rights in perpetuity --that was the mistake. [/quote]

Agree that Rhee made a colossal -- and cynical  -- mistake.

It's not about whether Hearst should be a PK-5 school, it's about how big a school it should be. They could have kept it the same physical size as when it was k-3, limited it to one class per grade -- seven classrooms,  about 150 students --  and it still would have been about three times larger than the in-boundary population needs. They wouldn't need to displace any existing students, just limit the lottery to a single pre-K and a single K each year, and as those kids move up take the trailers away.

Alternately, before expanding it they should have had a plan to adjust the boundary to correspond with the increased capacity. But that would have required planning, which we know DCPS doesn't do.[/quote]

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