Reply to Will Van Ness Elementary School be on the same level as Brent/Maury in 3 years?

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Reply to "Will Van Ness Elementary School be on the same level as Brent/Maury in 3 years?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Van Ness Elementary School near the Navy Yard is slated to open for the 2015 - 2016 school year.  With all the new development (Whole Foods, Harris Teeter, etc) and housing springing up every year, how likely will Van Ness become a high performing, high demand elementary school like Brent & Maury?  My take on this is that it will open with limited grades (PS3, PK4, K), and and a grade every year until it becomes a full fledged elementary school.  I think this will allow the school to grow just as the community is growing, and that it will most likely being just as good (or even better) than Brent & Maury.[/quote]

If Watkins is a barometer, you will be waiting a long, long, long time.  That's not meant to be a slight, but more of an observation that Watkins is in a far more developed area than Van Ness, is a well-established school, feeds to SH, and it still can't come close to filling itself with IB kids.

Two factors.  Development doesn't necessarily equal lots of young kids.  As others have noted, that area is more targeted toward young professionals than families.  You also have so many options.  Even if you had the potential to fill Van Ness with a critical mass a high SES kids, you will still lose a fair number to charters and privates.

I think you need to lower your expectations and hope that in 5 years it might be on par with Ludlow Taylor.  [/quote]

I predict the following for Van Ness Elementary:
The school will open only for PS3, PK4, K.  Doing this will allow the school to start off as a school with a majority of inbound kids from high SES familes (most of the the kids living in public housing are much older).  Every year, the school will add a grade and pretty much keep the demographics the same.  It will have a snowball effect.  Since a ton of new housing is planned, families from across the city will see Van Ness Elementary as a up and coming school, and they will also have lots of different new housing units to choose from.  By the time Van Ness Elementary is a full PS3 - 5 elementary school, it will be at least on the same level as what Brent is now.[/quote]

You predict or speculate?  Even if you are assuming only two classes per grade, you are going to need at least 60 IB high SES kids (20 per grade).  I'd be shocked if there are that many total living IB right now, but you really need 100+ to account for leakage to other options.  You can't just plop a school down next to a Wholefoods, throw open the doors, and call it Brent II.

As we are seeing with Eliot-Hine right now, parents are very reluctant to have their kids be the guinea pigs.  Brent did not just emerge fully formed.  Lots of people continue to forget that fact.  It wasn't that long ago when getting into Brent OOB was a reasonable proposition, and that was when the area around it was full on gentrified.

Van Ness needs to crawl, then walk, then trot, and then you can tell me about the marathons it will run.  [/quote]

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