Reply to New opposition petition to the Maury-Miner boundary proposal from DME

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I missed the Maury community meeting last night. How did it go? How certain did the delay until 2027 to start discussing feasibility recommendation seem?[/quote]

I thought the 2027 date didn't sound certain at all. She repeatedly stated that it was a placeholder date and that many Advisory Committee members and proponents of the pairing thought 2027 was too late.  She did say that it made sense to give some time, given that Maury has a new principal and that Miner just has an interim principal right now, but it seemed like she was strongly signaling the date may move up.

For these final Maury and Miner meetings, the DME updated their "walking distance" analysis to show average and median walking distances for students to Maury and to Miner, but she confirmed that the analysis did not take into account families that would have to walk to both campuses.

She repeated that the boundary changes they considered would entail more (current) Miner families walking a farther distance to Maury.  She conceded that this would be true for the paired school plan too, but stated that it would only be for "half the time," given that the students would start on one campus and graduate to the other.  She did not take into account (and in fairness no one brought up) that it would not be just "half the time" for families with children on both campuses.

She clarified that they are discussing an at-risk set-aside of seats, not a preference in the lottery.  So some number of seats will be designated for at-risk students and held even after the lottery (because at-risk families often have less information about the lottery and might miss it).  I'm not sure if she spoke about how many seats would actually be held (i.e., whether a school under 30% at-risk would be required to hold all its open spots for at-risk students or some specific subset), though I may have just missed this (had the kids running around).

Someone voiced a concern with the size of the paired school, in terms of administrative challenges and effect on sense of community, and DME was entirely dismissive of this.  She said there are other elementary schools this size in DCPS, so they're not worried.  I think the loss of the small community feel would be a big problem with the plan, so I was disappointed by this.

Someone brought up the negative affect that additional school transitions have on kids.  She didn't do much with this, just sort of vaguely said that you have to consider ways it helps and ways it hurts and see how they measure up, which is the closest I heard her come to defending the plan on any grounds other than that it would make the at-risk numbers even.  In fairness, the premise of the plan is nothing more than that it will make the at-risk numbers even -- not that it will improve academic outcomes for either at-risk or non at-risk students -- so I didn't expect much more than this.  But they're still falling back on general statements that economic integration is good for students, without ever getting into any details about what level of at-risk students counts as "integration" in these studies, whether they show that going from 60% to 40% makes a difference and what that difference is, whether Maury students would be adversely impacted by going from 12% to 40%, etc.  Because they don't really care.  All they care about is evening out the numbers.

Someone asked about Maury's capacity and how it got juiced, but I completely missed this answer.  I am very interested though, and hope someone can supplement.

DME didn't have any details on how the working group would work.

That's all I really remember.

The anti-cluster crowd has seemed content to call the working group recommendation a win.  I suppose it is, in the sense that they are no recommending the schools be paired starting in 2026, but it still sounds to me like the Advisory Committee thinks this is a good idea and sees the working group as the next step in putting it into motion.  (It's clear the pro-cluster people see it that way too, which is why they are so hot on it starting earlier).  But it does push things off a bit, so maybe the anti-cluster people are happy enough to see that it likely won't affect their kids very much if at all.  One thing I continue to be struck by is how little engagement there has been in the wider community (and particularly parents of future students) on this.  I still talk to people in the area with young kids (who would be affected by this!) who have no idea what is going on.  They are the ones with the biggest stake at this point.[/quote]

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