Reply to Committee on overcrowding in the Wilson feeder pattern

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If there is money in any budget for a Wilson expansion, I'm going to go down and fight it. We need DCPS, not one school.[/quote]

Effectively, DC has three public education systems: the charters, the Wilson feeder pyramid, and the rest of DCPS. Here are enrollment numbers for the three systems over the past ten years:

SY 2007-08	SY 2017-18	Change	Percent
Wilson Feeder	6,851	9,770	2,919	43%
				
DCPS w/o Wilson Feeder	42,571	38,212	-4,359	-10%
				
Charter Schools	19,733	43,340	23,607	120%
				
Total	69,155	91,322	22,167	32%

(I'm trying to present a table here. If it comes out garbled, each row has four numbers: the number of kids ten years ago, the number last year, the change in the number of kids, and the percentage change.)

DCPS overall lost about 1400 students in the past decade, shrinking 3%.

This is the conundrum that DCPS faces: except for the Wilson feeder pyramid, families are voting with their feet and leaving their schools, even though the school-age population overall is experiencing heavy growth. So do you put resources into the schools that people want to go to, or the ones they don't want to go to? I think the answer is both, but it's not an easy question.

If DCPS wanted to, they could cut off the flow of OOB kids into the Wilson pyramid in an instant. But they don't want to, they'd lose most of those families if they did. They'd rather they went to neighborhood schools, but they have no way to force them. [/quote]

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