Reply to Greater Greater Washington story on school enrollment growth

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Nick, you mean well, but overcrowing is a WOTP issue and I don't think overhauling the whole system for everyone is going to be acceptable EOTP and EOTR.  If you think people in Ward 3 will accept a lottery assignment at Ballou, think again.

The answer IMO is to strengthen the existing schools so that people want to attend, and to consider reopening or expanding spaces that are available, as needed. If Wilson-zoned parents cared more about quality elsewhere, it could happen.  But you seem to assume Ward 3 conditions of overcrowing and no more spaces apply everywhere.  That just isn't true.[/quote]

Nick here.

Today DCPS has 13,000 empty seats so you could argue that any crowding is a policy issue not a facilities issue. But if the projections hold, in eight years those empty seats are going to be gone. This will be a new historic era for DCPS. There may be policy challenges, but there are going to be real facilities issues-- and not just WOTP.

[b]I believe in neighborhood-based schools, for a lot of reasons. But right now nobody at any level of city government is doing the things that will need to be done to keep them a viable option.[/quote][/b]

Nick,

Did you speak with officials in DCPS and OSSE? Did they express a few of the ideas mentioned in your story? For example, you state:

"DCPS may not be able to continue as a neighborhood-based school system"
"It may not be possible to draw boundaries for each school that include the school building." --- WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?
"The city may not have the political will to spend hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars on new schools when it would mean that some existing schools would be part empty."

I'd like to know if these are the sentiments being expressed by DCPS.

Frankly, according to the statement I bolded above, it sounds like you're concluding that DCPS/OSSE is purposely undermining the neighborhood-based school system in order to bust it up. If so, this is extremely concerning. We know forced lotteries are a failure.

[/quote]

Nick here.

In the past few months I've spoken with councilmembers, people in the mayor's office, people in the DME's office, people from DCPS. They've all expressed versions of the same story: the enrollment surge that is coming can be handled with a combination of boundary changes and some revisions to student assignment policies. Nobody has talked about going to all-lottery, but no one has expressed any doubt about the ability to meet the demand by a few simple tweaks to the status quo. It was definitely conveyed to me that building new schools is just not going to happen.

This article had its origins when I started trying to make a map that would show where some of those boundary changes might go. I quickly got frustrated, because it seemed impossible. Then I added up the projected enrollment and projected capacity of all the elementary schools, and I got that the city is going to be 886 seats short. No amount of moving boundaries or changing assignment policies creates seats.  So I said, OK, assume you can put two new elementary schools anywhere you want, with 900 seats, and try again.

It still didn't work.  All of the schools that needed to shed students were concentrated in the same parts of the city. My own local elementary, Key, for example, is going to be about 150 kids over. The closest elementary that is projected to have space is Walker-Jones, in Shaw (and my old in-boundary school when I used to live over there). Walker-Jones is coincidentally projected to have about 150 seats. But between Key and Walker-Jones are nine other schools, and all nine of those also need to reduce their student count. In fact, the two closest schools to Walker-Jones, Seaton and Thomson, are going to need to move about 190 students between them, and could take all the capacity at Walker-Jones just by themselves.

I started seeing scenarios like Key sends 150 students to Mann. Mann is projected to be 125 over, and if you just added 150 now it's 275 over. So it needs to send 275 to it's closest neighbor, Stoddert.  Stoddert sends 340 to Hyde, Hyde sends 350 to Francis-Stevens, Francis-Stevens sends 520 to Thomson, and so on. These aren't boundary adjustments, these are wholesale turnovers. Look at the map, every school in the city would have to change its boundaries to get all the kids to fit.

[quote]
"It may not be possible to draw boundaries for each school that include the school building." --- WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?
[/quote]

This is an important point and I'm sorry that I didn't make it more eloquently. DCPS has 64 elementary schools right now. We're going to need two more no matter what, so let's assume 66 in eight years. There are an infinite number of ways  you could divide the city into 66 zones, each with the appropriate number of kids for one of the elementary schools. However, if you add the constraints that the zone physically contains the school, and is continuous, and is reasonably compact, it may not be possible at all. The reason for this is that the schools that are going to be crowded are concentrated, and the schools that are going to have seats are concentrated. There is a mismatch between the schools that the city has and the schools that it needs.

The city is going to face a choice: build new schools where they are needed; have ridiculously gerrymandered boundaries where families often drive past several other schools to get to their assigned school, or go all-lottery. [/quote]

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