Reply to Latin Cooper - Capitol Hill families?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Stuff it, I've lived on the Hill since the 1990s.  I was even enough of a sucker to attend a couple of the BS parent input meetings DCPS set up during the 2013-2014 boundary and feeder review.  The other parents I attended with all pushed for a pan-Ward 6 middle school, possibly spread between two campuses.  We were ignored.  DCPS could been pragmatic enough to change the feeder arrangement for Hill middle schools but didn't bother.  That's all there is to it. Now most UMC public school parents EotP flee to MS charters like Latin Cooper East, an arrangement that leaves a great deal to be desired.  Our near neighbors in the upscale VA and MD burbs (MoCo, Arlington, Fairfax) either don't bother with charters, or barely do, because most parents are OK with their in-boundary schools at every level.  That's the ideal, not a school system where almost half the students attend charters, including start-ups like Latin Cooper in crappy temp buildings.[/quote]

Rhee set us on the path to Latin Cooper by elevating feeder enrollment to the same level of preference as in-boundary status for by-right middle school attendance. It's that simple. If in-boundary status had remained the top preference, as in the pre-Rhee era, Stuart Hobson, and possibly Jefferson Academy and Eliot-Hine, would have attracted far more in-boundary families by now. Without prioritizing OOB attendance, DCPS would have come under heavy political pressure to cater to in-boundary families in the way they ran their by-right middle schools EotP. The reason DCPS Ward 6 middle schools don't need to offer designated honors classes for academic subjects in a heavily UMC swathe of the city is because Rhee pushed OOB enrollment. Hill parents of little kids don't tend to know that there are still more Ward 5, 7 and 8 students enrolled at Stuart Hobson than Ward 6.[/quote]

Setting aside the fact that it has in fact been 13 years since she departed so it is cray-cray to blame her for "setting us on the path" as if no one could have addressed this in the intervening years, your logic about why feeder preference somehow undid SH makes no sense. SH is not over enrolled (and has not yet been). No IB student is being denied a right to attend based on OOB feeder kids. It sounds like what you are saying is that if we could just keep those OOB kids out of SH (even if we left open seats) we'd be better off? You sound like another bitter Brent parent who cannot believe that Rhee said "no" to you. [b]Your BS about feeder patterns is just that, BS. Since Brent doesn't feed into SH there's no difference between the "undesirable OOB students" to which you make reference and your kid - both are OOB. [/b]The subtext of your post seems to be that Brent families should have preference to SH over OOB kids feeder kids because...why exactly?

There's an interesting and intellectually valid argument to be made that OOB feeder creates overcrowding and resource constraints at Deal and Wilson. I think the public policy arguments against removing feeder access are strong, but there's a legitimate discussion to be had. That's not what is happening at SH.

I'll wait. [/quote]

No.  I think the point is that Brent SHOULD (following common sense) feed into SH b/c SH is the closest (distance-wise)/walkable school to the majority of Brent families.  Instead, DCPS drew the boundaries so that Brent kids feed into a school twice as far and non-walkable/across a busy freeway entrance.[/quote]

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