Reply to Yu Ying - Transferring to Yu Ying from another state

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Reply to "Yu Ying - Transferring to Yu Ying from another state"

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[quote=Anonymous]OP,

I think the easiest way to understand the charter school system in DC is to recognize that each charter school is it's own educational authority, equal to DCPS, and reporting to the state.  Every other state in the country, except Hawaii, has multiple education authorities, usually, but not always connected to geographic regions.  You might have very big districts like NYC or DC, and tiny ones in rural areas or small towns that serve less than 1,000 students.  Yu Ying, and most charter schools in DC, are like the latter.

Imagine a district in rural Montana that serves a few hundred kids, scattered over a large geographic area.  That district doesn't get to pick and choose.  If a Deaf child is born in their district, maybe the first in a long time, they need to scramble and figure out a solution.  Pay an exorbitant salary to lure interpreters to the district?  Find a distance education program so one of their current teachers can be certified in teaching Deaf children?  Fund boarding school for the child?  Similarly, if a family with 6 kids, none of whom spoke a word of English, moved into their district tomorrow, then they'd have a responsibility to figure out how to serve them.  In neither circumstance would saying "we can't serve you" be an option.

Yu Ying has already gotten a huge concession in terms of being able to cut off their admissions at a certain point.  Most educational authorities in this country can't do that.  If they decide that, instead, they want to accept 3rd graders, then there are options for them.  They could look at the model used by Washington International School, where kids who enter after first grade without speaking a target language get intensive small group language classes until they catch up.  They could look at the model used by DCPS and most DC charter schools when they accept kids who can't read or speak their language of instruction (English), which is to include kids in the regular classes with push in or pull out support by specialists.  They could look at other options too.  But they can't use a test to pick and choose, any more than that district in Montana can decide that they aren't serving someone.

DCPS can pick and choose who goes to a certain school, like Oyster's language proficiency requirements or Ellington's auditions, because they aren't excluding kids from a district, they're just excluding them from a school.  Similarly E. L. Haynes (and probably others, Haynes just happens to be where I have kids so I know) can exclude kids from it's Arabic 2 class if they didn't have Arabic 1, because that's a class not a district. [/quote]

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