Reply to Ward 2/3 High School proposal in the NW Current

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Reply to "Ward 2/3 High School proposal in the NW Current"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Nobody is "keeping" the EOTP high schools empty. Every one of them accepts every student who applies, any kid in the whole city is welcome to attend them. Students have lots of options "closer to where they live." The problem is not many families want to attend them. More kids who are in-boundary for Cardozo attend Wilson than Cardozo for example.

What DCPS [can't] do is force people to go to schools they don't want to go to. It's not politically feasible, and it ends up not working.[b] DCPS has got to create schools that people want to go to, which means studying what makes schools popular. If part of the answer is location, then schools need to be put in locations that are attractive to people.[/b][/quote]

Part of the answer is indeed location.  It's safe to say all parents prefer a school that's close to where they live.

[/quote]

It turns out that not all parents prefer a school close to where they live. Or at least that's not the highest consideration. One of the points made up-thread is that one of the important qualities of the current Ellington location is that it is in a safe neighborhood. For some parents, that is more important than being close by.

This is a factor at Hardy as well. I saw David Catania speak recently, and he talked about how he looked at Hardy, and noticed that it was less than 15% in-boundary but over 40% of the kids came from east of the Anacostia. Wouldn't it be a win-win, he wondered, to just pick up the whole school -- teachers, students, administration, programs -- and move it somewhere more convenient to just about all of its families?  The answer he got is that one of the attractions of the school is the fact that it is located in a what is perceived to be a safe neighborhood.

Now, everyone deserves a neighborhood school and everyone deserves a safe neighborhood. But shouldn't DCPS give people what they want? And if what some people want is a school in a different neighborhood, shouldn't DCPS provide that? That would indicate that the thing to do is to put an overweighting of schools in the western part of the city.[/quote]

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