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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I may be reading this incorrectly, but if you look at the data provided in some of the DME supporting docs, it looks like there are currenly 104 IB students that could attend Hearst (obviously many choose to attend private).  And, under the DME proposal with the new boundary the projected number of IB kids eligible to attend is 140.  The school can hold 325 students.  Which begs the question, why not expand the Hearst boundary even further rather than turn Janney and Murch into trailer parks?
 
"School, Boundary, Neighborhood-Level Data Sheet Including Boundary Change Rationales"

http://dme.dc.gov/node/885242[/quote]

You are reading it incorrectly. Those numbers are a snapshot of PK3-5 [b]public[/b] school students at a given point in time (i.e., already enrolled at Hearst or Hearst/Murch for the 140 figure). I'm certainly no expert, but I see a few issues that make those numbers not quite predicitive anyway:

1.  Hearst has no preK3, so you aren't capturing in that number the in bound preK3 kids who are in private nursery school and will go to Hearst for PreK4 or K. It also fails to show the distribution of those students across the grades, which is what will matter in the boundary shift due to grandfathering of families in their current schools.

2. You have to remember to account for grandfathering when you try to figure out how much space Hearst actually has available. Don't make the mistake of saying there are 40 OOB seats in 5th grade this year (or whatever) so Hearst can take 40 kids from Murch's 5th grade and displace the 40 OOB kids at Hearst -- it can't. The numbers that matter here are how many K seats are available at Hearst to give to families at the edges of Hearst's boundaries, and the answer is about 25 seats. The inbound participation rate in the PK4 and K are up around 50% now. So never mind how many kids were in bound and using public school whenever that snapshot was taken, the current Prek class had very few spots open (about 20), and so the K class coming up in the year of the new boundary is highly likely to be almost entirely IB and will remain so until they are 5th graders. Those 20-25 spots barely puts a dent in the problem at Janney and Murch, which have about 225 kindergarteners between them when the K capacity of the schools as built is 140.

Hearst may be the "best little school in DC" but it can't solve all of our problems.
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