Reply to How does a 'safety" school turn into a highly regarded one?

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Reply to "How does a 'safety" school turn into a highly regarded one?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]One of those reasons: JKLM (and Stoddert) parents squatting in EOTP schools until they get by-right entry to K. Let's just stop that.

Oh, you just stop that. You know full well that Ward 3 parents are a tiny fraction of the churn. The vast majority are EOTP parents who play the lottery again and again until they get into one of the few highly regarded schools, and if not, they move. Very few plan on staying at their IB school beyond PreK, unless it happens to be one of the few desirable ones.[/quote]

For one, we can afford to actually pay for one of our many excellent neighborhood nursery schools.  I can't think of a single household in which the parents said, You know what?   Let's drive from 39th and Fessenden over to Woodridge every day, twice a day, and then back to our jobs at Farragut North so we can save the $10K we'd spend on PS3.[/quote]

It's quite a bit more than $10K/year to get the full-time preschool that public PK is, which makes it even more outrageous for the PP to suggest that the few families WOTP who may actually lottery for PK3 should be ineligible for doing so just because they have a guaranteed good option starting in K. Even so, you are right that they are so rare as to not have any impact on the "improvement" or lack thereof of EOTP schools, which is entirely driven by the lottery carousel in which most EOTP parents participate. The only WOTP family I have ever met who sent their kid to PK3 EOTP was at Appletree. I bet the actual data, if anyone has it, would support this anecdotal impression that it's a non-factor. It's a myth fueled by resentment against WOTP families.[/quote]

No, at our EOTP DCPS, at least 10 of the 50-odd PK 4 students last year were IB for a WOTP school. Interestingly, some are staying for K for a variety of reasons: we are a dual language school, sibling preference for a younger child etc. It is getting harder to get in OOB for pre-k, so this issue will probably resolve itself soon enough.[/quote]

Yes, this "issue", if you want to call it that, will resolve itself as soon as the IB parent community actually chooses the school and fills up the available spots. That is also when when schools in gentrifying neighborhoods will turn from "safeties" into "highly regarded ones". Until then, it is not the WOTP kids who are holding the school back in any way, because they can only enroll as long as there is no critical mass of parents committing to their IB school. While the school is waiting for that to happen, more higher-SES kids from WOTP will probably help matters more than they hurt them, if only by skewing the demographics IB gentrifiers tend to be so concerned about.[/quote]

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