Reply to Latin Cooper - Capitol Hill families?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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. 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. 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 point in answering. People like you simply do not care about creating neighborhood middle schools that work for most neighborhood families.  Your PC agenda, supported by DCPS, hurts Hill residents. It's much easier to call white and Asian parents in the neighborhood racist and classist in their thinking about middle schools, in so many words, than to advocate for solutions that incentivize neighborhood families to enroll in neighborhood schools.

The Capitol Hill MS situation has been sheer idiocy on the part of the the kumbaya crowd and their representation on the city council and in the mayor's office for many years.  Brent, Maury, SWS, Ludlow, Watkins, all of these schools should obviously feed into one high-performing neighborhood school that serves most neighborhood families, full stop.  You can nitpick over which parents should get which preference without changing that grim reality.

DCPS has screwed up royally on Capitol Hill where MS and HS are concerned in the last decade.  Now we've got Latin Cooper taking 40 5th graders, leaving out 3/4 of the Hill families that would have taken a spot. Fantastic.
[/quote]

I 100% agree that the obvious solution is a pan-Hill MS that would still be smaller than Deal & more diverse than Deal, so it's really hard to understand why it's not viable/acceptable but Deal is. If you took the schools you named and added Tyler and Payne (the IBs for those schools are all Hill), probably Miner (most of its IB is Hill) and [b]possibly JOW [/b](none of its IB is technically the Hill, but it currently feeds to SH & its hard to see where it should feed instead geographically) you'd have a high performing school that was also plenty diverse. You'd also have some schools with plenty of OOB slots that kids could try to get for the MS feed, in line with DCPS' current policies. It's a no-brainer.

That said, Hill families didn't really help themselves. "Cluster" families in particular historically fought against including other Hill schools (Brent, in particular) in the SH feed because they were the most gentrified at the time. The whole Watkins zone was gerrymandered to try to include rich/connected families (check out the single block dogleg to incorporate a single block around 14th street). Even now the Cluster has resisted including Ludlow kids in some of the special programs they have with SH (e.g., being in the school musicals), which is crazy because you'd think UMC Watkins families would want UMC Ludlow families to have more attachment to SH/send their kids there. The Cluster PTO seems to have missed the memo that Ludlow is more gentrified than Watkins now. I think the set up of Watkins being in a "cluster" with SH and then feeding two other ESes into SH is totally bizarre, but Watkins fought to retain that set up during the last boundary review.[/quote]

Assuming you know that JOW is closer to SH than all of the other schools you cited except for LT, right? And that this "Hill" distinction is decades old thinking, especially with the fastest growing part of the extended Hill being  the area around H Street.

I think what many of the posters on DCUM react to when people like you speak is that you seem to live in this old worldview that somehow only "real CH" matters. Reminds me of when I first moved to the area and called our then Councilmember about an issue and her staff told me she represented the Hill and I should contact my member...except her district included everything south of Florida. She just didn't know because there was no political will or capital away from her neighborhood. Things have changed. The only people who don't seem to realize it are people like you who still think that, notwithstanding population trends and housing data, neighborhoods near RFK and south of H Street are somehow more desirable and more "Hill" than burgeoning H Street.  [/quote]

This is a weird reaction to a post that said essentially JOW should be included despite not being technically on the Hill, precisely because of the geographic proximity that you point to. But.. it's not on the Hill. That's not the same as saying it's "less desirable." I'd much rather live in NOMA than some of the Watkins zone, actually. I'd much rather send my kids to JOW than to Miner. I'm not sure how you took my post as an attack on JOW or NOMA, because it wasn't at all. Instead, I was saying that a pan-Hill middle school made sense, because -- unlike some of the current ES/MS clusters -- the Hill is actually a neighborhood and, while the boundaries aren't black and white, they're not wholy invented (like, e.g., a ES/MS cluster that includes Eastern Market and part of the Wharf is). I think it makes a lot more sense to group schools by actually neighborhoods to the extent possible if you want IB buy-in and the Hill definitely views itself as a community/neighborhood.[/quote]

+ a million. We would all welcome JO to a pan-Hill middle school. [/quote]

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