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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I agree that I LT should close - it's not serving the in-bounds families and the in-bounds families have not risen to the occassion to invest in it like they did for Brent and Maury (remember that Maury was on a list of possible school closures not 5 or 6 years ago).

With Peabody now having more spaces (since SWS is leaving) and Peabody/Watkins being a predominantly OOB school anyways, it makes sense to close LT and have that boundary now feed into Peabody/Watkins.  Before all the rising pre-s families pitch a fit about fewer slots, you could increase the number of preschool and pre-K classes at Peabody and shrink the number of classes for the upper grades which would allow for Peabody/Watkins to have a higher IB percentage and could possibly then create space at SH to be able to allow Maury and/or Brent to feed into it which would then allow for SH to become a predominantly CH school and the Capitol Hill Cluster School population to actually reflect its name.

With the city tackling school closures next year, now is the time to let the deputy mayor for education, Tommy Wells, Kaya Henderson, Monica Warren-Jones, your ANC commissioners, and everybody else know that the community doesn't support LT staying open.

As for the idea about SWS taking over the LT building, I think that's a fine idea.  Though I expect that Cluster parents will fight it as the pull will then be away from Peabody and towards LT in terms of proximity preference.

As for the 'gifted' program at Watkins, it's had fits and spurts - the PTA is funding the pull-out math but that is not for every grade at Watkins.  The school knows that differentiation is an area it needs to work on - it is not yet there so when thinking about other schools, don't be dissuaded - these are struggles that are happening - there's just greater tolerance and greater willingness to problem-solve on the part of parents at some places than others.  
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Thanks for this.  IB parents of young children who agree wholeheartedly that LT should be closed are not in short supply.   Good idea that the number of slots should increase at Peabody (and Watkins 1st to 3rd?) proportionate to the number of slots in upper grades at Watkins.

The problem is going to be what to do with the large OOB LT population, especially the large special needs program.  But then Rhee closed some ES schools, sending the OOB population packing, so perhaps it's not beyond the realm of possibility for the same to happen at LT.

The main political problem will surely come in the form of the elderly Stanton Park neighborhood voters with deep ties to LT resisting.  They are, after all, the facilitators of the widespread address cheating, and have political capital.  They won't be shut down without a bruising fight.   Moreover, the LT PTA is probably still too AA, and the school's test scores too respectable relative to those coming out of most Anacostia schools (essentially serving the same population), for DCPS to play ball.   Upper-middle-class voters with young children who don't see a quality ES education in the works at LT may still be too small a slice of the pie.  Wells won't want to alienate the dwindling number of IB AA voters by closing LT.

I'll circulate your ideas to some LT parents bolting to Peabody for the fall at any rate, to see if I can generate some momentum on contacting the powers that be.  Thanks again.  
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