Reply to Boundary Review December town halls

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Boundary Review December town halls"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm firmly of the belief that the boundaries just need to be reset. Bowser will never do it. Doesn't have the guts. But it's just pulling off a bandaid. So the whiners send their kids to St. Albans. Those who are in these schools who aren't multigenerational poor will demand more from them and they will change quickly. Some people don't remember that Deal was this thing that people shunned not that long ago. And now it's got every program you can think of and is massively overfilled.

The right thing in my opinion is to make MacFarland the default MS for every student between Cardozo and Takoma west of Brookland, get rid of feeder rights to middle school, make Oyster-Adams' middle school another elementary and end dual language at Oyster, where no concentration of Spanish speakers live (yes, yes, World Bank blah blah blah, those people don't live inordinately near Oyster) add dual language at Brightwood and Dorothy Height, etc.

But it's NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. Good policy is subject to you all here, and DCUM says no, so Bowser obeys. The end.[/quote]

Agreed.

And Hardy was also shunned - just 5 years ago.

They need to rip the bandage off and start over.

There is still a political price to be paid for all of this tinkering around the edges too - people are pissed and political capital is being spent and they aren't even solving the problem.

But here is the real political problem - in order to wholesale re-do the boundaries you need to take on two very powerful lobbies in DC - the charter school lobby and the real estate lobby both of whom benefit enormously from the current clusterfu(k of DCPS boundaries.[/quote]

How do the boundaries impact the charter school lobby? Why should they care? [/quote]

Because a lot of their students are middle class white kids from gentrifying neighborhoods whose parents don't have the courage to actually have their kids attend school in their own neighborhood - if you the MS/HS problem in Ward 4 they lose a lot of their customers.[/quote]

Solving Ward 4 capacity issues won’t solve the issues for kids in those gentrifying communities. Are you suggesting that there will be enough seats in those Ward 4 schools to widen the boundaries for many more families? (Not being argumentative; just trying to understand)[/quote]

What Ward 4 capacity issues are you referring to?  Coolidge and Roosevelt are grossly under enrolled.  There is a chicken and egg issue in Ward 4 around MS capacity but that is easily solvable by increasing the capacity at Wells.[/quote]

Again, citation please. [/quote]

PP has no citation because the fact is Wells (middle that feeds to Coolidge) and Roosevelt are more over crowded than Deal/JR (JR now that MacArthur opened).

https://dme.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dme/publication/attachments/Appendix%20A%20-%20DCPS%20SY2021-22%20Enrollment%20Utilization%20Plans%20MFP%202022%20Supp_Final_0.xlsx

Macfarland is at 84% (same as Janney, and well under Hardy 64%). So really the talk should be how to get more kids into Hardy, but for some reason none of these DCUM warriors ever would make a post like that, right? Very easy to push brown kids east to fit your narrative. [/quote]

dp--The "permanent capacity" numbers that DME uses are crap.  A bunch of schools -- Hardy and J-R, for example, have numbers pulled out of the air, not reality.

Go walk around the schools during the day and then let's talk.[/quote]

This 100%. I have no dog in this fight, but my elementary school is deemed 86% utilized even though there are multiple classes in what used to be closets and multiple admin/instructional coaches share tiny offices and others have none. We have a special on a cart because there's no classroom. It is lunacy to say the school is 86% utilized and I am convinced that number was either invented out of thin air or doesn't account for the fact we have multiple self-contained classes that are full, but small (e.g., 6 or 8 students depending on the age) and so it thinks those classrooms aren't sufficiently "full."[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics