Reply to SWW - Letters of Recommendation

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Yes, there was a due date.

2025: February 10th
2024: February 9th
2023: February 8th
2016: February 9th 
2014: February 10th

These were all the dates I could find in my email, but obviously around the same time each year and after the applications are due for students. [/quote]
Makes sense, but when you (00:13) say you found those dates in your emails, do you recall who those emails were from or when they came?? DCPS? SWW? Banneker?

Basically I'm trying to understand which applicants were sent information about the Feb 9 deadline and by whom. DCPS has acknowledged that it sent an alert email with the recommendation deadline to some applicants but accidentally forgot to send it to others (!). So some families were told Feb 9 was a deadline, but others weren't. And even when DCPS realized they had made this mistake, instead of quickly contacting schools to let them know what had happened and contacting applicants to see if they might need extra days (I think it was after Feb 9 already), they just stayed quiet, said oops, and still penalized applicants for missing a deadline that had never been communicated to them.

In our case, we were never told about the Feb 9 deadline. We submitted Jan 29 and I was checking the application portal regularly and eventually [b]realized one of the recommendations hadn’t come through because of an incomplete email address. Once I caught the issue, I corrected the email and notified everyone. Although this was still over a week before any interviews, it turned out that the recommender portal had already closed.[/b]

Meanwhile, a friend's child had also been missing a recommendation - just like us - , but in their case they had received an email from enroll@k12.dc.gov titled “Action Requested by Feb 9,” so she knew when it had to be in and made sure it was addressed by that date.

BTW, SWW's principal told us - incorrectly - that "regular reminders were sent to applicants." I don't know if she thought SWW was doing that or DCPS, but regardless, neither is true.

Anyway, at this point I'm just trying to spread the word about that DCPS email to all the other families they forgot to send it to. Those students were denied equal access to key information and can/should file a complaint with DCPS Office of Integrity.

It's probably too late for any of our kids this year, but for all the families next year and beyond, DCPS needs to be held accountable.

So...Any details you can share about where your Feb 9 deadline communication came from - and how previous years's deadline were communicated - would be really helpful. :)

On behalf of all applicants, thank you![/quote]

The bolded part seems to be an important piece of why you perhaps missed communications, no?[/quote]

Sorry, just getting back to this, re: the bolded part of my post—No, This was the email they sent to families not teachers. Our personal email was always correct and DCPS successfully sent us other emails just not this one.

Basically, we just had the extreme bad luck to submit our application on Jan 29 at 8 pm. DCPS sent the  [Action requested by Feb 9] email to applicants a few hours earlier and it never went it out again. 
Kicking myself because I had actualy submitted our application a few days before that but then unsubmitted it to wait for a more up-to-date 8th grade report card (which I don’t know why they request since they don’t even look at)  to upload. If I’d left it alone I would have gotten the information about Feb 9!

Essentially, it was about when you submitted. Which is crazy since application submission date should have no bearing on anything.  Whether you submit Dec 15 or Feb 2 all applicants should have be given the same information about any deadlines.

And again, DCPS (up to the Chancellor office) knows this and has admitted to it privately. I suspect they just didn’t want to deal with the fall out of admitting it publicly. And I don’t know if they told the Selective HS’s either. I suspect not since SWW still seems to think we were being sent reminders.

MSDC also has no system to recognize or catch a bounce back email, so they just kept sending “reminder” emails to the same incomplete email address 🙁. They don’t cc families. Obviously i messed up with the email and not checking soon enough, and that will haunt me for a long time. But if DCPS had just sent the email about Feb 9 one more time, on Feb 3 when ALL the applications were in, I think  my daughter would be in different situation right now and I’d be in a better state of mind.

Also, FWIW, I have a kid at Walls and I certainly agree it’s not perfect. But it’s good and would have been good for her and was where she wanted to go. [/quote]

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