My child is in an upper grade at Janney. We are white. In her grade there are about 10 AA kids, 7-8 Hispanic/Latino kids (a few with one or both white parents), a lot of kids from international families.

I would be extremely cautious of placing an AA boy in a school where there is a lack of diversity in the class or teaching staff, teachers are too quick to refer or label any child that maybe challenging to teach. Straight to Special Ed.

Anonymous wrote:Wow, I guess that is what the community wants, since they fought against the 10% at risk and obtained a waiver.

wow, you should be ashamed of yourself. so in your mind AA could attend Janney only if there was a 10% set aside of OOB at risk kids? do you think there are no AA middle and upper middle class families who could afford to leave in AU?

we are at Murch, and we are not AA, but our kids (K and 4th) have AA classmates, including AA boys (there are also other minorities, including Asians and Latinos). I have known most AA boys in my 4th grader's class since pre-k. my impression is that socially they are all part of the community. middle class kids are doing as well as their white friends, have a very social normal life and their families are part of the community. there are some kids who are bused in from other areas of town and who come with some challenging backgrounds. they have specific support (I have no details, I am just a parent at the school), they seem to be part of the community like others, and any problems they may have are caused not by their race, but by their background (poor families, raised by grandparents and so on)

Anonymous wrote:Wow, I guess that is what the community wants, since they fought against the 10% at risk and obtained a waiver.

I guess that's what the black "community" "wants," since nobody black with a 4 year old willingly and freely made a choice to move in boundary for this school -- via rent or outright purchase.

Shitty as the redlining was in 1930*, it no longer exists. Not even a hint. My nearby DC neighborhood, where the home sale price is higher than AU park, has a decent % of AA families.


** WC and AN Miller included explicit "no Jews" and "no Coloreds" clauses in the home deeds when WC and AN Miller developed the neighborhoods of Sumner in MoCo, Spring Valley and AU Park in the early 20th century.

Anonymous wrote:We have a daughter, not a son, but I'm not interested in any of the JKLMM set. Looking at Shepherd.

Well, where do you live right now?

Are you the poster from a few weeks back who airily said she was "not planning to lottery into Janney" or similar?

No one at these schools was against an at risk set aside, unless the school was already overcrowded with kids in trailers like ours.

My children (and I) are black. They both have other AA kids in their class. There are also South American kids in the class, but they look white. There are a lot of mixed kids, most of the time the parent who is not white is a second or third generation immigrant.

Wow, I guess that is what the community wants, since they fought against the 10% at risk and obtained a waiver.

There is ONE AA child in PK (out of 80) kids at Janney this year and this child has white parents.

The upper NW schools almost exclusivity reflect the demographics of the neighborhoods. My son is the only AA boy in his class, but there are 2 AA girls, 1 child hispanic/latino, and 3 other kids who are mixed race. This is fine for us, we are happy with the diversity.

Anonymous wrote:Don't think there is much diversity at Janney, if that is what you are looking for.

When I took the tour this year it really stood out how little racial diversity there was. There was 1 class I visited that had 0 children who were AA.

We have a daughter, not a son, but I'm not interested in any of the JKLMM set. Looking at Shepherd.

Don't think there is much diversity at Janney, if that is what you are looking for.

With all of the discussion on AA boys in DCPS we would be very interested in hearing the perspective of parents of AA boys currently in elementary schools in the JKLMM cluster, We are currently IB for Janney.