Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So - - - Petworth parents "not having Wilson as an option" does not mean those parents should go to Georgetown, or Palisades or Glover Park. They should be in Petworth, because the things you want in Georgetown should be in Petworth or Columbia Heights instead.

Those things already ARE in those neighborhoods. They are just woefully under-utilized by the UMC white Petworth and Columbia Heights contingent:
Cardozo
CHEC
Roosevelt
Coolidge

Four large facilities are not bursting at the seams, unlike Wilson.

I guarantee that another WOTP high school will be at full capacity the first day it opens. And hence why it should be built - it relieves overcrowding at Wilson, it provides a 2nd viable option for a large cohort of great students, and it opens up more options for OOB folks all over the city (freeing up seats at Banneker, SWW, etc).

The city has already built so much EOTP and the high SES families simply are not showing up. I don't know how this can be any clearer.

Maybe it would be easier to re-locate Rock Creek Park?

This was part of the silliness about Ellington - why is there this notion that the schools have to be WOTP to be good?

Schools WOTP are good because of the students and faculty not the location.

Wilson and Deal are not all white UMC schools - both are still quite diverse. With the gentrification going on EOTP duplicating the diversity at an EOTP MS & HS should not be that heavy of a lift but to do it white students who live EOTP will need to be moved to EOTP schools.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So - - - Petworth parents "not having Wilson as an option" does not mean those parents should go to Georgetown, or Palisades or Glover Park. They should be in Petworth, because the things you want in Georgetown should be in Petworth or Columbia Heights instead.

Those things already ARE in those neighborhoods. They are just woefully under-utilized by the UMC white Petworth and Columbia Heights contingent:
Cardozo
CHEC
Roosevelt
Coolidge

Four large facilities are not bursting at the seams, unlike Wilson.

I guarantee that another WOTP high school will be at full capacity the first day it opens. And hence why it should be built - it relieves overcrowding at Wilson, it provides a 2nd viable option for a large cohort of great students, and it opens up more options for OOB folks all over the city (freeing up seats at Banneker, SWW, etc).

The city has already built so much EOTP and the high SES families simply are not showing up. I don't know how this can be any clearer.

But what's the reason why they would come to your second high school west of Rock Creek Park?

Anonymous wrote:6. Dual language elementary schools only have feeder rights to dual language middle and high schools. If you decide you want monolingual schooling you must lottery in somewhere.

That's basically #2 above. If under this proposal someone IB for Oyster doesn't want bilingual ed, they can send their kid to Francis-Stevens. Then they could either go on to Cardozo under the current feeder rules, lottery with a preference for Cardozo if OOB feeder rights were replaced by a lottery preference, or go to their new IB HS of Roosevelt. Or move, or pick a charter, or get into Ellington/SWW/Banneker/McKinley Tech.

Anonymous wrote:So - - - Petworth parents "not having Wilson as an option" does not mean those parents should go to Georgetown, or Palisades or Glover Park. They should be in Petworth, because the things you want in Georgetown should be in Petworth or Columbia Heights instead.

Those things already ARE in those neighborhoods. They are just woefully under-utilized by the UMC white Petworth and Columbia Heights contingent:
Cardozo
CHEC
Roosevelt
Coolidge

Four large facilities are not bursting at the seams, unlike Wilson.

I guarantee that another WOTP high school will be at full capacity the first day it opens. And hence why it should be built - it relieves overcrowding at Wilson, it provides a 2nd viable option for a large cohort of great students, and it opens up more options for OOB folks all over the city (freeing up seats at Banneker, SWW, etc).

The city has already built so much EOTP and the high SES families simply are not showing up. I don't know how this can be any clearer.

So - - - Petworth parents "not having Wilson as an option" does not mean those parents should go to Georgetown, or Palisades or Glover Park. They should be in Petworth, because the things you want in Georgetown should be in Petworth or Columbia Heights instead.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dude, look at the OP document. The relative growth numbers are elsewhere. Please just read it and get back to us.

OK I get that you didn’t read it. But the DC Office of Planning predicts that Columbia Heights gains 1779 kids under 17 by 2025 and Petworth gains 1940 by 2025. Georgetown by comparison gains 394 in the same time. Other clusters around there gain 300-700 but nothing to justify focusing on growth in Ward 2 instead of awards 1 and 4 which are the major seders of students to WOTP schools.

It's not just Georgetown....I'm not sure why you're so hung up on that. There's also large growth predicted for the Palisades area (+688), Glover Park/McLean Gardens (+505), and Eaton catchment (+307). All these kids are getting piped into Hardy and then onto Wilson. This is in addition to the current levels of over-crowding in Deal/Wilson. Something - anything - must clearly change WOTP. This simply is not sustainable and 2025 growth projections that your provided in this thread show it.

Yes, I completely agree that Petworth will see the biggest growth in the city. But the problem now is that many of those Petworth families are moving heaven and earth to get their kids into Wilson or charters and not touching the large underutilized HS facilities on their side of the park. That will need to change moving forward. Petworth parents in 2025 will NOT have Wilson as an option. And that's where the rubber will meet the road.

Ironically, getting another WOTP high school will ensure that OOB families still have options WOTP, if that's what they want. But the current trends show that the door for Wilson is quickly shutting for any families who don't live in the geographic boundary. Perhaps that's the strategy by Bowser/DCPS to force EOTP families to attend their local by-right high schools. But many of them have options and will move away, IMHO.

Anonymous wrote:Dude, look at the OP document. The relative growth numbers are elsewhere. Please just read it and get back to us.

OK I get that you didn’t read it. But the DC Office of Planning predicts that Columbia Heights gains 1779 kids under 17 by 2025 and Petworth gains 1940 by 2025. Georgetown by comparison gains 394 in the same time. Other clusters around there gain 300-700 but nothing to justify focusing on growth in Ward 2 instead of awards 1 and 4 which are the major seders of students to WOTP schools.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:but . . . none of the growth comes from Georgetown

It's coming from Glover Park (which was part of Western)

The houses and condos there get too small for high schoolers, most move on at that age.

Well hardly any new condos have opened in Glover Park. And no the houses are not too small - plenty of families have lived in those houses going back 100 years, including raising their kids to adulthood.

Actually there is a good bit of new construction going on up Wisconsin Avenue. There are a lot of 2+ bedroom condos; all are zoned for good schools. Plus, there's the existing inventory, which is constantly changing hands.

6. Dual language elementary schools only have feeder rights to dual language middle and high schools. If you decide you want monolingual schooling you must lottery in somewhere.

1. Ellington should expand to middle school. That would take some of the crowding out of overenrolled middle schools, give new opportunities to kids who don't like their IB middle school, and help train kids so DESA doesn't need to take as many from outside the district.

2. Bancroft to MacFarland and Roosevelt, Oyster either also to MacFarland and Roosevelt or keep Adams and route it to Roosevelt. Want a dual-language school? Get the dual-language feeder pattern.

3. Shepherd and Lafayette to New North and Coolidge. For the people who will say there isn't enough room, make just 6th and 7th grades in New North and create an 8th grade academy in the massively underenrolled Coolidge HS. If and when we get to a point where so many IB families are sending their kids to New North and Coolidge that it's going to be overcrowded, we can have a big party and also redistrict at that point, possibly shifting a few schools to Brookland and Dunbar.

4. End OOB feeder rights. If you get into a school for elementary, you're there through 5th and you have to lottery for middle school; same thing if you get into a middle school via the lottery and want to continue on to HS. If DCPS wants to compromise, it could give a lottery preference for kids who attended a feeder school, but still only take as many kids as the school has room for.

5. If you enroll in a school as IB and you move somewhere else in the District, you can choose to stay the rest of the school year but after that you have to go to your IB school or do the lottery. No more principal's discretion and a lot more audits. If neighborhood schools are important, the priority should be for people who actually live in the neighborhood, not people who lived there at one point and now live somewhere else. Homeless children and kids in foster care of course have additional protections under federal law and may be able to stay when other kids could not.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:but . . . none of the growth comes from Georgetown

It's coming from Glover Park (which was part of Western)

The houses and condos there get too small for high schoolers, most move on at that age.

Well hardly any new condos have opened in Glover Park. And no the houses are not too small - plenty of families have lived in those houses going back 100 years, including raising their kids to adulthood.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dude, look at the OP document. The relative growth numbers are elsewhere. Please just read it and get back to us.

Dude, look at what I wrote. Read it and get back to us. Those numbers don't take into account people coming back into the system or the cumulative impact of consolidating High Schools.

(They are also from 5 years ago and I never once said that Brightwood should not be an additional area of focus)

Right - there is relatively little new housing being built in Ward 3 but many more people with families are moving there and many families that in the past went private are opting to remain public.

But most of the new housing is being built east of the park and that is where the new demand is coming from - Deal/Wilson are becoming more crowded and whiter in large part because more white families from EOTP are trying to squeeze in.

And again to reiterate they are not all coming from the Shepherd catchment as one poster is hung up on.

If you made Wilson a purely neighborhood/WOTP HS it probably could accommodate everyone. But I think almost no one thinks that is a good idea or politically feasible. At the heart of this debate IMHO is how to keep Wilson diverse because it is becoming less so and shrinking the boundaries will exacerbate that.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:but . . . none of the growth comes from Georgetown

It's coming from Glover Park (which was part of Western)

The houses and condos there get too small for high schoolers, most move on at that age.

Anonymous wrote:Dude, look at the OP document. The relative growth numbers are elsewhere. Please just read it and get back to us.

Dude, look at what I wrote. Read it and get back to us. Those numbers don't take into account people coming back into the system or the cumulative impact of consolidating High Schools.

(They are also from 5 years ago and I never once said that Brightwood should not be an additional area of focus)

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:but . . . none of the growth comes from Georgetown

Ward 2 is pretty big, Chief. So is Ward 3. Both growing rapidly, probably even more once the Amazon employees start looking at real estate.

Slightly OT, I agree with another poster who said re-zoning for new apartment buildings (with a required % of lower-income units) would be a logical way to attract more diversity in areas that need it; also would help justify City approval for building more DCPS capacity to relieve pressure on DCPS schools that are overcrowded. It would also provide practical avenues for middle-class families who wish to move into better school boundaries for their kids.

You want to build more high density housing in areas where the schools are already crowded? That makes no sense.