Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Okay, I don't want to discredit anyone's experience with school violence, but that is a known issue that ACPS needs to address. I want to talk about the school culture and academics at J-H.

There are serious issues are JH, that due to its size, are more amplified than you would find at GW. 1) the overwhelming majority of the students come from very low income households and due to no fault of their own bring with them the stress and issues that are related to living in Section 8 in that neighborhood. Even making a completely funky Brooks district where kids from the Madison Street section 8 are somehow included in Brooks when they should be going to JH doesn't alleviate the issues. Instead of addressing the issues related to such a large number of children coming from very low income households, it is swept under the rug and bringing it to light is called racist. But we need to help these children and these families, because the odds are stacked against them that someone is reading to them at home, that there is someone to help with homework, that they get adequate sleep, that they are not affected by the safety issues (I get the police alerts, I know), that they may need intervention like a tutor but can't pay for it, etc. THEN combine that with 2) there are major administrative issues at JH. Recently a large teachers quit or didn't renew their contracts leaving to teach somewhere else. There is extremely high turnover in leadership. Honestly they should have brought the magic from the LCTA principal over to JH instead of hiring new people over and over.

JH looks all shiny and somewhat new, but it was rebuilt several years ago because the state threatened to take it over. JH when it only went to 5th grade, had failed the SOLs for so many years in a row that it qualified to be taken over by the Virginia Department of Education and one way to prevent that was by building a new building, which apparently technically meant it was a new school with a clean slate and no longer was a 5+ year failing SOL school.

So instead of trying to tackle the problems, ACPS literally built a new school where the old playground used to be. That was their answer. That's Jeff Houston.

The other 'fix' the city tried was to force all the white, UMC kids from Del Ray to attend JH when it was unaccredited. This effort was presumably to boost the scores of the school via diluting the poor scores from the Berg kids.

Imagine paying $1200 a month in property tax to be told your child has to go to, literally, the lowest performing grade school in the entire state. And, all the while you are much closer to another school that is accredited and had been traditionally your assigned school.

The city literally threw these people under the bus.

Yep. My friend lived on Adams, and is much closer to Brooks than JH. They were districted for JH but had a waiver but when new districts started her waivers were no longer allowed. So she had to send her kids to JH and let the middle schooler go there too even though they lived one block from GW. Was a huge nightmare. They live now in Fairfax.

I think the district lines have been drawn this way for 20 years.

They have been, BUT you used to be able to get a waiver, especially if you lived closer to another school and if your zoned school was failing. Plenty of people who were zoned for JH used to waive out, many went to Brooks. But it is nuts to have that district where kids on Madison/Montgomery go to Brooks and the kids along Braddock, Adams, etc go to JH.

If you take the Madison/Montgomery portion out of Brooks and replace it with the south end of Del Ray, it becomes over 90% white and high income.
Of course, it's all ridiculous because now Brooks is under capacity (but individual classrooms are overcrowded because they cut teachers because of underenrollment.) So allowing some geographically based transfers would have been feasible.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Okay, I don't want to discredit anyone's experience with school violence, but that is a known issue that ACPS needs to address. I want to talk about the school culture and academics at J-H.

There are serious issues are JH, that due to its size, are more amplified than you would find at GW. 1) the overwhelming majority of the students come from very low income households and due to no fault of their own bring with them the stress and issues that are related to living in Section 8 in that neighborhood. Even making a completely funky Brooks district where kids from the Madison Street section 8 are somehow included in Brooks when they should be going to JH doesn't alleviate the issues. Instead of addressing the issues related to such a large number of children coming from very low income households, it is swept under the rug and bringing it to light is called racist. But we need to help these children and these families, because the odds are stacked against them that someone is reading to them at home, that there is someone to help with homework, that they get adequate sleep, that they are not affected by the safety issues (I get the police alerts, I know), that they may need intervention like a tutor but can't pay for it, etc. THEN combine that with 2) there are major administrative issues at JH. Recently a large teachers quit or didn't renew their contracts leaving to teach somewhere else. There is extremely high turnover in leadership. Honestly they should have brought the magic from the LCTA principal over to JH instead of hiring new people over and over.

JH looks all shiny and somewhat new, but it was rebuilt several years ago because the state threatened to take it over. JH when it only went to 5th grade, had failed the SOLs for so many years in a row that it qualified to be taken over by the Virginia Department of Education and one way to prevent that was by building a new building, which apparently technically meant it was a new school with a clean slate and no longer was a 5+ year failing SOL school.

So instead of trying to tackle the problems, ACPS literally built a new school where the old playground used to be. That was their answer. That's Jeff Houston.

The other 'fix' the city tried was to force all the white, UMC kids from Del Ray to attend JH when it was unaccredited. This effort was presumably to boost the scores of the school via diluting the poor scores from the Berg kids.

Imagine paying $1200 a month in property tax to be told your child has to go to, literally, the lowest performing grade school in the entire state. And, all the while you are much closer to another school that is accredited and had been traditionally your assigned school.

The city literally threw these people under the bus.

Yep. My friend lived on Adams, and is much closer to Brooks than JH. They were districted for JH but had a waiver but when new districts started her waivers were no longer allowed. So she had to send her kids to JH and let the middle schooler go there too even though they lived one block from GW. Was a huge nightmare. They live now in Fairfax.

I think the district lines have been drawn this way for 20 years.

They have been, BUT you used to be able to get a waiver, especially if you lived closer to another school and if your zoned school was failing. Plenty of people who were zoned for JH used to waive out, many went to Brooks. But it is nuts to have that district where kids on Madison/Montgomery go to Brooks and the kids along Braddock, Adams, etc go to JH.