Anonymous wrote:I can't claim to be very familiar with area (except that a few years back I would charitably describe the walk back from RFK as dicey), but I would think it similar to H Street.

I live 2 blocks from Eliot-Hine and that area has absolutely nothing in common with H-Street. It's largely a residential area, and a safe one at that, with home values unfortunately way out of reach compared to the still much more affordable H St corridor. Eliot-Hine is an imposing building but the entrance is on Constitution Ave, which is literally a neighborhood street there.

So try this walking or biking tour to get a feel: Go to Lincoln Park, hang out a bit with Lincoln and Bethune, then continue four blocks along East Capitol, following the joggers, strollers, bikers and dog walkers. Enjoying the wide side-walks and the soon to bud lush leafy trees overhead, taking in the stately houses left and right followed by the historic Car Barn apartments. When you get to 17th, size up Eastern HS and walk left on 17th until you get to the end of the Eastern campus with its bleachers at Constitution Ave. Turn right, walk past 17th Place NE and Eliot-Hine's front entrance will come into view.
If you have more time, consider doing any of the following:
- If you're there on a Saturday trace back your steps and consider paying the DC Youth Orchestra Program at Eastern visit, grab a slice of pizza in the cafeteria just behind the marble stairway, and stroll around its lovely atriums and classrooms one and two floors up.
- Or go back and continue up (north) on 17th St to D, then E, then F St, where 17th makes a bend and check out the construction work at the Rosedale Recreation Center, hopefully the outdoor pool will open soon!
- Or, from EH, continue along Constitution Ave all the way to 21st St NE, cross C St NE and take a left on the bike path to reach the Anacostia River Walk Trail. Two choices from there: 1) Walk north just a few hundred yards and enter Kingman Island Park, where you can enjoy some wild life observation while lingering on the board walks. 2) Walk south as far as you like. A bit far on foot but great by bike: circle back to 8th St/Barracks Row or all the way to the Navy Yard and its waterfront park and Nats Stadium.

Enjoy!

Anonymous wrote:22:01, I truly hope we are not just accepting bullying as an episode of acceptance. You felt reassured that she talked about it. But yet a parent that has child who's a victim is not satisfied. So, where does the problem lie, is it because you heard the conversation and felt comfortable but is it the parent who's the victim and doesn't see any action?

22:01 here: Bullying cannot be an episode of acceptance, no. In fact, bullying shouldn't even exist and certainly shouldn't be tolerated. What I meant to convey is that bullying is more complicated than declaring zero tolerance on it, although that's an important step to recognizing it. Thus, I'd judge a school not by whether it exists (in fact, I'd give a school credit in recognizing that it does because everything else is a lie) but what is being done and what lasting measures are being developed about it. I'm by no means an expert, but my understanding is that anti-bullying efforts consist of a precess and not a one-time reaction to a particular incident. These efforts need to be embedded in the whole of a school culture; and that's not a one-time-here-and-now thing. Notwithstanding the need to see action on the individual case, it's just as much the process as a whole and its direction that I'd judge.

22:01, I truly hope we are not just accepting bullying as an episode of acceptance. You felt reassured that she talked about it. But yet a parent that has child who's a victim is not satisfied. So, where does the problem lie, is it because you heard the conversation and felt comfortable but is it the parent who's the victim and doesn't see any action?

Anonymous wrote:

The neighborhood around E-H is fine. I've lives two blocks from the school for the past 8 years. I think my kid would be safer walking to E-H than sitting on a bus to an from Latin for an hour a day.

yup. it's not the neighborhood, it's the stigma. i have a PK kid in E-H feeder school. i hope we go to E-H. it will really just depend on how many of our cohorts/schoolmates are there. it is indeed discouraging to hear someone question our motives if we do go to OUR inbound public school. what on earth could the motive be, other than to make the school great? isn't that a win-win?? i agree with a previous poster. there has to be algebra 1 in middle school, or we'll suck it up and look for a charter (cringe).

As far as the neighborhood, it's hard to generalize because it depends greatly on one's perception. If you live near E-H, you can't judge how it feels to outsiders, and outsiders are not in a great position to judge how it feels to actually live there. I can't claim to be very familiar with area (except that a few years back I would charitably describe the walk back from RFK as dicey), but I would think it similar to H Street. Some act as if H Street is perfectly developed; others as if gunfire was a regular occurrence. The truth is in the middle. We go to H Street regularly, and there are regularly "keep your head down" moments (and by that I mean you don't want to give the bum or drunk or addict or loud&aggressive person a reason to notice you).

But if there are E-H parents who believe in the neighborhood, I think it would behoove them to spread the word because I don't think (well, I know) that their view is shared by those to the west.

Totally agree! The judgment should not only be on whether a (middle) school exhibits bullying but what how honestly the problem is acknowledged, what is being done about it, what a school's plan is to prevent it. I recently heard Ms. Young, the EH principal, speak to the topic of bullying and, by contrast to another recent thread on this forum, felt reassured to see the problem and its urgency recognized rather than diminished and denied. Ms. Young has been the principal of EH only since fall. She can hardly be blamed for habits the promoted 8th graders had grown into. But she will be judged by whether and how she is able to promote a responsive and responsible school culture in which bullying and fighting is not only not tolerated but also prevented.

Bullying is awful but everywhere. It is rampant at Latin where people are lining up to go!

All is null and void. Newschannel 8 reported a story about a frustrated parent concerns about her daughter being continously bullied. This is black on black crime, therefore I can only imagine if the lone white child arrives.

The bully attitude has made it over to Eastern and the culprits are Eliot-Hine promoted 8th graders.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is a scholarly measure of concentrated poverty where even non-poor children suffer within a community. That percentage is 30%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty

I know that when we were at our previuos school it was 70% and just overwhelmed the learning atmosphere and we had to leave. Unfortunately I think there are a lot of schools in DC that have well over 30%.

I hear you. But before now everyone turns their back on schools that are above that threshold please be sure you recognize that the poverty rate is not computed using the same data. I presume you're looking at "% free and reduced lunch" as a measure of how many children are poor in a DC public school. That's not the same measure used to compute poverty density in neighborhoods as discussed by the link you provide. Maybe if one were to consider just "free lunch" that would be more comparable but that data is not available on school profiles.

Interesting. I've been going off of the "low-income" numbers from http://www.greatschools.org/res/pdf/DC/DC_School_Chooser_2012-2013.pdf

I wonder how that's computed...

Anonymous wrote:There is a scholarly measure of concentrated poverty where even non-poor children suffer within a community. That percentage is 30%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty

I know that when we were at our previuos school it was 70% and just overwhelmed the learning atmosphere and we had to leave. Unfortunately I think there are a lot of schools in DC that have well over 30%.

I hear you. But before now everyone turns their back on schools that are above that threshold please be sure you recognize that the poverty rate is not computed using the same data. I presume you're looking at "% free and reduced lunch" as a measure of how many children are poor in a DC public school. That's not the same measure used to compute poverty density in neighborhoods as discussed by the link you provide. Maybe if one were to consider just "free lunch" that would be more comparable but that data is not available on school profiles.

Anonymous wrote:

The "p" in DCPS stands for public and not poor. So the discussion about the poor being the down fall for all DCPS ill-fates. Then the notion that the rich and educated will be our salvation, is quite insulting. I'll say this there are not enough Capitol Hill parents with children to make any Ward 6 school gold mine. If the theory of having those with the same mind-set of having money and education being the winning ticket. Then we wouldn't be in dire straights as the old-adage of money talks and bullshit walks.

Questions about quality at E-H are not first and foremost questions about poor kids--at least, not wanting to send your kid to a school with poor kids, or wanting to take opportunities away from poor kids.

But the bottom line is, in order for a school to be successful, it needs to be economically diverse. Okay, to skip the euphemism: you need lots of middle-class kids. Here's a question: how many successful non-charter schools are there in DCPS that have a student low-income population above, say, 70%? 60%? 50%? What's the highest poverty load a school can cope with before "how to educate the student body" stops being the foremost concern?

Same with charters. As an outlier, KIPP has a reputation for getting decent outcomes out of uniformly poor student bodies, though I'm not sure if turning all of DC's schools over to KIPP is the answer.

At the end of the day, you fix the schools by making their student bodies less poor. You do that by getting more middle-class kids into the system by any means. The central strategy for improving DCPS should be to grow the middle-class population of DC--building market-rate housing. That means more money, and more prepared/motivated/supported peers for the poor kids.

The question that DCPS has been asking itself for decades has been "How do we make these schools work with 85%+ low-income student bodies?" And the answer is, you don't. It's not possible. These schools all went into the toilet over the period of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, which is the period when the black middle class emigrated to the suburbs (following the white middle-class, who left in the two decades previous). They're not going to be coming back as some sort of returning wave.

You need to get middle-class parents to buy back into the schools. By and large, those students are going to look like America--they won't be uniformly African American. They'll be white, black, asian, hispanic, etc... And that's a good thing.

There is a scholarly measure of concentrated poverty where even non-poor children suffer within a community. That percentage is 30%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty

I know that when we were at our previuos school it was 70% and just overwhelmed the learning atmosphere and we had to leave. Unfortunately I think there are a lot of schools in DC that have well over 30%.

14:48 (who I think is also 10:55 on a PP) speaks the truth.