DCPS could care less who fills seats as long as they get filled. End of story.

If Watkins and SH were doing as well as supporters claim, most of the OOB students who lottery in would be from the Hill. They aren't, not by a long shot, not even in K.

What separates Watkins from Maury, Brent, SWS and Cap Hill Montessori is neighborhood buy-in, weak vs. strong. The issue should be studied, not whitewashed with boosters trilling " Whoo hoo, we're up to 30 percent boundary this year!!"

Watkins has needed more than 3 decades to attract a lower % of neighborhood kids than Maury did between 2012 and this year. Comparative newcomer Mundo Verde is thought to support a student body that's more than half Hill kids.

Anonymous wrote:^^^^ Watkins isn't a neighborhood school. The four points above seem accurate. The data on test scores doesn't lie. How can a teacher perform differentiated teaching when students are so far apart? If the students were all within a narrow band of accomplishment, it can work. But it cannot work with polar opposites; high achievers get left looking at the ceiling.

It can also work with extra hands on deck, as posters have noted.

A single teacher generally can't differentiate effectively when kids are all over the map academically, but two in a classroom have a real shot if class sizes aren't large. This explains why the well-resourced PTAs on the Hill hire classroom aides and work hard to place student teachers in classrooms.

Traditionally, the Cluster hasn't paid for teachers aides despite fundraising aggressively since the 90s.

Didn't Snowden hit up Henderson to get her kid out of a Watkins placement for a Logan Montessori spot? I think that sums up Watkins, because Logan certainly is no shining academic powerhouse.

^^^^ Watkins isn't a neighborhood school. The four points above seem accurate. The data on test scores doesn't lie. How can a teacher perform differentiated teaching when students are so far apart? If the students were all within a narrow band of accomplishment, it can work. But it cannot work with polar opposites; high achievers get left looking at the ceiling.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^if you weren't scared of integration,

Go away race baiting troll.

Not PP and agree that race drives most of the IB bitching. Be honest and about it and own it instead of the poorly coded BS about wards 5,7,8 kids in out precious neighborhood

Here is what turned me off about Watkins:

(1) Parents reported teachers and staff yelling at students.
(2) Parents reported teachers being uninterested in challenging students who were above grade level.
(3) Parents reported advanced students having to do a lot of worksheets and self teaching while the teacher focused on the students who were behind.
(4) The test scores are not good.

My kids are in Watkins right now and all 4 of these points are greatly exaggerated. If parents are interested, contact the principal and tour the school. Come multiple times so you can see what goes on for yourself. Don't rely on DCUM posters who are either reporting old stories, never had kids who attended, etc. Is it the perfect school and does it work for everyone? Of course not. But it's not the place DCUM describes.

DCPS leaders and the super lefty Cap Hill Public School Parents Organization people have been blaming high SES parents for not filling most of the seats in Hill by-right schools for years and years.

What good has it done them, or us? Very little, despite one pricey mega renovation after another. In a nutshell, that's the story of Stuart-Hobson, OP.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^if you weren't scared of integration,

Go away race baiting troll.

Not PP and agree that race drives most of the IB bitching. Be honest and about it and own it instead of the poorly coded BS about wards 5,7,8 kids in out precious neighborhood

Here is what turned me off about Watkins:

(1) Parents reported teachers and staff yelling at students.
(2) Parents reported teachers being uninterested in challenging students who were above grade level.
(3) Parents reported advanced students having to do a lot of worksheets and self teaching while the teacher focused on the students who were behind.
(4) The test scores are not good.

Ugh if all the people inbound for Watkins actually went there the problems would fix themselves

Classic firstmover problem

The fact that it took Brent 10 years to finally get all inbound for kindergarten shows what the issue is. Upper SES DCUM being afraid of the poors/racisim

Let's ride with the accusation: Upper SES DCUMs are indeed afraid of "poors" in their kids' schools. Perhaps consider why they're afraid. They logically fear that a bunch of poor kids who are behind academically, and prone to behavioral problems, in a classroom will inhibit their children's learning and overall educational experience.

Solution: put many more instructors and counselors in school buildings, pile on targeted interventions like high-quality free after-care programs for poor kids offering academic tutoring, go with smaller class sizes, and offer structured pullouts for advanced kids. Is DCPS doing much of this? No. In DCPS, PTAs must knock themselves out to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide the inputs needed to manage parent fears, particularly in the form of teachers aides.

As things stand, only by building a critical mass of hundreds of high SES parents in a school community can high SES parent fears be managed in DCPS.

My kids began school at an ordinary government school in London with double the % of poor minority kids than at our Hill DCPS. In London, standards were higher than in DCPS, and academic outputs more impressive, although class sizes were larger. In the UK, if kids work behind grade level, they're pulled out of regular classrooms for much of the school day and tutored intensively in small groups until they can (if they ever can). They aren't left in regular classrooms to pull down standards for high-performing peers as in the US.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You seriously don't know the basics after perusing SH threads?

During the 2013-2014 school boundaries and feeders review, school system leaders refused to allow most of the nine DCPS elementary schools on Cap Hill to feed into an enlarged SH, creating a pan-Ward 6 DCPS middle school. DCPS intransigence on the issue was supported by the politically powerful leadership of the Capitol Cluster, both admins and parents (mostly residents Wards 5, 7 and 8), and their allies at the the pro-Cluster Capitol Hill Public School Parents Organization (CHPSPO). Sadly, most Cap Hill parents of little kids would have cheered the change.

Without the strongest Hill DCPS elementary schools--Maury, SWS and Brent--feeding into SH, the school can't improve quickly, catching up to Hardy and possibly Deal in this generation. Ensuring that SH become a predominantly in-boundary and high SES school is now a 10-20 year project, when it could have been a 3-5 year project. Not much more to say.

Agreed. The Cluster PTA president at the time Vince Morris was not helpful at all and inhibited any progess for growing the neighborhood. School safety and school management administrative culture was not his concern. He seems buddy-buddy with Grosso, so that says it all and now here we are with dysfunctional feeder patterns.

The pan-Hill MS concept was never concrete and not favored by DCPS to begin with. DCPS was not going to give any room for an argument to close either Jefferson or Eliot Hine by making SH the central MS.
Look at the proposals that from 2014 that are linked in the sticky at the top of this forum. The DCPS idea was and remains to strengthen each of the Ward 6 MS by reinforcing feeder patterns with a single or pair of "stronger" anchors.

On top of that, the numbers for the feeders in the pan-Hill MS wouldn't work for using SH. That is what CHPSPO argued, if I remember correctly. I'm not Vince but he expressed his position openly - as did the CHCS PTA that the Watkins/LT/JOW feed to SH is the most logical and sustainable.

What about a multi-campus Hill MS with all Hill ES feeding into a modernized Jefferson for 6th grade and a modernized E-H for 7th and 8th grades? With all current Stuart-Hobson feeder ES going to the pan-hill multi-campus MS, the Stuart-Hobson building could be turned into a citywide performing arts MS that feeds into Duke Ellington.

Nice ideas bandied about on DCUM in recent years that are going absolutely nowhere because DCPS leaders, the current mayor, and the DC City Council members aren't on board. Not a one.

The useless Charles Allen claimed to be for a Hill Middle School, but that was just another lie.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^if you weren't scared of integration,

Go away race baiting troll.

Not PP and agree that race drives most of the IB bitching. Be honest and about it and own it instead of the poorly coded BS about wards 5,7,8 kids in out precious neighborhood

Here is what turned me off about Watkins:

(1) Parents reported teachers and staff yelling at students.
(2) Parents reported teachers being uninterested in challenging students who were above grade level.
(3) Parents reported advanced students having to do a lot of worksheets and self teaching while the teacher focused on the students who were behind.
(4) The test scores are not good.

Ugh if all the people inbound for Watkins actually went there the problems would fix themselves

Classic firstmover problem

The fact that it took Brent 10 years to finally get all inbound for kindergarten shows what the issue is. Upper SES DCUM being afraid of the poors/racisim

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You seriously don't know the basics after perusing SH threads?

During the 2013-2014 school boundaries and feeders review, school system leaders refused to allow most of the nine DCPS elementary schools on Cap Hill to feed into an enlarged SH, creating a pan-Ward 6 DCPS middle school. DCPS intransigence on the issue was supported by the politically powerful leadership of the Capitol Cluster, both admins and parents (mostly residents Wards 5, 7 and 8), and their allies at the the pro-Cluster Capitol Hill Public School Parents Organization (CHPSPO). Sadly, most Cap Hill parents of little kids would have cheered the change.

Without the strongest Hill DCPS elementary schools--Maury, SWS and Brent--feeding into SH, the school can't improve quickly, catching up to Hardy and possibly Deal in this generation. Ensuring that SH become a predominantly in-boundary and high SES school is now a 10-20 year project, when it could have been a 3-5 year project. Not much more to say.

Agreed. The Cluster PTA president at the time Vince Morris was not helpful at all and inhibited any progess for growing the neighborhood. School safety and school management administrative culture was not his concern. He seems buddy-buddy with Grosso, so that says it all and now here we are with dysfunctional feeder patterns.

The pan-Hill MS concept was never concrete and not favored by DCPS to begin with. DCPS was not going to give any room for an argument to close either Jefferson or Eliot Hine by making SH the central MS.
Look at the proposals that from 2014 that are linked in the sticky at the top of this forum. The DCPS idea was and remains to strengthen each of the Ward 6 MS by reinforcing feeder patterns with a single or pair of "stronger" anchors.

On top of that, the numbers for the feeders in the pan-Hill MS wouldn't work for using SH. That is what CHPSPO argued, if I remember correctly. I'm not Vince but he expressed his position openly - as did the CHCS PTA that the Watkins/LT/JOW feed to SH is the most logical and sustainable.

What about a multi-campus Hill MS with all Hill ES feeding into a modernized Jefferson for 6th grade and a modernized E-H for 7th and 8th grades? With all current Stuart-Hobson feeder ES going to the pan-hill multi-campus MS, the Stuart-Hobson building could be turned into a citywide performing arts MS that feeds into Duke Ellington.

Nice ideas bandied about on DCUM in recent years that are going absolutely nowhere because DCPS leaders, the current mayor, and the DC City Council members aren't on board. Not a one.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^if you weren't scared of integration,

Go away race baiting troll.

Not PP and agree that race drives most of the IB bitching. Be honest and about it and own it instead of the poorly coded BS about wards 5,7,8 kids in out precious neighborhood

Here is what turned me off about Watkins:

(1) Parents reported teachers and staff yelling at students.
(2) Parents reported teachers being uninterested in challenging students who were above grade level.
(3) Parents reported advanced students having to do a lot of worksheets and self teaching while the teacher focused on the students who were behind.
(4) The test scores are not good.

Race doesn't drive most of the IB "bitching," SES does, coupled with the problem of DCPS never having adopted a policy of challenging ES or MS students who can work above grade level, or funded initiatives to ensure that they can. MD and VA passed laws according GT students rights in the 80s while DC hasn't. The result is that unless a principal is motivated to work with high SES parents to raise money for aides and pullout groups to enable classroom teachers to help challenge kids who can work above grade level, it doesn't happen consistently. A school only gets the aides after having built a critical mass of affluent parents willing and able to raise the dough to pay for them, as in the JKLM schools, Brent and Maury. It's a really bad system that shortchanges kids who work above grade level city-wide. At the MS level, formal above grade level offerings are still hard to find in DCPS (e.g. 7th grade algebra at Deal and Hardy).

We've been at Brent for a number of years after moving IB from the Cluster catchment area partly to avoid Watkins, mostly for the reasons outlined above (although the Watkins test scores are very good for white kids).

To my knowledge, most of the AA students in my children's cohorts in the lower grades are neighborhood kids with professional parents, or kids living in the mixed-income Ellen Wilson townhouses, not kids coming in from other wards. Brent has a diversity working group that does a decent job promoting good race relations.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You seriously don't know the basics after perusing SH threads?

During the 2013-2014 school boundaries and feeders review, school system leaders refused to allow most of the nine DCPS elementary schools on Cap Hill to feed into an enlarged SH, creating a pan-Ward 6 DCPS middle school. DCPS intransigence on the issue was supported by the politically powerful leadership of the Capitol Cluster, both admins and parents (mostly residents Wards 5, 7 and 8), and their allies at the the pro-Cluster Capitol Hill Public School Parents Organization (CHPSPO). Sadly, most Cap Hill parents of little kids would have cheered the change.

Without the strongest Hill DCPS elementary schools--Maury, SWS and Brent--feeding into SH, the school can't improve quickly, catching up to Hardy and possibly Deal in this generation. Ensuring that SH become a predominantly in-boundary and high SES school is now a 10-20 year project, when it could have been a 3-5 year project. Not much more to say.

Agreed. The Cluster PTA president at the time Vince Morris was not helpful at all and inhibited any progess for growing the neighborhood. School safety and school management administrative culture was not his concern. He seems buddy-buddy with Grosso, so that says it all and now here we are with dysfunctional feeder patterns.

The pan-Hill MS concept was never concrete and not favored by DCPS to begin with. DCPS was not going to give any room for an argument to close either Jefferson or Eliot Hine by making SH the central MS.
Look at the proposals that from 2014 that are linked in the sticky at the top of this forum. The DCPS idea was and remains to strengthen each of the Ward 6 MS by reinforcing feeder patterns with a single or pair of "stronger" anchors.

On top of that, the numbers for the feeders in the pan-Hill MS wouldn't work for using SH. That is what CHPSPO argued, if I remember correctly. I'm not Vince but he expressed his position openly - as did the CHCS PTA that the Watkins/LT/JOW feed to SH is the most logical and sustainable.

What about a multi-campus Hill MS with all Hill ES feeding into a modernized Jefferson for 6th grade and a modernized E-H for 7th and 8th grades? With all current Stuart-Hobson feeder ES going to the pan-hill multi-campus MS, the Stuart-Hobson building could be turned into a citywide performing arts MS that feeds into Duke Ellington.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^if you weren't scared of integration,

Go away race baiting troll.

Not PP and agree that race drives most of the IB bitching. Be honest and about it and own it instead of the poorly coded BS about wards 5,7,8 kids in out precious neighborhood

Here is what turned me off about Watkins:

(1) Parents reported teachers and staff yelling at students.
(2) Parents reported teachers being uninterested in challenging students who were above grade level.
(3) Parents reported advanced students having to do a lot of worksheets and self teaching while the teacher focused on the students who were behind.
(4) The test scores are not good.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^if you weren't scared of integration,

Go away race baiting troll.

Not PP and agree that race drives most of the IB bitching. Be honest and about it and own it instead of the poorly coded BS about wards 5,7,8 kids in out precious neighborhood