Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC had a choice over the past decade. Promote policies to make the city more family friendly or encourage policies that favor family-less young people and DINKs. It deliberately chose the latter because those people pay taxes but don’t use many services. The next decade DC is going to pay for this short-sighted direction to turn the city into a playground for young people instead of making it more family friendly.

DC is incredibly family friendly. Free museums and zoos, a bevy of public school choices, either in neighborhood or charters, Childrens Hosptial and its affiliates throughout the city, plenty of parks and rec centers, free community pools etc.

All of that, except your kids are banned from attending school.

You mean because of the global pandemic that has killed over half a million Americans and is still right this minute raging at a level even worse than it was this time last year?

Yeah, no duh kids aren't in school, have you been living under a rock for the past 14 months or are you just so incredibly selfish you'd rather people die than have to expend a little extra effort as a parent to give your kids successful remote education?

It is crazy how poorly informed some people are.

By this point, every physician in America has said ten times that kids should have been in school a long time ago because schools were wildly exaggerating the risks of reopening -- even before vaccines were available. DC has become an extreme outlier, compared to the rest of the country, in its willingness to keep kids out of school. That has nothing to do with coronavirus. It's because of politics. Unlike most places around the country, the teachers union here is powerful and the mayor isn't willing to fight with them to get kids back in school because she sees teachers are her political allies. In most of the rest of the country, kids are back in school five days per week.

And every education study that has ever been conducted on the topic finds kids, particularly young children, do extravagantly worse with distance learning than with being in person. Studies show when children miss this much school, they typically never catch up with children their age who've been in school, and that will have profound consequences for these children's lives.

Exactly. Most schools across the country are more open than in DC. And the kids who suffer the most from not attending real school are underprivileged, abused, and neglected kids. So now they’re even more screwed.

+1 Plus, the pools and sports fields were closed for most of last year. It was a devastating year for families with younger children. No wonder many have fled.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC had a choice over the past decade. Promote policies to make the city more family friendly or encourage policies that favor family-less young people and DINKs. It deliberately chose the latter because those people pay taxes but don’t use many services. The next decade DC is going to pay for this short-sighted direction to turn the city into a playground for young people instead of making it more family friendly.

DC is incredibly family friendly. Free museums and zoos, a bevy of public school choices, either in neighborhood or charters, Childrens Hosptial and its affiliates throughout the city, plenty of parks and rec centers, free community pools etc.

All of that, except your kids are banned from attending school.

You mean because of the global pandemic that has killed over half a million Americans and is still right this minute raging at a level even worse than it was this time last year?

Yeah, no duh kids aren't in school, have you been living under a rock for the past 14 months or are you just so incredibly selfish you'd rather people die than have to expend a little extra effort as a parent to give your kids successful remote education?

It is crazy how poorly informed some people are.

By this point, every physician in America has said ten times that kids should have been in school a long time ago because schools were wildly exaggerating the risks of reopening -- even before vaccines were available. DC has become an extreme outlier, compared to the rest of the country, in its willingness to keep kids out of school. That has nothing to do with coronavirus. It's because of politics. Unlike most places around the country, the teachers union here is powerful and the mayor isn't willing to fight with them to get kids back in school because she sees teachers are her political allies. In most of the rest of the country, kids are back in school five days per week.

And every education study that has ever been conducted on the topic finds kids, particularly young children, do extravagantly worse with distance learning than with being in person. Studies show when children miss this much school, they typically never catch up with children their age who've been in school, and that will have profound consequences for these children's lives.

Exactly. Most schools across the country are more open than in DC. And the kids who suffer the most from not attending real school are underprivileged, abused, and neglected kids. So now they’re even more screwed.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC had a choice over the past decade. Promote policies to make the city more family friendly or encourage policies that favor family-less young people and DINKs. It deliberately chose the latter because those people pay taxes but don’t use many services. The next decade DC is going to pay for this short-sighted direction to turn the city into a playground for young people instead of making it more family friendly.

It's funny--DC can have both if it wanted. When I had a family I moved from a 'playground' neighborhood to a 'family' neighborhood (as a working poor and then middle class/never 'wealthy'). I did it knowing that to the rest of the city my new neighborhood is where people wear elastic waist pants and clutch pearls. Sure, I'm sometimes wistful when I cruise U St. for the ghost of myself I see eating pizza at 1 AM and grinding strangers in the clubs, but it doesn't call to me as a parent. Good on the people who are who live there, and the people who are young and enjoying themselves. It's good to have options! What I don't like about the comp plan is in my perception it wants to turn all 'desirable neighborhoods' --currently desirable for different reasons--into the SAME neighborhood. I love that DC has variety (including parts of the city that are not desirable to developers but have lovely character and should receive attention in terms of supermarkets and other amenities). The Comp is so single-minded, and yes, families will leave if it is just condo after condo after condo. I suspect young people may not love having zero varied neighborhood choices as they 'mature' as well.

Great post.