Anonymous wrote:There was a meeting tonight at Van Ness Elementary for those families/children who got matched to Van Ness during round 1 of the lottery. School officials gave the following info:

PS3 - 30 seats matched (14 inbounds kids)
PK4 - 39 seats matched (21 inbounds kids)

They also said that Van Ness IS NOT Title I for the 2015 - 2016 School Year.

Anonymous wrote:There was a meeting tonight at Van Ness Elementary for those families/children who got matched to Van Ness during round 1 of the lottery. School officials gave the following info:

PS3 - 30 seats matched (14 inbounds kids)
PK4 - 39 seats matched (21 inbounds kids)

They also said that Van Ness IS NOT Title I for the 2015 - 2016 School Year.

Anonymous wrote:

Of course there is guaranteed affordable housing east of South Cap (some of the EYA TH's etc) and a good bit more coming when the DC finally builds the replacement units. Its not like this would be like certain Upper NW districts, or certain suburban districts, even had the boundary been on S Cap (which in fact it is not). So the issue is not about having FARMs kids, but how many. Since both non-FARMs and FARMs kids appear to do better when the FARMs percentage is below a particular threshold, I am not sure there is anything wrong with a goal of having a FARM % below that threshold.

I think there is far too little SES integration. I despair at the resistance to it in many suburbs, and in parts of DC (notably in upper NW) I find it unfair that people who have chosen to live in what will be an SES integrated neighborhood, and who want to send their kids to an SES integrated school, are attacked as racist/classist.

Anonymous wrote:There have been a lot of people on DCUM and at the boundary group meetings that were very clear they wanted the VN boundary to only be east of South Capitol. Some would have loved to take over some of Brent's boundary too.

The VNPG's official line is quite politically correct (their goal has been to get the school open) but actual parents living in the area are not always quite as polite. Whether this is about not wanting the kids in SW's public housing developments because they're poor, or because they're black and poor, is somewhat irrelevant. They have been pretty exclusive, and they have made it clear that the school they were zoned for is not an option, largely because of a student body they did everything they could to keep out of VN.

Anonymous wrote:There have been a lot of people on DCUM and at the boundary group meetings that were very clear they wanted the VN boundary to only be east of South Capitol. Some would have loved to take over some of Brent's boundary too.

The VNPG's official line is quite politically correct (their goal has been to get the school open) but actual parents living in the area are not always quite as polite. Whether this is about not wanting the kids in SW's public housing developments because they're poor, or because they're black and poor, is somewhat irrelevant. They have been pretty exclusive, and they have made it clear that the school they were zoned for is not an option, largely because of a student body they did everything they could to keep out of VN.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's very easy to have anti VN feelings. Especially if you live in SW. They fought so hard to keep many of our kids out of their schools by pretending to be scared of south capitol street. It felt like a quarantine.
Also- many of us had stumbled into the VNPG meetings and saw them in action. Even for DCUM standards it was distasteful. Not to mention their ignorance about school form and structure. A bunch of political wonks throwing around things like IB or immersion. It was painful to watch.

I don't call everything rascist and I actually get wanting a good kiddo mix in your schools. All good things. Then, you have the VNPG.

What specifically did the VNPG do to try to keep kids out the school?

I've been to most meetings, what did they do at the meetings that was distasteful?

What's wrong with having a meeting discussing the merits of Language Immersion or IB at the school?

What's wrong with a group of parents forming a parents group to support a DC Public School?

They specifically tried to set the boundary at South Capitol Street, which just so happens to be a way of keeping all the kids in 3 large public housing developments out of their school, and have publicly criticized or otherwise disregarded Amidon-Bowen, the school they're currently zoned for: see http://greatergreatereducation.org/post/23170/capitol-riverfront-parents-organize-to-reopen-a-closed-dcps-school/ "Sohmer didn't even apply to Amidon-Bowen, her zoned school, because someone told her it was dangerous. (She admits she didn't have time to do much research" and http://www.capitalcommunitynews.com/content/reopening-van-ness-elementary-school "One couple spoke eloquently about their ten mile round trip walk with their PK-4 child each day to get her to Amidon-Bowen Elementary School and back. Amidon-Bowen is the current by-right school for the Van Ness area. Located in Southwest, it is quite and across a major artery (South Capitol Street) from much of the Van Ness boundary. Few of the future Van Ness families have children there now so they are unlikely to enroll their children in Kindergarten there for the 2015-2016 school year." (note: there are very few, if any, parts of the Van Ness boundary that are a 2.5 mile walk from Amidon-Bowen, and the P6 and V8 buses run frequently from even the furthest reaches of Capitol Riverfront directly to Amidon). They specifically wanted the school to be filled with kids from that neighborhood, see http://www.capitalcommunitynews.com/content/sws-van-ness-and-school-boundary-proposals-run-down-hot-topics "parents in the former Van Ness boundaries have been fully mobilized to get the school reopened as quickly as possible. They presented their own neighborhood studies to the Chancellor’s office showing that the school would quickly be filled largely with IB kids."

Capitol Riverfront families were also very vocal at the DME's boundary discussions about having the boundary at South Capitol. And you can do a search on this site (pay special attention to posts in June and August 2014 when the boundary proposal and final boundaries came out) to see what folks had to say.

Anonymous wrote:

They specifically tried to set the boundary at South Capitol Street, which just so happens to be a way of keeping all the kids in 3 large public housing developments out of their school, and have publicly criticized or otherwise disregarded Amidon-Bowen, the school they're currently zoned for: see http://greatergreatereducation.org/post/23170/capitol-riverfront-parents-organize-to-reopen-a-closed-dcps-school/ "Sohmer didn't even apply to Amidon-Bowen, her zoned school, because someone told her it was dangerous. (She admits she didn't have time to do much research" and http://www.capitalcommunitynews.com/content/reopening-van-ness-elementary-school "One couple spoke eloquently about their ten mile round trip walk with their PK-4 child each day to get her to Amidon-Bowen Elementary School and back. Amidon-Bowen is the current by-right school for the Van Ness area. Located in Southwest, it is quite and across a major artery (South Capitol Street) from much of the Van Ness boundary. Few of the future Van Ness families have children there now so they are unlikely to enroll their children in Kindergarten there for the 2015-2016 school year." (note: there are very few, if any, parts of the Van Ness boundary that are a 2.5 mile walk from Amidon-Bowen, and the P6 and V8 buses run frequently from even the furthest reaches of Capitol Riverfront directly to Amidon). They specifically wanted the school to be filled with kids from that neighborhood, see http://www.capitalcommunitynews.com/content/sws-van-ness-and-school-boundary-proposals-run-down-hot-topics "parents in the former Van Ness boundaries have been fully mobilized to get the school reopened as quickly as possible. They presented their own neighborhood studies to the Chancellor’s office showing that the school would quickly be filled largely with IB kids."

Capitol Riverfront families were also very vocal at the DME's boundary discussions about having the boundary at South Capitol. And you can do a search on this site (pay special attention to posts in June and August 2014 when the boundary proposal and final boundaries came out) to see what folks had to say.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's very easy to have anti VN feelings. Especially if you live in SW. They fought so hard to keep many of our kids out of their schools by pretending to be scared of south capitol street. It felt like a quarantine.
Also- many of us had stumbled into the VNPG meetings and saw them in action. Even for DCUM standards it was distasteful. Not to mention their ignorance about school form and structure. A bunch of political wonks throwing around things like IB or immersion. It was painful to watch.

I don't call everything rascist and I actually get wanting a good kiddo mix in your schools. All good things. Then, you have the VNPG.

What specifically did the VNPG do to try to keep kids out the school?

I've been to most meetings, what did they do at the meetings that was distasteful?

What's wrong with having a meeting discussing the merits of Language Immersion or IB at the school?

What's wrong with a group of parents forming a parents group to support a DC Public School?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Semantics. Race correlates with poverty in DC. And yes, I'm aware there are many AA families who don't live in public housing. In fact, there are many high-income AA families. There just aren't many white families on public assistance. The field is about to become more level though when DCPS implements the at risk set aside.

Also, if there were schools in DC that had mostly Honey Boo-Boo type families, most people in a higher class would not want their children going to that school.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think anti VN boosters likely fall into one of two groups:
-Parents like pp who have been turned off by the obsession some (one?) posters have with demographics and how many FARM students will or will not attend and
-Capitol Hill parents (mostly Brent) who put years of hard work into improving the schools and are offended by the notion that all it takes to be a top school is having enough white students show up.

Every thread about Van Ness ends up about demographics, but so little is discussed about the actual program. What curriculum will they follow? Will there be dedicated art/music/PE teachers? What about special education? Foreign language? Will there be aftercare? uniforms? The school location is convenient for my family and these are the types of things that would make us interested in attending.

This is not a racial issue. In reality, most parents do not want to send their kids to a school where the vast majority of students come from challenging backgrounds (Public Housing poverty situations). Think about it, that's the reason you have private schools. Most people who choose private schools do so because it guarantees that their children will be surrounded by a certain type of child. That's also why parent send their kids to the JKLMM cluster of schools, because they like where the other children came from. That's also why a lot of people don't send their kids to Hardy.