It’s shaping up to be a pretty big week for DC public education. DC Public Schools is expected to announce the highly anticipated list of school closures tomorrow. But before we go there, DCFPI wants to highlight an opportunity to comment on whether or not DC should have a neighborhood preference for admission to the city’s public charter schools. A task force that was charged with exploring the possibility of creating neighborhood preferences for public charter schools has decided that there is no strong case for doing so, but it wants to hear what the public thinks.
First, a little background. Right now, if a DC charter school has more applications than available space, students are selected through a random lottery (after preference for siblings of enrolled students and children of the school’s board members/founders). There is no geographic preference for students who live in the surrounding area.
The Council, in the FY 2013 Budget Support Act of 2012, asked the Chairman of the DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB) to convene a task force to research and examine neighborhood preference for charter school admissions in the District of Columbia. Since then, two meetings were held by the task force to study charter student enrollment patterns, discuss what other cities have done, and what options for a preference are feasible for DC’s charter school community. You can find the background materials for the meetings here on the PCSB website.
So, what could this mean for DC parents? A neighborhood preference for a charter school would give some level of priority enrollment to families living inside a set geographic boundary around the school. But, how these boundaries are drawn and what factors go into actually applying the preference could be decided in very different ways. In the case of New Orleans, for example, the neighborhood preference is only applied from Kindergarten through 8th grade. The actual percentage of seats that are reserved for this purpose also varies, with some cities choosing to reserve 100% of seats for neighborhood students while others reserve less.
The task force deliberated several options, but has concluded preliminarily that a neighborhood preference is not needed. According to the PCSB, “35% of public charter school students go to school within one mile of their home and 49% go to school within their ward.” The task force feels that if a neighborhood preference is applied, it should be a voluntary option for each charter school.
Do you agree? The final task of this process is to hear whether the public feels a preference is needed, and if so, what options should be considered. It may be that some parents living close to a public charter school may feel that they should get an admission preference. At the same time, others point out that an admissions preference really is a matter of re-arranging the deck chairs (or school desks in this case), and that it does not address the true need for the city to have a systemic approach to improving all schools.
The task force is asking for public comment this Thursday evening (unfortunately directly overlapping with the Council’s first hearing on DCPS school closures). Your feedback will be used to help inform their final recommendations to the Council, due by December 15th.For more information on the task force, see here.
Public Comment Session to be held November 15th, 2012 5:30-7:30pm at Achievement Prep Public Charter School (908 Wahler Pl SE, Washington, DC 20032)
