Category Archives: Schools

Monday was the beginning of the out of boundary lottery process for DC public schools. This is the process by which students who don’t want to attend their designated local school can get a slot at another school.

As discussed here before, for several decades Hyde has been a school mostly filled with students from other neighborhoods. This started to change over the past decade as more Georgetowners decided to send their children to the local school. This has, in turn, reduced the number of slots available to students from other neighborhoods trying to attend Hyde.

One thing parents new to the system might not realize is that even children in the neighborhood have to apply through the lottery for a slot in the pre-Kindergarten program. They are not guaranteed a slot. They do, however, get priority in the lottery. In recent years, some neighborhood children have ended up on the wait list, but GM believes most, if not all, eventually got off the wait list. Continue reading →

On Tuesday, DC Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced the planned closure of 19 DC public schools. Thankfully (but not surprisingly) Hyde-Addison was not on the list. But a school just a stone’s throw from Georgetown was included: Francis-Stevens.

Francis-Stevens is a school that was formed into its current state only a few years ago. In 2008, DC closed the historic Stevens School at 21st and K St. The elementary school program it offered was shifted to the Francis Middle School at 24th and N. Since then, the combined Francis-Stevens has offered Pre-School through grade 8. After it is closed, the School Without Walls High School will get even more walls by using Francis -Stevens as a satellite campus.

But what happens to the kids at Francis-Stevens? Under the current plan, the middle-school aged kids would be moved to Hardy. The elementary-school aged kids would go to Marie Reed in Adams-Morgan.

On one level it makes sense to shift the elementary age kids to Marie Reed. It’s got a lot of capacity, and the majority of kids attending Francis-Stevens are out-of-boundary, so Marie Reed might even be closer to their home.

But what about that quarter of kids who are actually from Foggy Bottom? Should they have to option to choose a more local option than Adams Morgan? GM thinks they should. And that option should be Hyde-Addison here in Georgetown. Continue reading →

A recent study by the American Institutes of Research found that students at Georgetown’s Hyde-Addison demonstrated the best gains in reading performance versus every other school in the DCPS system.

The study ranked the schools by “median growth percentile”, which quantifies the growth an average student at each school has against the average for the whole system. In other words, how much better or worse do students perform year-over-year versus other students at their grade level. Continue reading →