Last spring at our general body meeting we took a poll of 50 students and Carville was the top choice of the people we put up for consideration. We wanted someone who was successful, popular, dynamic and engaging, and he fits the bill on all of those.

I've given some money to the scholarships in the District of Columbia, to the best students in D.C... many of the students have written me letters telling me they could not have afforded to go to college without the scholarship and money I've given them.

In lieu of not building buildings, we do not have a choice, We are adding 1,000 students per year. We need to be building three schools every two years, and we are not even coming close to that.

Administrators strongly favor geography; students strongly favor choice.

It was our goal for 100 percent of students to get their first or second choice, and that happened -- of the students who turned in their forms. I was pretty confident that it would happen because of the work we had done beforehand with surveys.

We had to randomly distribute the students overloaded in that school into their second choice. That's the 30 students or so who got their second choice.