How or why are Howard County public schools so good?

[Anonymous]

Howard County and MoCO are both racially diverse on a county level. MoCo has more white and Hispanic/Latino kids compared to HoCo. HoCo has more Asian kids compared to MoCo.

However, MoCo is more racially segregated on a school by school level. MoCo has multiple high schools with barely any white kids. HoCo doesn't have a single high school with fewer than 18% white kids, despite having fewer white kids on a county level.

MoCo has more diversity in terms of SES as MoCO is about 35% FARMs and HoCo is about 23% FARMs. However, MoCo is more segregated in that the rich areas are much wealthier and the poor areas have higher FARMs concentrations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oakland mills was literally like a scene out of stand and deliver. every student bathroom was flooded from students clogging the toilets, water would seep into the hallways... there is a completely separate group of administrators for the Latino\Latina students.... Whole days of classes in Spanish because learning the language here is pointless right? you'll never need to ask for directions or any question about anything. students watching porn on their phones...in class , but the teacher did nothing....

not only are Howard county schools not good enough to justify the property taxes homeowners pay , but I would argue they are the same as PG county.... or no better than. I have worked for every county in MD except for Frederick and Washington county Maryland.

Furthermore. School is going to be quite different next year , as all the janitors , teachers aids , office staff and all support workers leave the profession because of sub human wages. Its going to be nothing but teachers and principals left , So you'd better hop your school principal is willing to put on a hair net and shoulder up to the lunch ladies...

anonymous Howard county employee.

Good luck Yall!

Do you say that HoCo schools don't justify the taxes but then just talk about Oakland Mills. And even your account form OM is deceptive. Some of what you say is extremely concerning to me -- namely flooded bathrooms that don't get fixed and kids watching porn (or anything really) on their phones in class. But are these frequent occurrences or things that happened one time? That's stuff that absolutely happens at other well regarded public HSs in the area sometimes.

Classes occurring in Spanish... well it depends on the situation. OM has a large Spanish-speaking population. If occasionally non-reading/writing classes were conducted in Spanish, assuming all the students and the teacher are fluent, why would that be so terrible? I am not Latino but that wouldn't bother me unless it negatively impacted my child's education. I've met plenty of OM students and they all spoke English, so what you are saying is that OM has lots of bilingual students? That's considered a huge bonus in schools with majority white populations. Why would it be so terrible in a school with a majority-Latino population?

Not my experience in the OM community. What's described above exists in all high schools. Yes, there are more Hispanics, more AA, but that is diversity. The area is very close knit combined with rental transient areas. Every attempt to reorganize and redistrict has been met with huge backlash from the western side of the county, lots of wealth who don't want mixing of SES.


English is spoken, Hispanic population picks up English quickly. That language comment is crap.

My complaints about OM involve complaints I would have at any HOCO high school, as a teacher and colleague to many high school teachers. They need to get rid of phones and step up consequences for bad behavior . Middle school too.

Teachers are leaving the field, not necessarily because of one school. The profession will be going through a huge shift.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Each school needs to be diverse. By and large, HoCo is diverse (when you look at the whole) but the individual schools are NOT. Blacks are concentrated in a few schools. Asians are concentrated in a few schools. Latinos are concentrated in a few schools. Whites are in every school- some nominally. There is not a huge socioeconomic diversity within each school. Ask any teacher who has taught at multiple schools within the county. Even at OM the wealthy kids from Allview Estates are living in houses around the 500-600k mark, only as of recently. 500-600K house and associated income would be extremely poor in other schools.

I lived in areas that had only 3-4 HS with a larger population than that of Columbia. Columbia has 12? They are all little enclaves of their surroundings and that was purposeful.

There is no school in HoCo where living in a $500k-$600k house would be considered poor, you sound extremely out of touch. Probably 60% of the kids who go to Centennial HS live in a $500k-$600k house, with kids living in a $1M+ house at Centennial HS only making up a small fraction of the student body. Even at Marriotts Ridge HS, a very very large percentage of the students live in homes worth that much. I agree that the affluent students at Oakland Mills, Long Reach, and Hammond HS are on the lower end of upper-middle-class for the most part, as opposed to the wealthy students at River Hill, Centennial, Marriotts Ridge, Glenelg, Mt Hebron, Howard, Atholton, Reservoir, and even Wilde Lake HS, who can often live in $1M+ homes. To say that Oakland Mills' affluent students would be considered poor at those other schools is a huge stretch though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As these things go, Howard County has some schools with a great balance, Atholton, Howard, and Reservoir in particular. They are there if you want it. Most of the other high schools are at least 10% black, which isn’t bad for a school system that’s 25% black. Not a single high school is over 50% black.

Glenelg is the main outlier at 70% white. It will stay that way unless a bunch of other races decide they want to live on well water far from DC and Baltimore.

Howard County has a decent racial mix. It’s better than Montgomery County at least.

How do these schools have a great balance? Howard High School is the second whitest high school in Howard County, and it only has a 9% FARMS rate. Atholton is a predominately affluent high school with a FARMS rate of only 8%, and its >60% white and Asian. Reservoir was balanced, but its FARMS rate is continuing to decline every year, and its increasingly becoming another school segregated with mostly wealthy students as the new Maple Lawn kids are approaching high school and turning the demographics of the school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As these things go, Howard County has some schools with a great balance, Atholton, Howard, and Reservoir in particular. They are there if you want it. Most of the other high schools are at least 10% black, which isn’t bad for a school system that’s 25% black. Not a single high school is over 50% black.

Glenelg is the main outlier at 70% white. It will stay that way unless a bunch of other races decide they want to live on well water far from DC and Baltimore.

Howard County has a decent racial mix. It’s better than Montgomery County at least.

How do these schools have a great balance? Howard High School is the second whitest high school in Howard County, and it only has a 9% FARMS rate. Atholton is a predominately affluent high school with a FARMS rate of only 8%, and its >60% white and Asian. Reservoir was balanced, but its FARMS rate is continuing to decline every year, and its increasingly becoming another school segregated with mostly wealthy students as the new Maple Lawn kids are approaching high school and turning the demographics of the school.

Where are you looking? This is the demographic info for Howard High School on the county website says almost 20% FARMS, and the racial composition is pretty close to the overall demographics of the county.

[Anonymous]

Lack of black students. Any school system with few black students is going to be very good.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lack of black students. Any school system with few black students is going to be very good.

Wow, you seem really knowledgeable about Howard County.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lack of black students. Any school system with few black students is going to be very good.

Pretty racist, but also pretty wrong. You are unfamiliar with concepts of race, SES, demographics, education and Howard County.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Howard County and MoCO are both racially diverse on a county level. MoCo has more white and Hispanic/Latino kids compared to HoCo. HoCo has more Asian kids compared to MoCo.

However, MoCo is more racially segregated on a school by school level. MoCo has multiple high schools with barely any white kids. HoCo doesn't have a single high school with fewer than 18% white kids, despite having fewer white kids on a county level.

MoCo has more diversity in terms of SES as MoCO is about 35% FARMs and HoCo is about 23% FARMs. However, MoCo is more segregated in that the rich areas are much wealthier and the poor areas have higher FARMs concentrations.

And how many HoCo schools have less than 18% Blacks?
Also HCPS is 34% white while MCPS is 26% white. You're clueless

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lack of black students. Any school system with few black students is going to be very good.

Your answer above is both racist and ignorant. There are large numbers of AA students in Howard County schools. What the county lacks is a long history of redlining resulting in severe segregation in both the neighborhoods and schools. (If you don't know what redlining is, look it up before responding because you don't sound very knowledgeable about the subject.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lack of black students. Any school system with few black students is going to be very good.

The level of racism and ignorance that you have displayed here on DCUM is absolutely vile.

[Anonymous]

Actually Howard county has a lot of black people, you racist PP! It doesn’t have much Latinos though and Moco has tons. That’s the big demographic difference.

That and the ‘better’ (higher test score) schools tend to be in Western Hoco which is wealthier and mostly white and Asian kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Howard County and MoCO are both racially diverse on a county level. MoCo has more white and Hispanic/Latino kids compared to HoCo. HoCo has more Asian kids compared to MoCo.

However, MoCo is more racially segregated on a school by school level. MoCo has multiple high schools with barely any white kids. HoCo doesn't have a single high school with fewer than 18% white kids, despite having fewer white kids on a county level.

MoCo has more diversity in terms of SES as MoCO is about 35% FARMs and HoCo is about 23% FARMs. However, MoCo is more segregated in that the rich areas are much wealthier and the poor areas have higher FARMs concentrations.

From this statement, I would guess that you don't live in or know much about HCPSS.

The school board and the current school superintendent have striven hard to rebalance the schools economically and as a results, they have redistributed the balance of the races across the school district. They do it by balance the schools socioeconomically, but the result ends up also being a rebalance of the schools by race. Yes, the more affluent area schools do have lower numbers of URM, but not as much as would happen if they didn't redistrict polygons (neighborhood blocks) to balance.

If you look at the school zones for many of the schools, they have strange area coverage and often completely non-contiguous areas for the school zone, specifically for this purpose.

[Anonymous]

"How do these schools have a great balance? Howard High School is the second whitest high school in Howard County, and it only has a 9% FARMS rate. Atholton is a predominately affluent high school with a FARMS rate of only 8%, and its >60% white and Asian. Reservoir was balanced, but its FARMS rate is continuing to decline every year, and its increasingly becoming another school segregated with mostly wealthy students as the new Maple Lawn kids are approaching high school and turning the demographics of the school."

First of all stop equating black families with being poor. In every post you tend to correlate black Howard County residents with FARMS. You are further from the truth. Do you realize that there are lots of white FARMS here in Howard County? Do you realize that there are many wealthy and UMC black families that reside in Howard County?

I hate it when people falsify information on DCUM. You just assume that if you tell the bigger lie then folks will believe you. Please don't allow facts to get into your way.

Here is the profile of Howard High School. https://www.hcpss.org/f/schools/profiles/prof_hs_howard.pdf

My biracial children attend Howard High School. So, I know what I see with my own eyes at school events and from volunteering at the school. The percentage of white students are 41.4% at Howard High. White students are in fact the minority at Howard High and at many schools in Howard County. The school's FARM percentage is 14.2% not 9%. According to my data and source the FARMS percentage is increasing and the school will install a food pantry inside the school this fall. Trust me I am more in the know about the dealings of Howard High School and Howard County Public Schools than you.

Also, I find your obsession with race peculiar and your misconceptions problematic. What exactly are you trying to accomplish here on DCUM? Every post from you has been a trail of lies. I don't have the energy or patience today to dissect every lie that you have told, but I want to inform folks about your dishonesty.

I think you have a limited and a close-minded perspective of Howard County Public Schools. I am not saying that HCPSS is without issues and there is no room for improvement because there are always areas of improvement that need to be address. Perfection does not exist anywhere. I am trying to understand your rationalization and false information that you continue to profess.

By the way, what is your issue with Maple Lawn? I don't live there, but apparently Maple Lawn has become the new pinata for folks to beat down. I think it's a great and diverse community. It is zone to Reservoir High School which is predominately black the last time I check. The school profile is here. https://www.hcpss.org/f/schools/profiles/prof_hs_reservoir.pdf

I ask again what is your goal? Are you trying to discourage black families from relocating to Howard County with your rhetoric? Or are you trying to proclaim that Howard County is drowning with white racists? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you seeking an audience or validation?