Baltimore Sun article about Howard County rezoning

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

That's not quite true.

County funding and resources and curriculum standards for schools is uniform across the board. What made River Hill more desirable than Wilde Lake was market forces driven by the people themselves. The county didn't set up River Hill / Clarksville to become a high end district, it naturally evolved that way. The same for the Columbia districts themselves. So the county didn't make River Hill a prestigious high school any more it made Wilde Lake a less than desirable school (actually, Wilde Lake is perfectly fine). It was the individual actions of homeowners and people's own decisions that led to River Hill being River Hill today. What the county is doing is interfering with the individual decisions and market forces by abruptly distorting it.

If we want to accept your theory, we could also argue that there's a strong case to be made that the county acted in bad faith to the River Hill homeowners. A government does not exist in isolation of the people, it's supposed to represent the people but clearly the county is not representing the affected families and homeowners either.

There is NOTHING about land use that "naturally evolves."

As for bad faith - maybe the property owners of River Hill believed that they would never be rezoned. Maybe that was even officially the Howard County government position at one time, I don't know. But circumstances are subject to change. Rezoning, by itself, does not constitute bad faith. Not when it rezones people who don't own property, not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will gain value, and not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will lose value.

You don't have a right to socioeconomically-segregated public schools. You just don't.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

We don't need to move 7300 students to fix overcrowding. Move the minimum number of students to fix overcrowding. Do the big "equity fixing" in 2023 so some families don't have to keep switching.

This redistricting pushes a lot of students westward because that's where the capacity is. Opening a new school is going to pull some students back eastward because that's where the new high school is.

You think pulling families back and forth is good for the families? 3 major redistrictings in 5 years is too much.

Why not now? Do the big fix now, do a smaller rezoning just for the high school in 2023.

Because it's all going to change again in 2 years. There is no such thing as a small rezoning when you introduce a high school.

There is a negative impact each time you do a redistricting, and it takes time to see the positive benefits.

Reduce the negative impact of this reshuffling. Do a big one in 2023. Then give it time to settle.

Doing a big redistricting now is just unnecessary churning. 3 times in 5 years?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

We don't need to move 7300 students to fix overcrowding. Move the minimum number of students to fix overcrowding. Do the big "equity fixing" in 2023 so some families don't have to keep switching.

This redistricting pushes a lot of students westward because that's where the capacity is. Opening a new school is going to pull some students back eastward because that's where the new high school is.

You think pulling families back and forth is good for the families? 3 major redistrictings in 5 years is too much.

Why not now? Do the big fix now, do a smaller rezoning just for the high school in 2023.

Because it's all going to change again in 2 years. There is no such thing as a small rezoning when you introduce a high school.

There is a negative impact each time you do a redistricting, and it takes time to see the positive benefits.

Reduce the negative impact of this reshuffling. Do a big one in 2023. Then give it time to settle.

Doing a big redistricting now is just unnecessary churning. 3 times in 5 years?

Why isn't there? HCPSS has 12 high schools. This will be the 13th. Why would you have to do a county-wide rezoning for the system's 13th high school?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

That's not quite true.

County funding and resources and curriculum standards for schools is uniform across the board. What made River Hill more desirable than Wilde Lake was market forces driven by the people themselves. The county didn't set up River Hill / Clarksville to become a high end district, it naturally evolved that way. The same for the Columbia districts themselves. So the county didn't make River Hill a prestigious high school any more it made Wilde Lake a less than desirable school (actually, Wilde Lake is perfectly fine). It was the individual actions of homeowners and people's own decisions that led to River Hill being River Hill today. What the county is doing is interfering with the individual decisions and market forces by abruptly distorting it.

If we want to accept your theory, we could also argue that there's a strong case to be made that the county acted in bad faith to the River Hill homeowners. A government does not exist in isolation of the people, it's supposed to represent the people but clearly the county is not representing the affected families and homeowners either.

There is NOTHING about land use that "naturally evolves."

As for bad faith - maybe the property owners of River Hill believed that they would never be rezoned. Maybe that was even officially the Howard County government position at one time, I don't know. But circumstances are subject to change. Rezoning, by itself, does not constitute bad faith. Not when it rezones people who don't own property, not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will gain value, and not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will lose value.

You don't have a right to socioeconomically-segregated public schools. You just don't.

Your post is utterly rubbish. Land use naturally evolves through the individual actions of people, whether developers or buyers, over the years and in reaction to market forces. Population changes greatly affects the character of an area over the years and decades and quite often there's little a jurisdiction can do about it. Baltimore, for example, cannot rezone its way out of poverty. But zoning does help to play a role by laying the predictable frameworks for land use in a stable way (which is the point of zoning, it was actually introduced to prevent unexpected and unpredictable rapid changes affecting long term stability and property values, such as opening a factory in the middle of a residential area). This is why the county is guilty if we are to accept your definition of zoning reach because if it allowed a zoning and districting to exist for decades, which people used to make their decisions in good faith of what to buy and where to live and what to build. "good faith" may mean nothing to you but is actually a valid legal understanding. The county is suddenly changing the rules without advance warning, creating instability and badly affecting market conditions (which in Howard is driven heavily by schools). A government exists because people have faith and confidence in the said government. But when the government becomes arbitrary it creates market instability. The government does not exist to impose your views on other people.

The difficulty of imposing zoning on an unwilling population is neatly observed in the Baltimore Sun article by the person who commented that the River Hill families will most likely just sell and move to stay in the River Hill district.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

That's not quite true.

County funding and resources and curriculum standards for schools is uniform across the board. What made River Hill more desirable than Wilde Lake was market forces driven by the people themselves. The county didn't set up River Hill / Clarksville to become a high end district, it naturally evolved that way. The same for the Columbia districts themselves. So the county didn't make River Hill a prestigious high school any more it made Wilde Lake a less than desirable school (actually, Wilde Lake is perfectly fine). It was the individual actions of homeowners and people's own decisions that led to River Hill being River Hill today. What the county is doing is interfering with the individual decisions and market forces by abruptly distorting it.

If we want to accept your theory, we could also argue that there's a strong case to be made that the county acted in bad faith to the River Hill homeowners. A government does not exist in isolation of the people, it's supposed to represent the people but clearly the county is not representing the affected families and homeowners either.

There is NOTHING about land use that "naturally evolves."

As for bad faith - maybe the property owners of River Hill believed that they would never be rezoned. Maybe that was even officially the Howard County government position at one time, I don't know. But circumstances are subject to change. Rezoning, by itself, does not constitute bad faith. Not when it rezones people who don't own property, not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will gain value, and not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will lose value.

You don't have a right to socioeconomically-segregated public schools. You just don't.

You know, poor kids don't have a right to go to school with richer kids. They just don't.

I'm only saying this to show that the issue of trying to change school demographics is a complicated one because you can't argue for it from a "rights" perspective either way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

We don't need to move 7300 students to fix overcrowding. Move the minimum number of students to fix overcrowding. Do the big "equity fixing" in 2023 so some families don't have to keep switching.

This redistricting pushes a lot of students westward because that's where the capacity is. Opening a new school is going to pull some students back eastward because that's where the new high school is.

You think pulling families back and forth is good for the families? 3 major redistrictings in 5 years is too much.

Why not now? Do the big fix now, do a smaller rezoning just for the high school in 2023.

Because it's all going to change again in 2 years. There is no such thing as a small rezoning when you introduce a high school.

There is a negative impact each time you do a redistricting, and it takes time to see the positive benefits.

Reduce the negative impact of this reshuffling. Do a big one in 2023. Then give it time to settle.

Doing a big redistricting now is just unnecessary churning. 3 times in 5 years?

Why isn't there? HCPSS has 12 high schools. This will be the 13th. Why would you have to do a county-wide rezoning for the system's 13th high school?

Because if socioeconomic equity is a focus, the BOE will need to do some wrangling to ensure the FARMs concentration isn't too high in HS13. That's going to impact all the HS in central and eastern Howard county.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just can't with the posters who think believe that

1. the purpose of school boundaries is to maintain the property values of affluent property owners.
2. the purpose of school boundary changes is to punish "the professional classes" by making their kids go to the same public schools poor people's kids go to.

Talk about entitlement and victimhood.

Actually, we ARE entitled to what we earned. We worked for it. What's entitled is others thinking THEY are entitled to our hard-earned wealth. Can you tell me why we should be forced to give away what we worked for?

Nobody's taking your hard-earned wealth, and you're not giving anything away.

The money you put into your property is an investment, just like the money you put into the stock market. There's no guaranteed return on investment. It's a gamble. Sometimes you win (when you go to sell, the sales price is higher than the price you paid to buy), sometimes you break even (when you go to sell, the sales price is about the same as the price you paid to buy), sometimes you lose (when you go to sell, the sales price is lower than the price you paid to buy). If you can't tolerate that risk, then you shouldn't buy property. Rent, let your landlord take the risk, and put your money in a federally-insured bank account.

In this case, Government is deliberately shifting boundaries to meet socio-economic equity goals. This means punishing one class of people to benefit another. This is social engineering designed specifically to pick my pocket. That is most definitely deliberately taking something from me.

Government policies very frequently have socioeconomic goals. For example, if you live in an area where only single-family detached houses are allowed, that is a policy with socioeconomic goals - one might call it social engineering. Transportation policies that favor some modes of transportation over others (for example, driving over taking buses or walking) are also social engineering. If rezoning for socioeconomic equity is social engineering, then so were the zoning decisions that established and maintained the socioeconomic inequity.

But is the policy designed specifically to make you poorer? I seriously doubt it. I mean, maybe the Board of Education has been meeting secretly in Columbia's smoky back rooms, saying, "Ha ha! Let's do a bunch of stuff so that affluent people will lose money! Wheeeee!", but it seems unlikely. More likely, the policy is designed to balance capacity issues and make sure that the poor kids aren't all in these schools over there while the rich kids are in those schools over here.

Just admit you believe that money should be evenly distributed, unless you are a socialist elite like Obama, Sanders and other wealthy liberals who don’t practice what they preach it’s deliberate and spiteful

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Just admit you believe that money should be evenly distributed, unless you are a socialist elite like Obama, Sanders and other wealthy liberals who don’t practice what they preach it’s deliberate and spiteful

I find it helpful to distinguish between "a public school system shouldn't have separate schools for affluent families and low-income families" and "everybody should have the same amount of money."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

That's not quite true.

County funding and resources and curriculum standards for schools is uniform across the board. What made River Hill more desirable than Wilde Lake was market forces driven by the people themselves. The county didn't set up River Hill / Clarksville to become a high end district, it naturally evolved that way. The same for the Columbia districts themselves. So the county didn't make River Hill a prestigious high school any more it made Wilde Lake a less than desirable school (actually, Wilde Lake is perfectly fine). It was the individual actions of homeowners and people's own decisions that led to River Hill being River Hill today. What the county is doing is interfering with the individual decisions and market forces by abruptly distorting it.

If we want to accept your theory, we could also argue that there's a strong case to be made that the county acted in bad faith to the River Hill homeowners. A government does not exist in isolation of the people, it's supposed to represent the people but clearly the county is not representing the affected families and homeowners either.

There is NOTHING about land use that "naturally evolves."

As for bad faith - maybe the property owners of River Hill believed that they would never be rezoned. Maybe that was even officially the Howard County government position at one time, I don't know. But circumstances are subject to change. Rezoning, by itself, does not constitute bad faith. Not when it rezones people who don't own property, not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will gain value, and not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will lose value.

You don't have a right to socioeconomically-segregated public schools. You just don't.

You know, poor kids don't have a right to go to school with richer kids. They just don't.

I'm only saying this to show that the issue of trying to change school demographics is a complicated one because you can't argue for it from a "rights" perspective either way.

All kids - rich and poor - have a right to equal opportunity. And you don't have equal opportunity in segregated schools.

[Anonymous]

Because if socioeconomic equity is a focus, the BOE will need to do some wrangling to ensure the FARMs concentration isn't too high in HS13. That's going to impact all the HS in central and eastern Howard county.

I think that is a real concern. As I read the projections, it looks more like all of the current higher poverty high schools , plus HS 13, will remain high poverty, and Glen Elg, RH, MR, and others will continue with viritually no lower income students unless some bold changes are made. As others have said, it is all about development and the location of moderate to low income housing. Why not make some moves now?

Looking at the Superintendent's proposal, I think I see areas where they are trying to avoid moving families twice. For instance, Rockburn Township gets moved to Long Reach, wheras areas of Elkridge, which have previously been under discussion as being moved to Long Reach do not. Not only this does move promote diversity at Long Reach, but it allows the Rockburn students to settle in at Long Reach for the long term. Elkridge families stay where they are, for now, but in two years they will likely have to make the long treck down Route 1 to HS 13.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Your post is utterly rubbish. Land use naturally evolves through the individual actions of people, whether developers or buyers, over the years and in reaction to market forces. Population changes greatly affects the character of an area over the years and decades and quite often there's little a jurisdiction can do about it. Baltimore, for example, cannot rezone its way out of poverty. But zoning does help to play a role by laying the predictable frameworks for land use in a stable way (which is the point of zoning, it was actually introduced to prevent unexpected and unpredictable rapid changes affecting long term stability and property values, such as opening a factory in the middle of a residential area). This is why the county is guilty if we are to accept your definition of zoning reach because if it allowed a zoning and districting to exist for decades, which people used to make their decisions in good faith of what to buy and where to live and what to build. "good faith" may mean nothing to you but is actually a valid legal understanding. The county is suddenly changing the rules without advance warning, creating instability and badly affecting market conditions (which in Howard is driven heavily by schools). A government exists because people have faith and confidence in the said government. But when the government becomes arbitrary it creates market instability. The government does not exist to impose your views on other people.

The difficulty of imposing zoning on an unwilling population is neatly observed in the Baltimore Sun article by the person who commented that the River Hill families will most likely just sell and move to stay in the River Hill district.

No, it doesn't. Land use happens within a regulatory framework imposed by the government. As you say.

And no, zoning wasn't introduced for that reason. Zoning was introduced to keep undesirable land uses (industrial, commercial, apartments, poor people, black people) away from middle-class/affluent white people in single-family-detached homes.

I'm impressed, though, that you think it's "suddenly changing the rules without advance warning" for a duly elected school board to propose to change school boundaries.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

That's not quite true.

County funding and resources and curriculum standards for schools is uniform across the board. What made River Hill more desirable than Wilde Lake was market forces driven by the people themselves. The county didn't set up River Hill / Clarksville to become a high end district, it naturally evolved that way. The same for the Columbia districts themselves. So the county didn't make River Hill a prestigious high school any more it made Wilde Lake a less than desirable school (actually, Wilde Lake is perfectly fine). It was the individual actions of homeowners and people's own decisions that led to River Hill being River Hill today. What the county is doing is interfering with the individual decisions and market forces by abruptly distorting it.

If we want to accept your theory, we could also argue that there's a strong case to be made that the county acted in bad faith to the River Hill homeowners. A government does not exist in isolation of the people, it's supposed to represent the people but clearly the county is not representing the affected families and homeowners either.

There is NOTHING about land use that "naturally evolves."

As for bad faith - maybe the property owners of River Hill believed that they would never be rezoned. Maybe that was even officially the Howard County government position at one time, I don't know. But circumstances are subject to change. Rezoning, by itself, does not constitute bad faith. Not when it rezones people who don't own property, not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will gain value, and not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will lose value.

You don't have a right to socioeconomically-segregated public schools. You just don't.

You know, poor kids don't have a right to go to school with richer kids. They just don't.

I'm only saying this to show that the issue of trying to change school demographics is a complicated one because you can't argue for it from a "rights" perspective either way.

All kids - rich and poor - have a right to equal opportunity. And you don't have equal opportunity in segregated schools.

Kids self segregate in non-segregated schools anyway and the test scores remain the same. Rich kids aren't hanging out with the poor kids. This has nothing to do with color and everything to do with money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

That's not quite true.

County funding and resources and curriculum standards for schools is uniform across the board. What made River Hill more desirable than Wilde Lake was market forces driven by the people themselves. The county didn't set up River Hill / Clarksville to become a high end district, it naturally evolved that way. The same for the Columbia districts themselves. So the county didn't make River Hill a prestigious high school any more it made Wilde Lake a less than desirable school (actually, Wilde Lake is perfectly fine). It was the individual actions of homeowners and people's own decisions that led to River Hill being River Hill today. What the county is doing is interfering with the individual decisions and market forces by abruptly distorting it.

If we want to accept your theory, we could also argue that there's a strong case to be made that the county acted in bad faith to the River Hill homeowners. A government does not exist in isolation of the people, it's supposed to represent the people but clearly the county is not representing the affected families and homeowners either.

There is NOTHING about land use that "naturally evolves."

As for bad faith - maybe the property owners of River Hill believed that they would never be rezoned. Maybe that was even officially the Howard County government position at one time, I don't know. But circumstances are subject to change. Rezoning, by itself, does not constitute bad faith. Not when it rezones people who don't own property, not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will gain value, and not when it rezones people who believe that their properties will lose value.

You don't have a right to socioeconomically-segregated public schools. You just don't.

You know, poor kids don't have a right to go to school with richer kids. They just don't.

I'm only saying this to show that the issue of trying to change school demographics is a complicated one because you can't argue for it from a "rights" perspective either way.

All kids - rich and poor - have a right to equal opportunity. And you don't have equal opportunity in segregated schools.

Kids self segregate in non-segregated schools anyway and the test scores remain the same. Rich kids aren't hanging out with the poor kids. This has nothing to do with color and everything to do with money.

That's what the opponents of desegregation keep telling themselves. But it doesn't make it true.

[Anonymous]

I don't know about Howard but it is 100% true that kids segregate in diverse schools with Montgomery County. The PBES/TP/Blair cluster is terrible in this regard. The white families seem to only be willing to live there if they keep a guarantee of being away from the rest of the student body.

Rezoning has nothing to do with building an integrated diverse community. Rezoning is an attempt to balance financial equity and keep areas with lower performing schools from falling further behind. School administrators like it because it helps slow down schools falling into the bottom level rankings of 4 and below which people avoid like the plague and become an eyesore of why your school is failing. Move enough rich kids in and that 4 school becomes a 5. Administrators can pat themselves on the back for raising the performance of their school even though the poor kids are failing at the same rate as before.

Like it or not, people choose their housing based on the scores of the schools. If you can keep the scores up, you can stabilize property values. What is happening to rezoning is a decision that what the wealthy areas have to lose is less than what the poor areas would lose if they continue to go down.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

A very easy solution is to move any new developments to the under crowded schools. If they want to continue building more and more without new schools, then just send the new developments to the districts with the lowest capacity. If they are already moving kids all over, just move the kids that don't have roots yet.

So much for the "keep communities together" and "no long bus trips" arguments.

It is going to be done anyway. It already has in MCPS. Boundaries are sprinkles all over. Not one big circle. Many kids, even ES kids have long bus routes. I know Fallsgrove going to Ritchie Park does. Rio area in Gaithersburg going to Fallsmead does. And it will be worse once this boundary assessment is done.

And tons of kids are already bused for better opportunities in Magnet and IB. None of them seem to give a crap abut being together. The communities that want to stay together are the ones that grew up together. New communities are brand new. It is less traumatic to move them a bit further than chopping up existing neighborhoods.