First hearing on districtwide boundary study is tonight

[Anonymous]

I hope the consultant considers the private school population in the study. What happens when a whole bunch of private school kids, who won’t go to their current school, get rezoned for something that is now acceptable to their parents? There are a ton of private schools down county and that could throw a wrench in the numbers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just because redrawing boundaries won't raise scores doesn't mean the boundaries don't need to be redrawn. Clearly, some of these schools are severely overcrowded, and boundaries need to be redrawn.

Just because redrawing those boundaries such that it evens out the FARMs a bit won't raise test scores, it doesn't mean that evening out FARMs is a bad idea.

There are four factors in drawing boundaries, and unfortunately, they can't all have equal weight. It just doesn't work. Something's gotta give.

Totally agree! Exactly! Also for the record Wootton cluster parent here.... all W parents are not against this study!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

OP's point seems to be that some people who are pro-boundary changes seem to present Einstein as a school that needs additional higher income students. As if somehow adding more higher income students will make Einstein 'better'. Even though, the families who are already there, think Einstein is fine just the way it is.

We're not at Einstein, but another lower income school, and many families in our cluster feel the same way.

Sigh I guess we are going to discuss Einstein yet again. I have seen numerous posts from someone about how you should buy in the Einstein cluster because if it gets rezoned to Woodward or somewhere even better you will get a windfall. It certainly seems like more than a few people are hoping to get zoned out of Einstein. This makes absolutely no sense though as why would MCPS move UMC kids out of Einstein and into a higher performing school filled with other UMC kids? If anyone gets moved out of Einstein it will be the low performing kids.

As for more UMC coming into Einstein, where are these kids going to come from? Do you really think that people who bought into Whitman or BCC will send their kids to Einstein? Those are the wealthiest areas in the entire county and you can't swing a cat in Bethesda or Silver Spring without hitting a private school.

You might succeed in shipping some poor students out of Einstein but this won't be enough to raise Einstein's scores without backfilling them with wealthy students. You will still have a low performing school, its just less crowded. You may succeed in dropping the scores of BCC or Whitman but it won't be by that much. Even if you could move enough low income kids to force the scores to drop, they would still be higher than Einstein. The housing prices in Whitman and BCC would soften making those houses more affordable and fewer people would be pushed into buying in the Einstein cluster so you just made Einstein poorer again.

This is all behavioral economics. Things don't work out they way you personally wish they will work out. They work out based on people's economic behaviors. Someone needs to do some modeling and factor in real economic behaviors.

I’m the PP and I actually agree with most of what you are saying!

MCPS doesn’t always do things that make sense.

[Anonymous]

Just because redrawing those boundaries such that it evens out the FARMs a bit won't raise test scores, it doesn't mean that evening out FARMs is a bad idea.

You something more than evening out is not a bad idea to divide and disrupt communities. No one -poor or wealthy- wants to be the island that gets chosen for forced bussing. Whether the issue is logistics, time, transportation, neighborhood continuity, not wanting to go to a lower performing school or whatever it is never popular for the area that is affected. There has to be a very compelling reason to inflict harm on a community.

I don't disagree with you that there may be other reasons to engage in forced bussing but letting MCPS hide poor performance, raising money for MCCPTA, or spreading out disruptive kids who should be sent to a special schools with much higher security or interventions instead of mainstream classrooms are just not compelling reasons.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Rezoning that occurs based on overcrowding and geography usually has less of impact on housing values because its clear to people when buying that they are on the edge of an area likely to be rezoned. The discount is built into the housing market. Areas that have better planning and financial management also forecast ahead and new developments are sold with clear future boundaries disclosed. Its frankly bizarre to me here that new developments pop up with no hard plan as to where kids will go and then it ends up being a crap shoot which one will get rezoned to the lower school.

Property values is a tangible thing to home owners and it should be to the county as well. The type of redistricting that MCPS is pursuing will destabilize the real estate market and at a time when MOCO is not doing very well. Someone in the county needs to be forecasting what this will cost the county in the long run and how they will make up the shortfall.

The other bizarre thing about all this is that the advocates seem to be white people living in lower performing schools and AA MCPS administrators and BOE members. The opposition is white people in high performing schools and asians. The hispanics who make up the largest demographic group in the system are no where to be seen or heard in any of these discussions. If you look at the county demographics, the hispanic residents are overwhelming younger and have more kids while the majority of white and AA residents are aging out of child bearing years so MCPS in the next 5-10 years is likely to reach 60% hispanic. Someone should ask the hispanic community what they want since they will be the primary population in the future.

Very interesting observation about the Hispanic representation at the meetings. I realize that the main issue is language barrier (which is also the issue in the classroom I am sure), however, surely there are fluent Hispanic families who would want to make a statement. Perhaps they don't care, or don't even realize what's happening.

Um. Yes, there are plenty of Hispanic/Latino families who speak English. Including the ones whose native language is English.

The Hispanic families I was referring to are the ones who are generally first generation, poor, in poorly performing schools with high FARMS. Not the ones who live down the street from me who drive the Mercedes convertible. Please, give me a break.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I hope the consultant considers the private school population in the study. What happens when a whole bunch of private school kids, who won’t go to their current school, get rezoned for something that is now acceptable to their parents? There are a ton of private schools down county and that could throw a wrench in the numbers.

I believe this was an argument that Josh was star used when the parents in the Long Branch neighborhood wanted to decouple New Hampshire estates from Oak View. His argumentwas it would be too expensive to retrofit the school to be a k-25 school and that they would end up attracting a lot more families that were either in privates or co-signing somewhere else so the school would become too crowded

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I hope the consultant considers the private school population in the study. What happens when a whole bunch of private school kids, who won’t go to their current school, get rezoned for something that is now acceptable to their parents? There are a ton of private schools down county and that could throw a wrench in the numbers.

I would assume there are also families that thought their kids were going to a school they liked and will now opt for private..

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I hope the consultant considers the private school population in the study. What happens when a whole bunch of private school kids, who won’t go to their current school, get rezoned for something that is now acceptable to their parents? There are a ton of private schools down county and that could throw a wrench in the numbers.

I struggle to think of a Silver Spring neighborhood where this could possibly be an issue. The wealthiest Silver Spring neighborhoods — the likeliest to have lots of private school kids — are Woodside and Woodmoor, neither of which would be rezoned into rich western schools. The closest schools to the rich western schools are Wheaton and Einstein, neither of which neighborhood has many private school students. I mean a handful of kids go to Holy Redeemer and then SJC and a few kids have parents who teach at private schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Just because redrawing those boundaries such that it evens out the FARMs a bit won't raise test scores, it doesn't mean that evening out FARMs is a bad idea.

You something more than evening out is not a bad idea to divide and disrupt communities. No one -poor or wealthy- wants to be the island that gets chosen for forced bussing. Whether the issue is logistics, time, transportation, neighborhood continuity, not wanting to go to a lower performing school or whatever it is never popular for the area that is affected. There has to be a very compelling reason to inflict harm on a community.

I don't disagree with you that there may be other reasons to engage in forced bussing but letting MCPS hide poor performance, raising money for MCCPTA, or spreading out disruptive kids who should be sent to a special schools with much higher security or interventions instead of mainstream classrooms are just not compelling reasons.

But why assume that the reason for the boundary change is just to mask poor performance or spreading out disruptive kids?

I don't see it that way. The way I see it, they are trying to balance FARMs as much as they can within the constraints of the other three factors.

I do agree, though, that islands are terrible, and we have that issue already, and certainly they should not continue drawing such boundaries.

But, in and of itself, boundary changes to even out capacity AND FARMS is the right thing for MCPS to do.

[Anonymous]

UMC DCC families need to brace up for some of their neighborhoods to get rezoned into Kennedy. How else would you get more UMC kids into Kennedy? You aren't going to bus kids from Whitman or Churchill all the way up there past all the other DCC schools.

How about the NEC? Where are the UMC kids going to come from when the poorest schools are in the eastern most corner.

The geography and concentration of poverty in the eastern areas makes this endeavor next to impossible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Just because redrawing those boundaries such that it evens out the FARMs a bit won't raise test scores, it doesn't mean that evening out FARMs is a bad idea.

You something more than evening out is not a bad idea to divide and disrupt communities. No one -poor or wealthy- wants to be the island that gets chosen for forced bussing. Whether the issue is logistics, time, transportation, neighborhood continuity, not wanting to go to a lower performing school or whatever it is never popular for the area that is affected. There has to be a very compelling reason to inflict harm on a community.

I don't disagree with you that there may be other reasons to engage in forced bussing but letting MCPS hide poor performance, raising money for MCCPTA, or spreading out disruptive kids who should be sent to a special schools with much higher security or interventions instead of mainstream classrooms are just not compelling reasons.

Which communities are being divided and disrupted? I'm going to say that 270 is a bigger barrier to community in Clarksburg than school assignments. And Gibbs already is in Germantown. Is all of Bethesda a community? Is Bethesda "divided and disrupted" by being split among three high school clusters?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:UMC DCC families need to brace up for some of their neighborhoods to get rezoned into Kennedy. How else would you get more UMC kids into Kennedy? You aren't going to bus kids from Whitman or Churchill all the way up there past all the other DCC schools.

How about the NEC? Where are the UMC kids going to come from when the poorest schools are in the eastern most corner.

The geography and concentration of poverty in the eastern areas makes this endeavor next to impossible.

Indeed, and the way they address that is by putting in magnet programs there, like the IB. There are four new ones, all concentrated in the eastern part, two right next to each other. But who knows how effective it will be.

John F. Kennedy HS
Springbrook HS
Watkins Mill HS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:UMC DCC families need to brace up for some of their neighborhoods to get rezoned into Kennedy. How else would you get more UMC kids into Kennedy? You aren't going to bus kids from Whitman or Churchill all the way up there past all the other DCC schools.

How about the NEC? Where are the UMC kids going to come from when the poorest schools are in the eastern most corner.

The geography and concentration of poverty in the eastern areas makes this endeavor next to impossible.

Olney. Wasn't Sherwood originally supposed to be part of the NEC?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:UMC DCC families need to brace up for some of their neighborhoods to get rezoned into Kennedy. How else would you get more UMC kids into Kennedy? You aren't going to bus kids from Whitman or Churchill all the way up there past all the other DCC schools.

How about the NEC? Where are the UMC kids going to come from when the poorest schools are in the eastern most corner.

The geography and concentration of poverty in the eastern areas makes this endeavor next to impossible.

Indeed, and the way they address that is by putting in magnet programs there, like the IB. There are four new ones, all concentrated in the eastern part, two right next to each other. But who knows how effective it will be.

John F. Kennedy HS
Springbrook HS
Watkins Mill HS

Watkins Mill HS is not in the east county.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
UMC DCC families need to brace up for some of their neighborhoods to get rezoned into Kennedy. How else would you get more UMC kids into Kennedy? You aren't going to bus kids from Whitman or Churchill all the way up there past all the other DCC schools.

How about the NEC? Where are the UMC kids going to come from when the poorest schools are in the eastern most corner.

The geography and concentration of poverty in the eastern areas makes this endeavor next to impossible.


Olney. Wasn't Sherwood originally supposed to be part of the NEC?

I thought Olney was way off somewhere in the middle and not close to the north eastern schools in the NEC.