s/o Why are parents around here so worried about kids who receive free lunch?

[Anonymous]

Many posts on here seem to refer to parents who have moved or sent their children to private school because their home school had too many "FARMS" kids. Can someone explain this disadvantage to me, with statistics or something? Mostly I have heard comments such as "everybody knows" that these children cause more trouble, will affect my child's education, etc. If your own child already has an advantaged home environment, how does it affect them to have children in their classes who don't?

I haven't been on this board long enough to know exactly what a troll is but I'm not one so hold your fire. I'm just a parent starting out in the public schools.

[Anonymous]

Poorer people bring down property values and bring crime. Poor people also are more likely to not have time to discipline their kids, have drug or alcohol problems etc...

[Anonymous]

People (like pp) stereotype. Test scores tend to be lower but that is not (imo) a sign of poor teaching. I think as long as your child can feel safe at school, the environment at home and emphasis parents place on learning is key. I have nieces at a posh private school and have just as much concern about their social environment as I would if they were in a lower soci-economic area

[Anonymous]

If you actually read any of those threads, you would find that several posters took the time to provide link to studies that showed over all that schools with large concentrations of low income children were not good learning environments and that there were many factors involved for why not. I think one of the most interseting was about Kansas City schools I believe where the schools had a blank check to make improvements and millions of dollars later it had no true effects for the students in terms of gains in test scores or learning.

[Anonymous]

I think it's important to keep FARMS rates in perspective. I agree that schools with high rates (over 50%) can have more than their share of issues. But people are freaking out when the FARMS rate foes from 19% to 22%. That's just silly.

[Anonymous]

Teachers are required to spend their time/efforts trying to bring up the lower achieving students in their class. So if your well fed, read to, learned his letters and numbers in preschool kid is in kindergarten with a class full of kids whose parents weren't able to send them to preschool or a daycare with a curriculum, or didn't read to their kids, etc., your kid will be bored while the teacher is going over concepts they already know.

[Anonymous]

Let's be clear about the income guidelines here. According to the MCPS website, a family of 4 qualifies for FARMS if their income is below $41,000 per year. As a comparison, the median family income in the United States according to Wikipedia is $45,000 per year. So the children getting FARMS in this area are not necessarily abjectly poor.

[Anonymous]

Also think about it if schools are spending resources on feeding the children it takes money away from resouces towards teaching children.

taking from article

There are a variety of explanations for why schools’ test scores are correlated with F/R meal percentage:
?More affluent families have more free time to support their kids in school
?Income is correlated with education, so higher income parents tend to have higher educations and tend to be more supportive of their children’s educations
?Income is correlated with education, so higher income parents tend to prioritize education higher for the children
?Less affluent parents are more likely to work two jobs or otherwise be less available to help their children with homework, volunteer in their classrooms, and so on.
?Income is also correlated with age, so parents in more affluent schools are likely to be older, on average, than parents in less affluent schools, which gives them a better ability to support their children academically
?Children in more affluent schools have a peer group more supportive of education in general, which helps pull up test scores for all students in that peer group
?More affluent schools have higher levels of financial support from their PTAs for support services like classroom aids, extra computers, and so on


http://www.bellevueschools.net/income-and-test-scores-in-the-bellevue-schools/

[Anonymous]

Let's be clear about the income guidelines here. According to the MCPS website, a family of 4 qualifies for FARMS if their income is below $41,000 per year. As a comparison, the median family income in the United States according to Wikipedia is $45,000 per year. So the children getting FARMS in this area are not necessarily abjectly poor.

Nobody here cares what the national median income is, because we don't live in West Texas, Utah or Ellsworth, Maine. We care about what it costs to live .... here. Where we actually live. Where we have to pay rent, buy gas, insure a car, buy food or see a doctor.

The median family income in MONTGOMERY COUNTY is ~$96,000. So, yeah, a family of four making less than half of that is poor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it's important to keep FARMS rates in perspective. I agree that schools with high rates (over 50%) can have more than their share of issues. But people are freaking out when the FARMS rate foes from 19% to 22%. That's just silly.

3% is signifigant and cause for concern. Sometimes it is a result of illegals in an overboarded house sending their kids to school.

[Anonymous]

I think the debate on this is incredibly charged, and it's unfortunate. You can't avoid the broad correllation between test scores as a measure of school quality and income levels -- and by extension, property values. Having had a child in elementary school for a couple of years now, I understand why a little bit better now - the wealthier families at our school are the ones who provide the bulk of the support to the school in terms of both funds and volunteering. They have the resources ($, time and energy) to invest in their kids in other ways that help raise the overall academic level, whether through extracurricular activities or tutoring or simply ensuring that their kids do their homework. I'm not trying to say that less wealthy families don't ever do these things, or don't care as much about their kids, but simply that they often have other demands on their resources and other constraints. Fwiw, I think of myself as somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, although by any rational standard we are insanely wealthy ourselves (just much less so than most of the families at our child's school) -- my child's classmates from the lawyer/lobbyist families families always seem better prepared and more engaged in the school than we do.

I'm sure there are other issues as well - particularly in this area, higher numbers of low-income students tends to be associated with higher numbers of students whose first language is not English. That can pose challenges in the classroom, too.

So I don't revile FARMs kids in any way; some of my child's best friends since starting school may or may not have qualified, I think at least, and they are wonderful kids who are smart and better behaved than my own. But I also appreciate why the idea of creeping increases in the low-income population of a school may worry some parents, because they (like me) may have reason to associate a school's quality with overall income levels of the families it serves. I also think it is generally unfortunate for all concerned when schools that are predominantly white and wealthy become more so.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Let's be clear about the income guidelines here. According to the MCPS website, a family of 4 qualifies for FARMS if their income is below $41,000 per year. As a comparison, the median family income in the United States according to Wikipedia is $45,000 per year. So the children getting FARMS in this area are not necessarily abjectly poor.

uh . . . You know cost of living changes depending upon the area.

Could YOU live on $41K with two children in Mo Co, for example?

I'm amazed at how stupid some people can be.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's important to keep FARMS rates in perspective. I agree that schools with high rates (over 50%) can have more than their share of issues. But people are freaking out when the FARMS rate foes from 19% to 22%. That's just silly.

3% is signifigant and cause for concern. Sometimes it is a result of illegals in an overboarded house sending their kids to school.

Okayyy, and sometimes it's the result of apartment complexes within boundary, so more rentals and people who make less money. R U freakin' Kiddin' me? 3% could be the Gucci-wearing neighbors next door that lost both their jobs and have a high mortgage and aren't telling anyone. 3% could be anything.

Honestly, I don't get the knee-jerk reaction to people who have children who need assistance.

[Anonymous]

Really, you don't? Because we now have decades of empirical research that demonstrates that poor kids do worse in school, have more behavioral problems as a group and less involved parents.

Nobody has a knee-jerk reaction to one such poor child. A school comprised of 50% or more? Different experience in the classroom. I'm sorry that's painful to hear.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's important to keep FARMS rates in perspective. I agree that schools with high rates (over 50%) can have more than their share of issues. But people are freaking out when the FARMS rate foes from 19% to 22%. That's just silly.

3% is signifigant and cause for concern. Sometimes it is a result of illegals in an overboarded house sending their kids to school.

Okayyy, and sometimes it's the result of apartment complexes within boundary, so more rentals and people who make less money. R U freakin' Kiddin' me? 3% could be the Gucci-wearing neighbors next door that lost both their jobs and have a high mortgage and aren't telling anyone. 3% could be anything.

Honestly, I don't get the knee-jerk reaction to people who have children who need assistance.

If you aren't part of the solution you are part of the problem.