MCPS to end areawide Blair Magnet and countywide Richard Montgomery's IB program

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I can imagine a scenario where a rigorous SMCS program on the level of Blair's evolves at Wooton. Blair's SMCS will become honors-for-all, and eventually fall from there. Blair's magnet was started to bring excellence to the lowest performing high school in the county.

Taylor's plan is problematic for Blair.

SMCS in either Churchill or Wootton will rise. This regional thing will bring down Blair. It's a shame to lose its fame.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they were smart, they would have created these 6 regional programs (9-12 grades), and have the current Blair/Poolsville only for 10-12 grades (remove 9th).
At the end of the 9th grade, select the top students from the 6 regionals to send them to 10-12 grades at Blair/Poolsville. That would have been smart and competitive

Right, because kids and families want to move schools and make friends twice.

It is absolutely funny to see people unfamiliar with the current magnet programs having opinions.

If you have or had a kid at Blair magnet you will know that kids go there not for friendship and playing. It is all competition, all academics. Most of them have real internship every single summer. Interships at NASA, UMD, Johns Hopkins where their parents drive them 5 days per week.
These programs are serious, and competition is rough. You will see students crying for getting a B that "ruins" their Ivy League chances. You see Robotics kids meeting almost every day after school and in summer.

This is not the normal advanced program you might think about. It is another level that cannot be clone 6 times.

What benefit does NASA get from having a 14-year old work with them for a summer? Even a prodigy genius one? These “internships” honestly sound like fake charities created by parents for Ivy applications.

Another outsider having no idea about what these kids do but having strong opinions. LOL
One of the NASA internships is about robotics. 50 kids from entire US.
If you have the curiosity to check Blair's and Poolsville's robotics teams you will understand that this is not charity. They build fully functional robots in 2 months to compete in First Robotics events. This is serious stuff with high budgets (~40k per year) and a lot at effort all year round. Last 2 years, Blair's team qualified to the Worlds Championship in Texas. Many of these kids get into the famous CMU or MIT Engineering programs and end up building robots for NASA later in life.
Get your facts right before writing non sense here.

Are there ways to donate to the magnets to support them further once MCPS begins degrading them through the regional program module?

At Blair, there is a Blair Magnet Foundation that sponsors the Robotics team and other Blair students initiatives. Search them up. Not sure about the rest but I assume they also have non profit org supporting them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can imagine a scenario where a rigorous SMCS program on the level of Blair's evolves at Wooton. Blair's SMCS will become honors-for-all, and eventually fall from there. Blair's magnet was started to bring excellence to the lowest performing high school in the county.

Taylor's plan is problematic for Blair.

SMCS in either Churchill or Wootton will rise. This regional thing will bring down Blair. It's a shame to lose its fame.

It is destined for Rockville, just as the IB will stay at RM and be complemented with Humanities & Language. Non-criteria-based programming, like Healthcare, and maybe a mix of criteria-based and non-criteria-based Arts will be installed at Churchill & Wooton. Leadership/Public Service/Education will be a wild card. Otherwise, the benefits sought would tend not to accrue to the entirety of the region.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they were smart, they would have created these 6 regional programs (9-12 grades), and have the current Blair/Poolsville only for 10-12 grades (remove 9th).
At the end of the 9th grade, select the top students from the 6 regionals to send them to 10-12 grades at Blair/Poolsville. That would have been smart and competitive

Right, because kids and families want to move schools and make friends twice.

It is absolutely funny to see people unfamiliar with the current magnet programs having opinions.

If you have or had a kid at Blair magnet you will know that kids go there not for friendship and playing. It is all competition, all academics. Most of them have real internship every single summer. Interships at NASA, UMD, Johns Hopkins where their parents drive them 5 days per week.
These programs are serious, and competition is rough. You will see students crying for getting a B that "ruins" their Ivy League chances. You see Robotics kids meeting almost every day after school and in summer.

This is not the normal advanced program you might think about. It is another level that cannot be clone 6 times.

What benefit does NASA get from having a 14-year old work with them for a summer? Even a prodigy genius one? These “internships” honestly sound like fake charities created by parents for Ivy applications.

Another outsider having no idea about what these kids do but having strong opinions. LOL
One of the NASA internships is about robotics. 50 kids from entire US.
If you have the curiosity to check Blair's and Poolsville's robotics teams you will understand that this is not charity. They build fully functional robots in 2 months to compete in First Robotics events. This is serious stuff with high budgets (~40k per year) and a lot at effort all year round. Last 2 years, Blair's team qualified to the Worlds Championship in Texas. Many of these kids get into the famous CMU or MIT Engineering programs and end up building robots for NASA later in life.
Get your facts right before writing non sense here.

Are there ways to donate to the magnets to support them further once MCPS begins degrading them through the regional program module?

At Blair, there is a Blair Magnet Foundation that sponsors the Robotics team and other Blair students initiatives. Search them up. Not sure about the rest but I assume they also have non profit org supporting them.

Donating won't help. The students (with their parents behind them) and teachers make the program. The students' parents don't need your money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can imagine a scenario where a rigorous SMCS program on the level of Blair's evolves at Wooton. Blair's SMCS will become honors-for-all, and eventually fall from there. Blair's magnet was started to bring excellence to the lowest performing high school in the county.

Taylor's plan is problematic for Blair.

SMCS in either Churchill or Wootton will rise. This regional thing will bring down Blair. It's a shame to lose its fame.

Why it is a shame? It's a shame the Blair was riding on SMCS's reputation instead of earning its own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Those of you with young smart kids, you are screwed. You don’t know it now but by the time your kids’ are ready for HS, you will see.

People with young smart kids have had virtually no magnet access for them based on the current flawed MCPS approach of only providing magnet spots to a tiny number of kids countywide. If others are anything like me, we are freaking thrilled at the idea that MCPS might be changing this approach to provide more slots for more kids, and hoping it will lead to the same at the middle and elementary school level as well. More than 1-2% of the kids in this county deserve advanced programming.

The top 1-2% deserve their own program. The rest of the smart kids have access to AP or IB already.

As someone who was a top 1% kid in a small school system whose classes were with kids from various parts of the top 25%, with none of the fantastic classes or teachers MCPS's magnet programs have... these kids will do just fine being forced to take classes with top 5% kids rather than top 2% kids and no longer being able to take marine biology or plate tectonics.

Sorry if I think our public system should aspire to more than “just fine.” We are falling apart.

Do you realize how you sound? You really think that keeping your kids away from the 95th percentile riff-raff and making sure they have 15 super-specialized science classes to choose from (rather than 6 or 8 or however many the regional ones would have) is an intolerable tragedy worth denying access to the magnet experience to hundreds more kids a year?

Actually my kid is not cut out for the magnets. But as a society we need to give the most able kids the best education so they can be our scientists and engineers and doctors. It is amazing to me that people don’t get this.

For this to be a justification for opposing these changes:

1) it has to be true that these scientists and engineers and doctors are only in the top 1-2%, and that leaving out kids in the few percent below that is fine because they don't have the capability to contribute to society in those ways;
2) it has to be true that an MCPS admission process can accurately identify those top 1-2% of kids (including those who don't have the highest test scores because they haven't been able to access magnet classes in elementary or middle school and haven't gotten parental supplementation, and/or are from lower-income backgrounds and schools)
3) it has to be true that being in class with 95th-98th percentile kids will hurt the chances of those top percentile kids to succeed.

Are you confident enough about those things that you're willing to sell out the other kids to keep Blair a walled garden for a tiny number of kids?

Actually, MCPS leadership could have kept the countywide programs (including Down/UpCounty like Blair SMCS), while also creating regional magnet programs too. Too bad they are making it an "either/or."

Agree with other poster that Blair SMCS and Blair STEM will not be the same. So incredibly astonished and saddened at either the failure to comprehend or worse the deliberate indifference and hostility by the MCPS leadership to these programs. When all else has been sinking, these have been the crown jewels of MCPS. Does Central Office know only destruction, not how to build and improve things?

I don't know the details but it sounds like they tried this with RMIB/regional IBs and it failed? If you want to argue for this approach for SMCS magnets you need to figure out how to make the case of how it will work there when it didn't for IB.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they were smart, they would have created these 6 regional programs (9-12 grades), and have the current Blair/Poolsville only for 10-12 grades (remove 9th).
At the end of the 9th grade, select the top students from the 6 regionals to send them to 10-12 grades at Blair/Poolsville. That would have been smart and competitive

Right, because kids and families want to move schools and make friends twice.

It is absolutely funny to see people unfamiliar with the current magnet programs having opinions.

If you have or had a kid at Blair magnet you will know that kids go there not for friendship and playing. It is all competition, all academics. Most of them have real internship every single summer. Interships at NASA, UMD, Johns Hopkins where their parents drive them 5 days per week.
These programs are serious, and competition is rough. You will see students crying for getting a B that "ruins" their Ivy League chances. You see Robotics kids meeting almost every day after school and in summer.

This is not the normal advanced program you might think about. It is another level that cannot be clone 6 times.

What benefit does NASA get from having a 14-year old work with them for a summer? Even a prodigy genius one? These “internships” honestly sound like fake charities created by parents for Ivy applications.

Another outsider having no idea about what these kids do but having strong opinions. LOL
One of the NASA internships is about robotics. 50 kids from entire US.
If you have the curiosity to check Blair's and Poolsville's robotics teams you will understand that this is not charity. They build fully functional robots in 2 months to compete in First Robotics events. This is serious stuff with high budgets (~40k per year) and a lot at effort all year round. Last 2 years, Blair's team qualified to the Worlds Championship in Texas. Many of these kids get into the famous CMU or MIT Engineering programs and end up building robots for NASA later in life.
Get your facts right before writing non sense here.

That "World championship" is for everyone with enough money to fund an expensive hobby.

The famous CMU and MIT (and BYU, btw) Engineering programs that educated people who built robots for NASA didn't intern at NASA at 14.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they were smart, they would have created these 6 regional programs (9-12 grades), and have the current Blair/Poolsville only for 10-12 grades (remove 9th).
At the end of the 9th grade, select the top students from the 6 regionals to send them to 10-12 grades at Blair/Poolsville. That would have been smart and competitive

Right, because kids and families want to move schools and make friends twice.

It is absolutely funny to see people unfamiliar with the current magnet programs having opinions.

If you have or had a kid at Blair magnet you will know that kids go there not for friendship and playing. It is all competition, all academics. Most of them have real internship every single summer. Interships at NASA, UMD, Johns Hopkins where their parents drive them 5 days per week.
These programs are serious, and competition is rough. You will see students crying for getting a B that "ruins" their Ivy League chances. You see Robotics kids meeting almost every day after school and in summer.

This is not the normal advanced program you might think about. It is another level that cannot be clone 6 times.

My kids and their friends at Blair are enjoying the friendships and playing. I'm sorry you psychology destroyed your child, or you are making up sour grapes over the smarter kids who can have fun while being smart.
They have a lot of fun on the bus rides to national championships too 🏆

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Those of you with young smart kids, you are screwed. You don’t know it now but by the time your kids’ are ready for HS, you will see.

People with young smart kids have had virtually no magnet access for them based on the current flawed MCPS approach of only providing magnet spots to a tiny number of kids countywide. If others are anything like me, we are freaking thrilled at the idea that MCPS might be changing this approach to provide more slots for more kids, and hoping it will lead to the same at the middle and elementary school level as well. More than 1-2% of the kids in this county deserve advanced programming.

The top 1-2% deserve their own program. The rest of the smart kids have access to AP or IB already.

As someone who was a top 1% kid in a small school system whose classes were with kids from various parts of the top 25%, with none of the fantastic classes or teachers MCPS's magnet programs have... these kids will do just fine being forced to take classes with top 5% kids rather than top 2% kids and no longer being able to take marine biology or plate tectonics.

Sorry if I think our public system should aspire to more than “just fine.” We are falling apart.

Do you realize how you sound? You really think that keeping your kids away from the 95th percentile riff-raff and making sure they have 15 super-specialized science classes to choose from (rather than 6 or 8 or however many the regional ones would have) is an intolerable tragedy worth denying access to the magnet experience to hundreds more kids a year?

Actually my kid is not cut out for the magnets. But as a society we need to give the most able kids the best education so they can be our scientists and engineers and doctors. It is amazing to me that people don’t get this.

For this to be a justification for opposing these changes:

1) it has to be true that these scientists and engineers and doctors are only in the top 1-2%, and that leaving out kids in the few percent below that is fine because they don't have the capability to contribute to society in those ways;
2) it has to be true that an MCPS admission process can accurately identify those top 1-2% of kids (including those who don't have the highest test scores because they haven't been able to access magnet classes in elementary or middle school and haven't gotten parental supplementation, and/or are from lower-income backgrounds and schools)
3) it has to be true that being in class with 95th-98th percentile kids will hurt the chances of those top percentile kids to succeed.

Are you confident enough about those things that you're willing to sell out the other kids to keep Blair a walled garden for a tiny number of kids?

Actually, MCPS leadership could have kept the countywide programs (including Down/UpCounty like Blair SMCS), while also creating regional magnet programs too. Too bad they are making it an "either/or."

Agree with other poster that Blair SMCS and Blair STEM will not be the same. So incredibly astonished and saddened at either the failure to comprehend or worse the deliberate indifference and hostility by the MCPS leadership to these programs. When all else has been sinking, these have been the crown jewels of MCPS. Does Central Office know only destruction, not how to build and improve things?

I don't know the details but it sounds like they tried this with RMIB/regional IBs and it failed? If you want to argue for this approach for SMCS magnets you need to figure out how to make the case of how it will work there when it didn't for IB.

DP. To attract interested, academically inclined students, they would have to do a better job of making high-level programming available at regional magnets than they did with IB (and that includes the level of their commitment to the non-magnet high-level base offerings at every school).

There are enough interested and capable students -- not all magnet students have to get all As to benefit, but all have to have access, more or less at their option or at least to their individual capability, to the highest levels of programming available at any such site across the county for this to work from a suppy/demand standpoint. And for it to present anything like an equitable solution.

[Anonymous]

So I have a question. What are the admissions criteria for the SMCS and RMIB programs, and do they actually serve the top 1-2%, high-potential kids across the county of all backgrounds roughly equally?

Because if they do, then I think it's right to have a special program for those kids-- there are real outliers like that in every school, and bringing them all together in a cohort of one or two programs could make sense.

But is that really what these programs are? From what I've seen in lower grades, MCPS isn't great at actually identifying the most gifted kids and instead uses exposure based things like MAP scores and the like, which disproportionately select kids from good elementary and middle schools and kids whose families supplement and support them outside of school. And based on the stats MCPS shared, these are disproportionately WJ, Wootton, and Churchill kids, which lines right up with that.

If the countywide magnets are essentially just helping 95th percentile kids from rich areas get more advantages than top 1-2% kids from poor areas because they select based on exposure rather than intelligence and capacity, that's a huge issue. At that point you might as well just make sure that top 5% kids from all schools get access and throw out the countywide model entirely.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they were smart, they would have created these 6 regional programs (9-12 grades), and have the current Blair/Poolsville only for 10-12 grades (remove 9th).
At the end of the 9th grade, select the top students from the 6 regionals to send them to 10-12 grades at Blair/Poolsville. That would have been smart and competitive

Right, because kids and families want to move schools and make friends twice.

It is absolutely funny to see people unfamiliar with the current magnet programs having opinions.

If you have or had a kid at Blair magnet you will know that kids go there not for friendship and playing. It is all competition, all academics. Most of them have real internship every single summer. Interships at NASA, UMD, Johns Hopkins where their parents drive them 5 days per week.
These programs are serious, and competition is rough. You will see students crying for getting a B that "ruins" their Ivy League chances. You see Robotics kids meeting almost every day after school and in summer.

This is not the normal advanced program you might think about. It is another level that cannot be clone 6 times.

What benefit does NASA get from having a 14-year old work with them for a summer? Even a prodigy genius one? These “internships” honestly sound like fake charities created by parents for Ivy applications.

Another outsider having no idea about what these kids do but having strong opinions. LOL
One of the NASA internships is about robotics. 50 kids from entire US.
If you have the curiosity to check Blair's and Poolsville's robotics teams you will understand that this is not charity. They build fully functional robots in 2 months to compete in First Robotics events. This is serious stuff with high budgets (~40k per year) and a lot at effort all year round. Last 2 years, Blair's team qualified to the Worlds Championship in Texas. Many of these kids get into the famous CMU or MIT Engineering programs and end up building robots for NASA later in life.
Get your facts right before writing non sense here.

That "World championship" is for everyone with enough money to fund an expensive hobby.

The famous CMU and MIT (and BYU, btw) Engineering programs that educated people who built robots for NASA didn't intern at NASA at 14.

You must be joking! There are thousands of teams and only a fraction qualify. Budget matters but it's not everything. And btw, the teams have a business sub team responsible with donations and budget. It is serious stuff with some kids sending letters and meeting with potential sponsors, and others designing and building the robot. Not as simple as you might think.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they were smart, they would have created these 6 regional programs (9-12 grades), and have the current Blair/Poolsville only for 10-12 grades (remove 9th).
At the end of the 9th grade, select the top students from the 6 regionals to send them to 10-12 grades at Blair/Poolsville. That would have been smart and competitive

Right, because kids and families want to move schools and make friends twice.

It is absolutely funny to see people unfamiliar with the current magnet programs having opinions.

If you have or had a kid at Blair magnet you will know that kids go there not for friendship and playing. It is all competition, all academics. Most of them have real internship every single summer. Interships at NASA, UMD, Johns Hopkins where their parents drive them 5 days per week.
These programs are serious, and competition is rough. You will see students crying for getting a B that "ruins" their Ivy League chances. You see Robotics kids meeting almost every day after school and in summer.

This is not the normal advanced program you might think about. It is another level that cannot be clone 6 times.

My kids and their friends at Blair are enjoying the friendships and playing. I'm sorry you psychology destroyed your child, or you are making up sour grapes over the smarter kids who can have fun while being smart.
They have a lot of fun on the bus rides to national championships too 🏆

NP. That sounds so much better. PP was trying to brag, but her post was actually depressing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If they were smart, they would have created these 6 regional programs (9-12 grades), and have the current Blair/Poolsville only for 10-12 grades (remove 9th).
At the end of the 9th grade, select the top students from the 6 regionals to send them to 10-12 grades at Blair/Poolsville. That would have been smart and competitive

If they were smart they would have regional middle school programs, and use that to make good selections for high school.

SMCS's 9th grade is the toughest year in the program. The STEM classes are enriched and accelerated to double speed. They finish all the normal high school STEM classes by end of 10th grade, and then have 2 years of electives.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can imagine a scenario where a rigorous SMCS program on the level of Blair's evolves at Wooton. Blair's SMCS will become honors-for-all, and eventually fall from there. Blair's magnet was started to bring excellence to the lowest performing high school in the county.

Taylor's plan is problematic for Blair.

SMCS in either Churchill or Wootton will rise. This regional thing will bring down Blair. It's a shame to lose its fame.

Why it is a shame? It's a shame the Blair was riding on SMCS's reputation instead of earning its own.

Wow. Just wow. You are ignorant.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they were smart, they would have created these 6 regional programs (9-12 grades), and have the current Blair/Poolsville only for 10-12 grades (remove 9th).
At the end of the 9th grade, select the top students from the 6 regionals to send them to 10-12 grades at Blair/Poolsville. That would have been smart and competitive

If they were smart they would have regional middle school programs, and use that to make good selections for high school.

SMCS's 9th grade is the toughest year in the program. The STEM classes are enriched and accelerated to double speed. They finish all the normal high school STEM classes by end of 10th grade, and then have 2 years of electives.

The plan is to renovate the middle school programs next year.