Fairfax County: McLean Citizens Association demands smaller class sizes
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Anonymous
+4 trailers. |
Anonymous
And people complain that the AAP program costs too much money. |
Anonymous
Dranesville includes schools in the Herndon, Langley and McLean pyramid, and one school in the Marshall pyramid (Lemon Road). In 2011, Epstein won heavily in the precincts zoned for Langley HS in 2011, but Strauss won every precinct that fed into Herndon, McLean or Marshall HS. My guess is that, in the 2015 election, the Republican-endorsed candidate will get all the Langley precincts again, the Democratic-endorsed candidate will get all the Herndon precincts and the Pimmit precinct that feeds into Marshall, and the McLean precincts will split, quite possible over this very issue of class sizes. |
Anonymous
I'm not sure where your confusion is. Hypothetically, if there are 46 kids in 2nd grade, at a non-Title 1 school, they would be divided into 2 classes, each with 23 kids. But in a Title 1 school, where there are apparently caps for grades K-3 of 22 kids per class, there are two possibilities: 2 classes with 22 kids each and 1 class with only 2 kids OR 3 classes with 15-16 kids each. Either way, there will be 3 classes at the Title 1 school, needing 3 teachers. The optics may look bad when you say, hey how come they have only 15 kids in a class, but, really, when you say "staff up to the cap" are you really advocating they do classes of 22, 22 and 2, just so they can say, hey only one of the classes is below the cap? That's goofy. |
Anonymous
But most of those kids are brown! |
Anonymous
Good reason why the collar may need to be adjusted with a higher cap at the low end. |
Anonymous
So you're actually OK with increasing the class sizes in Title I schools, but only if we inconvenience other students and spend more on transportation in the process? |
Anonymous
My Lord, please don't encourage this blowhard to run for School Board and embarrass Dranesville again by publicly playing these kind of destructive, divisive, "me first" interest group politics. It's bad enough she has a mouthpiece through the MCA which, as another poster mentioned, is a totally unrepresentative, insignificant organization that has lost any influence it may once have had by moving well into Tea Party territory. No one listens to the MCA these days. These are simply right-wingers who are sitting in an echo chamber patting themselves on their backs for demanding that "their tax dollars" be spent on "their children." Thankfully, Dranesville was smart enough to reject Louise's pandering and smart enough to know that someone as divisive as she is in person should never wield influence anywhere outside the MCA. Anybody who tells you, as this resolution basically does, that they can lower class sizes in McLean without spending a dime more in the Schools budget is obviously making an empty promise, and counting on you not to really think it through. Do you really think, as this resolution implies, that kids in small classes who have special needs, speak ESOL, or live below the poverty line are "making out like bandits?" Yeah, I'm quoting Catherine Lorenze, who was Louise Epstein's campaign manager last time around. Shame on you for voting for her in the first place. People with these kinds of beliefs have no place in truly public education. |
Anonymous
I think PP was being sarcastic. |
Anonymous
I can assure everyone in McLean, etc. that students on this side of the county are not making out like bandits, despite their smaller class sizes. There is some fraud and waste in the FARMS system that could be weeded out, but no one at Gatehouse wants to make the unpopular decision to do it. I don't think they verify any information on a single FARM form. There is just no way that if your household gross combined income is $44k, that you just bought a $400k house - but I digress. |
Anonymous
Actually I think the non-title one kids in classes with well under 20 students are making out like bandits, especially if either they are paying no real estate taxes or if they are not special needs/esol/farm and are having small classes. The school board even says the actual title 1 money doesn't even get used for the most part for smaller class sizes. It goes towards extra resource teachers. So these schools get lower class sizes and more resource teachers and esol specialists and special ed specialists. I agree the MCA resolution asks too much, but the current situation is also too much for certain schools to handle, especially when those schools also have ESOL and special needs children in them as well. "Brown kids" do not have the monopoly on esol and special needs. Just FARMS rates. They probably asked for this wanting something in between. If the state's max ratio is 24.5, there is no reason each school's ratio needs to be much higher than the state's max. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
I am sorry you feel this way, I stand by my vote. Janie Straus has not represented my children nor has she been responsive when I have tried contacting her- she just rubber stamps whatever comes from staff. Voting Ms Straus out is first on my list. |
Anonymous
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Many years ago –when Title I was relatively new—I taught Title I kids. In those days, the kids were Title I—not the school. We were given quite a bit of money. However, we were required to spend it on equipment. That meant tape recorders, filmstrip projectors (I said this was a long time ago!) etc. The teachers were livid. How much equipment do you need? Of course this was before computers. (By the way, our classes were mixed Title I and non-Title I kids). We were not supposed to use Title I equipment with non-Title I kids. It was ridiculous. We screamed and with the help of a caring principal and a brilliant teacher, we wrote up a program to hire additional teachers to reduce class size. We also used the money for a reading specialist and a math specialist dedicated to these kids. These specialists took every child every day. The math specialist took half of my class (first grade) and worked with the kids in her math lab while I drilled and did worksheets with the other half. She worked on concepts while I worked on rote. Then, we switched groups. We did the same thing with reading. Reading specialist worked on phonics, I worked on sight words and comprehension. At the end of the year, the math results were amazing. Reading was not as impressive. One teacher took the non Title I kids and the rest of us had entirely Title I. The class sizes were too big—29, as I recall, but the extra help from the specialists was critical. These “specialists” were real teachers who worked with kids—not “instructional coaches” giving advice to teachers.
FCPS spends entirely too much money on people that do not work with kids. Someone needs to figure this out. Teachers don’t need advice—the kids need real help. I guarantee you, the Title I money could be better spent. NO class in FCPS should have double the size of another--except special needs. |
Anonymous
7.0M out of a budget of 3.8 Billion. If they found 2% worth of waste/fraud/abuse in the budget they could reduce the class size to 21.25 ((3,800,000,000*.02)=(76M/7.0M) =~11*.5) = class size of ~21.25) ....but they are not looking very hard We don't need more taxes. They just need to spend the money they have wisely. |