I doubt it as how would they know as they don’t track private school students. |
You are correct that the FARMS rate for in-boundary students doesn’t include private school students. It includes all MCPS students that live in the boundaries as opposed to the kids who actually end up at the school through the DCC choice process. Private school students who live in the community are not counted. |
Ah okay thank you for the clarification. So the difference between the current FARMS rate of 60% and the "resident student" FARMS rate of 44% is all due to transfers from other schools through the DCC/other reason? |
Yes, with the DCC, students have two options, they can apply for specialized programs at the consortium schools and they got a checklist to rank the order of the schools they'd prefer so the non-resident students are from other DCC schools volunterarily going there for the special programs. All the DCC schools are going to see huge farm increases because of this. Most families cannot make the transportation work to the W schools who are lower income so the non-farm kids will more likely be the ones leaving and no one will be replacing them. |
Huh. But I am also seeing that on the second page of the Superintendent's tables, it shows FARMS rates for "Current Attending Student 2025-26 Demographics with Transfers". For Northwood they say the FARMS rate is 52% and for Kennedy they say the FARMS rate is 53%. Yet according to the MCPS School Profiles website the Northtwood FARMS rate is 60% and the Kennedy FARMS rate is 70%. Something isn't adding up here. |
You'd need to know more about the data points. Were those numbers taken on the same dates? If one was done in August and one done in November, you can get very different numbers with early school year changes. Or, is one with transfers and one without? |
The first one is with transfers. The second one is too since it is current enrollment. They are from different years - the school profiles is as of September 2024 and the Superintendent's recommendation is for 2025-26. I can see Northwood FARMS going down by 8 points. They do fluctuate. But Kennedy going down by 17 points? That seems unlikely. Could it be families aren't applying for FARMS for fear of ICE? |