Support the Montgomery Virtual Academy (MVA) from Budget Cuts!

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Please cite to the data you’re using to make this statement that it’s not worse. For example, please tell me what data you’re seeing that makes the following inaccurate:

“Chronic absenteeism: elementary aged children have significantly higher rates of chronic absenteeism for virtual academy compared to similar students in person schooling“ see page 24 https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2023/Virtual%20Academy%20FINAL.pdf

See page 27 for the mva’s academic failures in math as compared to brick and mortar schools: “Students in grade 1 to 5 attending MVA were significantly less likely than their in-person peers to meet their projected growth in math in spring of 2022” Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

See page 29 for evidence of similarly significant failures in reading results. Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

Please also direct me to data that shows how large the waitlist is and whether it’s caused by a sudden turn in the rapid decline of enrollment in the program that saw more that 40% of enrollees abandon the program after each year it’s been in existence rather than being caused by a decision by MCPS to lock in current enrollment numbers so as not to throw additional resources at a failed program that’s run its course.

Pay attention. My kids are regularly marked absent when there. I gave up correcting it. Blame the teachers.

In other words you have no objective data. Some random anecdote that mva teachers are to blame for the massive chronic absenteeism based on your kid being marked absent despite being on the screen isn’t persuasive

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Please cite to the data you’re using to make this statement that it’s not worse. For example, please tell me what data you’re seeing that makes the following inaccurate:

“Chronic absenteeism: elementary aged children have significantly higher rates of chronic absenteeism for virtual academy compared to similar students in person schooling“ see page 24 https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2023/Virtual%20Academy%20FINAL.pdf

See page 27 for the mva’s academic failures in math as compared to brick and mortar schools: “Students in grade 1 to 5 attending MVA were significantly less likely than their in-person peers to meet their projected growth in math in spring of 2022” Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

See page 29 for evidence of similarly significant failures in reading results. Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

Please also direct me to data that shows how large the waitlist is and whether it’s caused by a sudden turn in the rapid decline of enrollment in the program that saw more that 40% of enrollees abandon the program after each year it’s been in existence rather than being caused by a decision by MCPS to lock in current enrollment numbers so as not to throw additional resources at a failed program that’s run its course.

I was following the news and I came across this pdf somewhere else. Once opened it up I just laugh about it. As an analytical person I couldn’t believe our county spending money on this garbage data report. How much did they spend on it? If it’s done by middle schoolers, bravo 👏 but professionals? Seriously? Anyways it conveys the message it wanna convey. I didn’t comment anything earlier because it’s been awhile posting and it was meaningless to me.

Here are some biases I would like to point out:
1. There’s no control group. There will never be meaning sending in person to virtual and vice versa to compare apples to apples.
2. It’s apples to oranges comparison in the pdf. When you look at the sample size without weights and also the mixtures by grade level and ethnicity. You can simply ditched it.
3. To elaborate, it’s like comparing top 1% to the rest, the delta is so huge. Yet do we categorize ourselves are poor or live in poverty?
4. 10 students in MVA roughly is 1% back then the small sample size with a big variation would cause lots of discrepancies vs a bigger sample size. So while numbers presented are factual, the story convey is invalid.
5. One thing to note is very true tough is the chronic absentees. It’s very concerning in a way they are in line with what the families are presenting. Those kids are living in a rough time. If you do have families or friends that’ve been thru those you know how long it would take. It’s fortunate that not yours, nor mine. (Knock knock Touchwood). It is what it is. God Bless 🙏

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Please cite to the data you’re using to make this statement that it’s not worse. For example, please tell me what data you’re seeing that makes the following inaccurate:

“Chronic absenteeism: elementary aged children have significantly higher rates of chronic absenteeism for virtual academy compared to similar students in person schooling“ see page 24 https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2023/Virtual%20Academy%20FINAL.pdf

See page 27 for the mva’s academic failures in math as compared to brick and mortar schools: “Students in grade 1 to 5 attending MVA were significantly less likely than their in-person peers to meet their projected growth in math in spring of 2022” Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

See page 29 for evidence of similarly significant failures in reading results. Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

Please also direct me to data that shows how large the waitlist is and whether it’s caused by a sudden turn in the rapid decline of enrollment in the program that saw more that 40% of enrollees abandon the program after each year it’s been in existence rather than being caused by a decision by MCPS to lock in current enrollment numbers so as not to throw additional resources at a failed program that’s run its course.

Pay attention. My kids are regularly marked absent when there. I gave up correcting it. Blame the teachers.

Wow what a setup here! I doubt any of the MVA parents will be pointing fingers at those wonderful MVA teachers. Nice try buddy!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Let Dawn fight to close all schools that don’t perform to her satisfaction. Let’s stop educating the children in RICA, in prison, in low performing schools, all the children that do not show up to her brick and mortar buildings, dump all the home schooled children. Time to clear the deck for her. Let’s discriminate like in the good old days. Never mind that children all over the USA are and have been attending online schools long before the pandemic. Never mind that MCPS has been buying technology for 15 years to do this exact type of virtual school. Let’s keep MCPS in the 1950’s.

If that’s your best argument to save this failing program, I’d encourage you to make it to the BOE as part of your public testimony in the next board meeting. It’d do us all a favor to highlight that there is no actual argument grounded in facts or data to keep this program alive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Please cite to the data you’re using to make this statement that it’s not worse. For example, please tell me what data you’re seeing that makes the following inaccurate:

“Chronic absenteeism: elementary aged children have significantly higher rates of chronic absenteeism for virtual academy compared to similar students in person schooling“ see page 24 https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2023/Virtual%20Academy%20FINAL.pdf

See page 27 for the mva’s academic failures in math as compared to brick and mortar schools: “Students in grade 1 to 5 attending MVA were significantly less likely than their in-person peers to meet their projected growth in math in spring of 2022” Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

See page 29 for evidence of similarly significant failures in reading results. Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

Please also direct me to data that shows how large the waitlist is and whether it’s caused by a sudden turn in the rapid decline of enrollment in the program that saw more that 40% of enrollees abandon the program after each year it’s been in existence rather than being caused by a decision by MCPS to lock in current enrollment numbers so as not to throw additional resources at a failed program that’s run its course.

I was following the news and I came across this pdf somewhere else. Once opened it up I just laugh about it. As an analytical person I couldn’t believe our county spending money on this garbage data report. How much did they spend on it? If it’s done by middle schoolers, bravo 👏 but professionals? Seriously? Anyways it conveys the message it wanna convey. I didn’t comment anything earlier because it’s been awhile posting and it was meaningless to me.

Here are some biases I would like to point out:
1. There’s no control group. There will never be meaning sending in person to virtual and vice versa to compare apples to apples.
2. It’s apples to oranges comparison in the pdf. When you look at the sample size without weights and also the mixtures by grade level and ethnicity. You can simply ditched it.
3. To elaborate, it’s like comparing top 1% to the rest, the delta is so huge. Yet do we categorize ourselves are poor or live in poverty?
4. 10 students in MVA roughly is 1% back then the small sample size with a big variation would cause lots of discrepancies vs a bigger sample size. So while numbers presented are factual, the story convey is invalid.
5. One thing to note is very true tough is the chronic absentees. It’s very concerning in a way they are in line with what the families are presenting. Those kids are living in a rough time. If you do have families or friends that’ve been thru those you know how long it would take. It’s fortunate that not yours, nor mine. (Knock knock Touchwood). It is what it is. God Bless 🙏

None of this makes sense. Try harder. Your argument basically turns on “virtual is so unique that you can’t benchmark its progress (in the mva’s case though, its failure) against any metric at all…other than chronic absenteeism, because, data and control groups and apples” The argument to keep a $5m program alive that’s failing on all metrics other than random anecdotes from individuals that claim it works for them needs to be better.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Please cite to the data you’re using to make this statement that it’s not worse. For example, please tell me what data you’re seeing that makes the following inaccurate:

“Chronic absenteeism: elementary aged children have significantly higher rates of chronic absenteeism for virtual academy compared to similar students in person schooling“ see page 24 https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2023/Virtual%20Academy%20FINAL.pdf

See page 27 for the mva’s academic failures in math as compared to brick and mortar schools: “Students in grade 1 to 5 attending MVA were significantly less likely than their in-person peers to meet their projected growth in math in spring of 2022” Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

See page 29 for evidence of similarly significant failures in reading results. Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

Please also direct me to data that shows how large the waitlist is and whether it’s caused by a sudden turn in the rapid decline of enrollment in the program that saw more that 40% of enrollees abandon the program after each year it’s been in existence rather than being caused by a decision by MCPS to lock in current enrollment numbers so as not to throw additional resources at a failed program that’s run its course.

Pay attention. My kids are regularly marked absent when there. I gave up correcting it. Blame the teachers.

He says, seemingly oblivious to the implications of his child's level of participation being such that his presence isn't noticed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Please cite to the data you’re using to make this statement that it’s not worse. For example, please tell me what data you’re seeing that makes the following inaccurate:

“Chronic absenteeism: elementary aged children have significantly higher rates of chronic absenteeism for virtual academy compared to similar students in person schooling“ see page 24 https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2023/Virtual%20Academy%20FINAL.pdf

See page 27 for the mva’s academic failures in math as compared to brick and mortar schools: “Students in grade 1 to 5 attending MVA were significantly less likely than their in-person peers to meet their projected growth in math in spring of 2022” Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

See page 29 for evidence of similarly significant failures in reading results. Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

Please also direct me to data that shows how large the waitlist is and whether it’s caused by a sudden turn in the rapid decline of enrollment in the program that saw more that 40% of enrollees abandon the program after each year it’s been in existence rather than being caused by a decision by MCPS to lock in current enrollment numbers so as not to throw additional resources at a failed program that’s run its course.

I was following the news and I came across this pdf somewhere else. Once opened it up I just laugh about it. As an analytical person I couldn’t believe our county spending money on this garbage data report. How much did they spend on it? If it’s done by middle schoolers, bravo 👏 but professionals? Seriously? Anyways it conveys the message it wanna convey. I didn’t comment anything earlier because it’s been awhile posting and it was meaningless to me.

Here are some biases I would like to point out:
1. There’s no control group. There will never be meaning sending in person to virtual and vice versa to compare apples to apples.
2. It’s apples to oranges comparison in the pdf. When you look at the sample size without weights and also the mixtures by grade level and ethnicity. You can simply ditched it.
3. To elaborate, it’s like comparing top 1% to the rest, the delta is so huge. Yet do we categorize ourselves are poor or live in poverty?
4. 10 students in MVA roughly is 1% back then the small sample size with a big variation would cause lots of discrepancies vs a bigger sample size. So while numbers presented are factual, the story convey is invalid.
5. One thing to note is very true tough is the chronic absentees. It’s very concerning in a way they are in line with what the families are presenting. Those kids are living in a rough time. If you do have families or friends that’ve been thru those you know how long it would take. It’s fortunate that not yours, nor mine. (Knock knock Touchwood). It is what it is. God Bless 🙏

None of this makes sense. Try harder. Your argument basically turns on “virtual is so unique that you can’t benchmark its progress (in the mva’s case though, its failure) against any metric at all…other than chronic absenteeism, because, data and control groups and apples” The argument to keep a $5m program alive that’s failing on all metrics other than random anecdotes from individuals that claim it works for them needs to be better.

Yes you can. But it is not my job to do it…right? Or even purposing how. I didn’t get paid for this. LOL

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Please cite to the data you’re using to make this statement that it’s not worse. For example, please tell me what data you’re seeing that makes the following inaccurate:

“Chronic absenteeism: elementary aged children have significantly higher rates of chronic absenteeism for virtual academy compared to similar students in person schooling“ see page 24 https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2023/Virtual%20Academy%20FINAL.pdf

See page 27 for the mva’s academic failures in math as compared to brick and mortar schools: “Students in grade 1 to 5 attending MVA were significantly less likely than their in-person peers to meet their projected growth in math in spring of 2022” Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

See page 29 for evidence of similarly significant failures in reading results. Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

Please also direct me to data that shows how large the waitlist is and whether it’s caused by a sudden turn in the rapid decline of enrollment in the program that saw more that 40% of enrollees abandon the program after each year it’s been in existence rather than being caused by a decision by MCPS to lock in current enrollment numbers so as not to throw additional resources at a failed program that’s run its course.

I was following the news and I came across this pdf somewhere else. Once opened it up I just laugh about it. As an analytical person I couldn’t believe our county spending money on this garbage data report. How much did they spend on it? If it’s done by middle schoolers, bravo 👏 but professionals? Seriously? Anyways it conveys the message it wanna convey. I didn’t comment anything earlier because it’s been awhile posting and it was meaningless to me.

Here are some biases I would like to point out:
1. There’s no control group. There will never be meaning sending in person to virtual and vice versa to compare apples to apples.
2. It’s apples to oranges comparison in the pdf. When you look at the sample size without weights and also the mixtures by grade level and ethnicity. You can simply ditched it.
3. To elaborate, it’s like comparing top 1% to the rest, the delta is so huge. Yet do we categorize ourselves are poor or live in poverty?
4. 10 students in MVA roughly is 1% back then the small sample size with a big variation would cause lots of discrepancies vs a bigger sample size. So while numbers presented are factual, the story convey is invalid.
5. One thing to note is very true tough is the chronic absentees. It’s very concerning in a way they are in line with what the families are presenting. Those kids are living in a rough time. If you do have families or friends that’ve been thru those you know how long it would take. It’s fortunate that not yours, nor mine. (Knock knock Touchwood). It is what it is. God Bless 🙏

None of this makes sense. Try harder. Your argument basically turns on “virtual is so unique that you can’t benchmark its progress (in the mva’s case though, its failure) against any metric at all…other than chronic absenteeism, because, data and control groups and apples” The argument to keep a $5m program alive that’s failing on all metrics other than random anecdotes from individuals that claim it works for them needs to be better.

Oh, it's a $5M school. There it is. The Board of Education needed $5M to get out of their 850 Hungerford offices and empty that building. They moved $5M for that purpose. Of course they need to shut down something that costs $5M.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Please cite to the data you’re using to make this statement that it’s not worse. For example, please tell me what data you’re seeing that makes the following inaccurate:

“Chronic absenteeism: elementary aged children have significantly higher rates of chronic absenteeism for virtual academy compared to similar students in person schooling“ see page 24 https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2023/Virtual%20Academy%20FINAL.pdf

See page 27 for the mva’s academic failures in math as compared to brick and mortar schools: “Students in grade 1 to 5 attending MVA were significantly less likely than their in-person peers to meet their projected growth in math in spring of 2022” Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

See page 29 for evidence of similarly significant failures in reading results. Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

Please also direct me to data that shows how large the waitlist is and whether it’s caused by a sudden turn in the rapid decline of enrollment in the program that saw more that 40% of enrollees abandon the program after each year it’s been in existence rather than being caused by a decision by MCPS to lock in current enrollment numbers so as not to throw additional resources at a failed program that’s run its course.

I was following the news and I came across this pdf somewhere else. Once opened it up I just laugh about it. As an analytical person I couldn’t believe our county spending money on this garbage data report. How much did they spend on it? If it’s done by middle schoolers, bravo 👏 but professionals? Seriously? Anyways it conveys the message it wanna convey. I didn’t comment anything earlier because it’s been awhile posting and it was meaningless to me.

Here are some biases I would like to point out:
1. There’s no control group. There will never be meaning sending in person to virtual and vice versa to compare apples to apples.
2. It’s apples to oranges comparison in the pdf. When you look at the sample size without weights and also the mixtures by grade level and ethnicity. You can simply ditched it.
3. To elaborate, it’s like comparing top 1% to the rest, the delta is so huge. Yet do we categorize ourselves are poor or live in poverty?
4. 10 students in MVA roughly is 1% back then the small sample size with a big variation would cause lots of discrepancies vs a bigger sample size. So while numbers presented are factual, the story convey is invalid.
5. One thing to note is very true tough is the chronic absentees. It’s very concerning in a way they are in line with what the families are presenting. Those kids are living in a rough time. If you do have families or friends that’ve been thru those you know how long it would take. It’s fortunate that not yours, nor mine. (Knock knock Touchwood). It is what it is. God Bless 🙏

None of this makes sense. Try harder. Your argument basically turns on “virtual is so unique that you can’t benchmark its progress (in the mva’s case though, its failure) against any metric at all…other than chronic absenteeism, because, data and control groups and apples” The argument to keep a $5m program alive that’s failing on all metrics other than random anecdotes from individuals that claim it works for them needs to be better.

Oh, it's a $5M school. There it is. The Board of Education needed $5M to get out of their 850 Hungerford offices and empty that building. They moved $5M for that purpose. Of course they need to shut down something that costs $5M.

Perhaps, but that money was already spent and now they need to make cuts. And MVA is the obvious thing to cut based on its poor performance and tiny student base.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Let Dawn fight to close all schools that don’t perform to her satisfaction. Let’s stop educating the children in RICA, in prison, in low performing schools, all the children that do not show up to her brick and mortar buildings, dump all the home schooled children. Time to clear the deck for her. Let’s discriminate like in the good old days. Never mind that children all over the USA are and have been attending online schools long before the pandemic. Never mind that MCPS has been buying technology for 15 years to do this exact type of virtual school. Let’s keep MCPS in the 1950’s.

I'm really looking forward to your testimony, Sterling. You're going to do great-- but for the other side.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Let Dawn fight to close all schools that don’t perform to her satisfaction. Let’s stop educating the children in RICA, in prison, in low performing schools, all the children that do not show up to her brick and mortar buildings, dump all the home schooled children. Time to clear the deck for her. Let’s discriminate like in the good old days. Never mind that children all over the USA are and have been attending online schools long before the pandemic. Never mind that MCPS has been buying technology for 15 years to do this exact type of virtual school. Let’s keep MCPS in the 1950’s.

I'm really looking forward to your testimony, Sterling. You're going to do great-- but for the other side.

Who is this sterling you are obsessed with?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Let Dawn fight to close all schools that don’t perform to her satisfaction. Let’s stop educating the children in RICA, in prison, in low performing schools, all the children that do not show up to her brick and mortar buildings, dump all the home schooled children. Time to clear the deck for her. Let’s discriminate like in the good old days. Never mind that children all over the USA are and have been attending online schools long before the pandemic. Never mind that MCPS has been buying technology for 15 years to do this exact type of virtual school. Let’s keep MCPS in the 1950’s.

I'm really looking forward to your testimony, Sterling. You're going to do great-- but for the other side.

Who is this sterling you are obsessed with?

Haven't you followed along at all? He and his wife are pretty much the only supporters of MVA.

It's a sad situation. The parents are hypochondriacs while subjecting their kids to munchausen by proxy. The poor girl was begging for friends at one of the earlier Board meetings, but the parents don't care.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Please cite to the data you’re using to make this statement that it’s not worse. For example, please tell me what data you’re seeing that makes the following inaccurate:

“Chronic absenteeism: elementary aged children have significantly higher rates of chronic absenteeism for virtual academy compared to similar students in person schooling“ see page 24 https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2023/Virtual%20Academy%20FINAL.pdf

See page 27 for the mva’s academic failures in math as compared to brick and mortar schools: “Students in grade 1 to 5 attending MVA were significantly less likely than their in-person peers to meet their projected growth in math in spring of 2022” Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

See page 29 for evidence of similarly significant failures in reading results. Please direct me to the data that shows this is not accurate.

Please also direct me to data that shows how large the waitlist is and whether it’s caused by a sudden turn in the rapid decline of enrollment in the program that saw more that 40% of enrollees abandon the program after each year it’s been in existence rather than being caused by a decision by MCPS to lock in current enrollment numbers so as not to throw additional resources at a failed program that’s run its course.

Pay attention. My kids are regularly marked absent when there. I gave up correcting it. Blame the teachers.

In other words you have no objective data. Some random anecdote that mva teachers are to blame for the massive chronic absenteeism based on your kid being marked absent despite being on the screen isn’t persuasive

Actually that's with the in person child and I know they are there in class by the work being done.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Let Dawn fight to close all schools that don’t perform to her satisfaction. Let’s stop educating the children in RICA, in prison, in low performing schools, all the children that do not show up to her brick and mortar buildings, dump all the home schooled children. Time to clear the deck for her. Let’s discriminate like in the good old days. Never mind that children all over the USA are and have been attending online schools long before the pandemic. Never mind that MCPS has been buying technology for 15 years to do this exact type of virtual school. Let’s keep MCPS in the 1950’s.

I'm really looking forward to your testimony, Sterling. You're going to do great-- but for the other side.

Who is this sterling you are obsessed with?

Haven't you followed along at all? He and his wife are pretty much the only supporters of MVA.

It's a sad situation. The parents are hypochondriacs while subjecting their kids to munchausen by proxy. The poor girl was begging for friends at one of the earlier Board meetings, but the parents don't care.

Very wrong. Why are you so obsessed with it? It has no impact on your life. It has an impact on a lot of students lives.

You are fortunate you have no health issues nor do your kids. You'd probably ignore your kids concerns vs. they being good parents and getting the kids the help and medical care they need.

Stay blessed as health only lasts so long.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok. The MVA advocates are nuts and shooting themselves in the foot.

According to this MoCo 360 article, they're planning on staging a student sit-in: https://moco360.media/2024/05/31/mcps-decision-to-close-virtual-academy-a-gut-punch-for-families-students/

Academy families say they are planning to advocate for the program by staging a student sit-in Monday at the school board headquarters in Rockville

If students are capable of showing up to Rockville to participate in a sit-in, then clearly they're capable of showing up to a school building regularly. This undercuts their point that the MVA is an ESSENTIAL solution because otherwise, their children have no way to learn.

Good for them. I would support any family whose program got pulled last minute. They should have pulled the plug earlier if this was always going to be the case. This doesn’t affect anyone complaining. I don’t know why you are running your mouth. But you know, this change could pull resources now from all of your kids’ schools. This is essentially the size of an entire (small) middle school that is being displaced. Now everyone has to figure out accommodations with only a few days left in the school year before most staff leave. Good job MCPS. Good job. Spineless idiots.

No, this means there's over $4M in cuts that *won't* have to come out of our schools.

And the size of MVA is insignificant once you spread the kids back out to their home schools.

Totally went over your head, but that’s ok. You don’t get to tell people what to be passionate about. This is important to them. I support them because this was done irresponsibly. I would do the same for any program because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t say the same for anyone here. The lack of empathy in the area is astounding. You all should be embarrassed of yourselves. I grew up in the Midwest; we took care of each other, even if we didn’t agree all the time.

DP. They're allowed to be passionate about whatever they want, but so are the rest of us. I work with parents of kids with special needs, and I've seen what happens when parents enroll their kids in online schools. Often parents think it's working, but virtually all of them are doing their kids a disservice. The education is ineffective, it exacerbates social problems and school refusal, and kids suffer. The one or two possible success stories that advocates can trot out don't trump the data and, for me, they don't trump my personal experience of the majority of cases.

I've written (again, like I did in February) to the school board to voice my opinion as a voter that this program needs to end. I do that because of my empathy for the kids who are in it. You can decide that that's embarrassing, but I'm not remotely ashamed to be advocating for ending an ineffective program.

No, no you aren’t. You are assuming you know what’s best for these families. How embarrassing for you to spend all of this time trying to take down what works for somebody else. How bizarre would it be for MVA families to write to the board to advocate for shutting down other programs? It’s just so odd. You are odd.

MVA families are doing that. It's a zero sum game and they're advocating to keep their program at the expense of others. I'm being honest that I'm advocating for a program to end.

And I'm not "assuming," I'm advocating for what works both based on data and in my experience. If MVA proponents are allowed to advocating based on their experience, I'm allowed to advocate based on mine, and our elected representatives will decide who to support.

How is it at the expense of others? You have no idea what you are talking about. Go away and give your own kids some attention.

Money from the budget goes to MVA rather than other programs that serve other students. Do you understand how budgeting works?

Meanwhile the insistence that people who disagree with you must be bad parents is embarrassing. If your program could stand on its merits, you wouldn't need to resort to such silliness.

No, a good chunk of money does not serve students directly. The MVA does.

It is a good program. One could argue in person is bad because look at the numbers within the schools. We have no current data.

The MVA’s academic results are significantly worse than in-person schools. Especially among the youngest and poorest members of the virtual program. Its enrollment has declined by more than 67% since it started. It is not a good program. Maybe for some based on anecdotes but based on the objective data, it’s failing its mission and hemorrhaging participants.

Please do make the case to the BOE that, as an alternative to shutting down this program, we instead close brick and mortar schools that are underperforming.

No it’s not worse and new data has not been released. Likewise many students choose not to test for a variety of reasons making the data inaccurate.

Enrollment was expected to decline as some were in it for Covid and went back and others choose long term. There is a waitlist but without more teachers they could not let students in.

Let Dawn fight to close all schools that don’t perform to her satisfaction. Let’s stop educating the children in RICA, in prison, in low performing schools, all the children that do not show up to her brick and mortar buildings, dump all the home schooled children. Time to clear the deck for her. Let’s discriminate like in the good old days. Never mind that children all over the USA are and have been attending online schools long before the pandemic. Never mind that MCPS has been buying technology for 15 years to do this exact type of virtual school. Let’s keep MCPS in the 1950’s.

I'm really looking forward to your testimony, Sterling. You're going to do great-- but for the other side.

Who is this sterling you are obsessed with?

Haven't you followed along at all? He and his wife are pretty much the only supporters of MVA.

It's a sad situation. The parents are hypochondriacs while subjecting their kids to munchausen by proxy. The poor girl was begging for friends at one of the earlier Board meetings, but the parents don't care.

Your obsession with this family is a sadder situation.