2011 Operating Budget and Magnet busing

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agreed with 10:22. Cutting transport denies access to lower SES families. These programs are necessary educational interventions, not some frill.

how are language immersion programs a necessary intervention? Especially when many of the families who apply for them only do so to get their kids into a better school than the one in their neighborhood and not because of the language aspect?

It is not just the transportation to the language immersion programs; it is also transportation to the highly gifted centers. If our children's needs for accelerated and enriched instruction could be met at their home school, I'd be all for cutting the transportation to these programs; however, that is not currently the case in MCPS.

Isn't it odd that Language Immersion and Highly Gifted Centers are lumped together as magnet programs? One must qualify and meet certain criteria to be offered a spot in any of the Center Programs, while language immersion is available to any student in MCPS, depending on whether or not they are picked in a random lottery.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agreed with 10:22. Cutting transport denies access to lower SES families. These programs are necessary educational interventions, not some frill.

how are language immersion programs a necessary intervention? Especially when many of the families who apply for them only do so to get their kids into a better school than the one in their neighborhood and not because of the language aspect?

It is not just the transportation to the language immersion programs; it is also transportation to the highly gifted centers. If our children's needs for accelerated and enriched instruction could be met at their home school, I'd be all for cutting the transportation to these programs; however, that is not currently the case in MCPS.

Isn't it odd that Language Immersion and Highly Gifted Centers are lumped together as magnet programs? One must qualify and meet certain criteria to be offered a spot in any of the Center Programs, while language immersion is available to any student in MCPS, depending on whether or not they are picked in a random lottery.

You are correct. But, they are both magnet programs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agreed with 10:22. Cutting transport denies access to lower SES families. These programs are necessary educational interventions, not some frill.

how are language immersion programs a necessary intervention? Especially when many of the families who apply for them only do so to get their kids into a better school than the one in their neighborhood and not because of the language aspect?

It is not just the transportation to the language immersion programs; it is also transportation to the highly gifted centers. If our children's needs for accelerated and enriched instruction could be met at their home school, I'd be all for cutting the transportation to these programs; however, that is not currently the case in MCPS.

Isn't it odd that Language Immersion and Highly Gifted Centers are lumped together as magnet programs? One must qualify and meet certain criteria to be offered a spot in any of the Center Programs, while language immersion is available to any student in MCPS, depending on whether or not they are picked in a random lottery.

You are correct. But, they are both magnet programs.

The reason they are both called "magnet" programs stems, by and large, from the integration era. Montgomery County integrated at a time when there were other examples that had been in the news about busing situations which has caused great conflict in the communities. Not many parents (of any color) in MoCo liked the idea of busing for integration. In my neighborhood (35 years ago), you had majority parents who opposed integration because they opposed busing, and minority parents who opposed busing because they didn't like the idea that the burden of busing was placed on minority kids (it was their kids who had to get on the bus and go to a far away school, for the most part).

So, the idea began to develop to try to integrate by "pull"ing (like a magnet) kids to schools instead of "pushing" (i.e. busing). The "pull" would be special programs that white parents would want their children to attend; these were mainly placed in high minority schools. It was also an attempt overall to retain white parents in the school system (at the time there had been examples of whole counties/areas in other jurisdictions where parents simply withdrew from the public school system rather than integrate.) In MoCo, the magnets were coupled with the "quality racial balancing" transfer policy (or something like that, I forget the exact phrase). The idea was that students would be allowed to transfer into magnets if it helped attain a racial balance. This was subsequently found to be illegal in the MD case, Eisenberg and this specifically racial aspect of the transfer policy was dropped.

How much it is true anymore that these programs integrate schools, I really don't know as while there are overall demographic numbers available per school, it is generally not possible to find publicly available numbers about the demographics of a particular sub-program at the school. So you might be able to tell how many black and white kids go to Blair, but it's harder to tell how many black and white kids are in each of the sub-programs at Blair or the "general population" (for lack of a better term).