WAPO article on Prince George's County Schools

[Anonymous]

The Post published an article today on the frustration that middle class parents face when considering public schools in the county:


http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/middle-class-parents-closely-watching-changes-in-prince-georges-public-schools/2013/05/26/1d21d492-c330-11e2-914f-a7aba60512a7_story.html

[Anonymous]

"Howell wants to stop spending the $10,000 in tuition he pays each year for his daughter. But until the school system can address classroom size, recruiting and retaining qualified teachers and providing them with the resources needed to provide a “world-class” education, Howell said he won’t take a chance with his daughter’s future."

This is the problem with many of the middle class families in PG (And I am one of them!). We want someone else to go first, fix things and then we will feel comfortable sending our kids to the public schools. It is not going to happen like that. Unfortunately, many residents buy into the perceptions of the schools that non-residents have and therefore don't even give the schools a chance when they can afford other options. When I went to open houses at the private schools, they were packed. I went to the open houses at a couple of public schools and I could count the number of parents who showed up on one hand. Do people have first hand knowledge of what is even going on in these schools? For some place like Bowie, you have Tulip Grove and Heather Hills, and they are some of the top performing elementary schools in the state. You can't tell me that the other schools within that same five mile radius have families with drastically different SES. Why is Yorktown, Rockledge, Northview ranked maybe in the top 50% out of 700+ schools in the state of Maryland and Tulip Grove and Heather Hills are in the top 50? They are all close and the FARMS rate is similar.

Most of the privates have a mandatory volunteer service requirement. Think about how some of these schools would be changed if they put that same 20 hours per household in the public schools?

I don't blame the parents entirely though, the schools should be doing a better job at marketing what they are doing to change things for the better. Why is there no outreach to parents? Every open house I went to for public schools I had to call them to find out if they even had one. They know the zoned area, why are they not communicating with incoming families beginning with kindergarten. I am willing to take a risk for a year, because my child is well-prepared and I can easily supplement at that age. However, I would not be that willing for an older child. Get the parents involved with the schools early. Parents that I talk to with kids in public school have had really good experiences, at least in Bowie and for the magnet schools. I figure I will at least give it a try.

[Anonymous]

PP, I agree with you on being an involved parent but the reality is that not every middle class family is zoned for a top-performing elementary school.

My local school is Cesar Chavez, a spanish immersion elementary school that is under enrolled with a high FARMS rate. I chose my neighborhood 10 years before I became a parent because it was close to DC, and the commute would be minimal. I am not interested in moving out to Bowie. What do we do for schools?

[Anonymous]

My child is in public school.

He is doing really well, and is challenged appropriately.

Despite turning out a-ok in the long run, I am not the product of a traditional education. There are HUGE gaps in my formal education that I had to make up myself, and I wound up graduating from a small arts-focused private, that frankly left a lot to be desired academically.

My son is doing better in public school, in school period, than I EVER did. We considered private, thinking it was better. We couldn't afford it.

I tell myself over and over, "no school is a panecea." I've said it on these forums. I truly believe it.

[Anonymous]

At least the school you are zoned to had an open house, PP. We went to the open house for some specialty schools (lost out in the lottery again), but our neighborhood school doesn't have an open house until August. At that point you're already stuck with it by default or you're locked into a private so even if the open house was impressive you'd be forfeiting a deposit and a couple months of tuition. I think our neighborhood school has a lot going for it and I met some parents with kids there that are pretty happy with the school. But all the things I needed to do to feel comfortable with the school were self-initiated. There's no real outreach to the community like there was with the privates around here. I think a lot of middle class families do avoid the neighborhood schools out of fear and PGCPS does little or nothing to reach out to those families and show what the schools can offer.

For a family that doesn't have ties to current families at the school they are left with schooldigger and internet forums and a whole lot of chatter about how horrible the schools are. And once a family enrolls the eldest child in private they are likely to follow suit with the younger ones. I think if the public schools in PG really want to stop losing the middle class families then they need to do more outreach. They need to convince folks that the neighborhood school is a good option. Opening more specialty program seats might help too. We know tons of folks who went private after losing the lottery. We went parochial for that reason initially since we were zoned for a neighborhood school that was really struggling at the time and we got scared off by the negative talk about it. We stayed private with the eldest (now at an out of county private) after losing out on the TAG lottery when trying to make the switch to a TAG center for 2nd grade. We're going to give the neighborhood (new neighborhood now) school a try for our middle child with the idea that we can try something different next year if it doesn't go well.

[Anonymous]

I sent my DS to public for 1-5. But, it seemed every day, the county came up with some ridiculous plan that would ruin all the good things about our little school and have a negligible impact on the schools they were trying to fix. I just got tired of the endless rallies, usually several per year, to fight the county administration.

I think PG is just too large. Isn't it the second largest school district in the nation? Because of this, the administrators just can not get to know the individual character and individual needs of each area. And face it, PG is diverse. There are neighborhoods that are basically urban and neighborhoods in horse country. You can not make one-size-fits all over such diversity and get a good fit on anybody. And, because they have so much to look over, the administrators just don't have time to do anything but look at us as numbers in a spreadsheet that they have to even out.

They should divide it into autonomous zones. Each should get a fixed amount of money according to their enrollment. Some fraction of the money should be held back for building new buildings, and the different zones could compete for that money (normal maintenance of the building should come out of the fixed fee). Schools that have especially bad problems should also get some extra money from the state. But, then, the zones should be allowed to completely rule themselves. I imagine a zone being a high school and all its feed schools. Then the parents would know that their investments in time and effort wouldn't be wiped away at the whim of a bureaucrat in Upper Marlboro who has never even driven through their neighborhood. Right now, all parents who have invested in the system know that all their work is in danger of being destroyed this way every single year.

Parents need to know that their investments will produce stable results and not just a momentary improvement that can disappear at any time for no good reason.

[Anonymous]

These are great ideas and the open house / early community outreach one seems a fairly easy one to implement. The question is how do we get them to consider ideas like these. Is a board meeting effective? Writing directly to our board representative? Writing to Rushern Baker? Implement at the school level just through PTA?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:These are great ideas and the open house / early community outreach one seems a fairly easy one to implement. The question is how do we get them to consider ideas like these. Is a board meeting effective? Writing directly to our board representative? Writing to Rushern Baker? Implement at the school level just through PTA?

Our ES had an open house for parents in incoming K students in April and the PTA was heavily involved. It involved an overview of the school by the Principal, and time in each of the K classrooms. The PTA also held an informal round table type community meeting in someone's living room for anyone in the neighborhood who was interested in learning more about the ES.

[Anonymous]

April is too late though if they are serious about trying to stop people from using private as the default. Registration fees (and sometimes deposits) have already been paid to privates at that point. It is much harder to talk someone out of a decision they already made and the people who are really nervous aren't going to wait and chance losing a spot at a private so they can check out the open house in the spring. The open houses need to be happening prior to application deadlines for the private schools - that means they need to be doing these and publicizing them in the fall.

I also don't see why this should fall on the PTA. If this is a PGCPS problem then PGCPS should be doing something about it. We've moved around a lot and in the 2 states we lived in prior to MD, the local districts held a kindergarten roundup/open house in the late fall. And the schools publicized these events to people who lived in bounds (flyer on the door from one, signs on street corners in the other state). I don't think those would be very expensive things to put in place and it would encourage people to come see for themselves rather than just having to rely on gossip and a website when deciding whether to write the registration/deposit check to the private. The PTA can be really involved with the greeting or event planning, but maybe PGCPS needs to say *every* school has to do an open house in November or something like that. If it is put on the PTA to get it done then you're going to have schools with nothing happening because they don't have very active PTAs. Or you have people who already committed to public and maybe don't know about the private school timelines planning the event for the other people who are already committed to public.

I don't know about the schools for other posters, but there was just a huge difference in reception between the public and private schools for us. When we looked at privates we were offered tours and information about the schools. When we went to see our neighborhood school we were given a registration packet and nothing else. We were told they "don't really do tours" and that there would be an open house for new kinder students in August but we'd only get the info mailed to us after we registered DC. I know the privates are "selling" their schools and PGCPS technically isn't, but maybe they need to rethink the approach here.

I think about the hundreds of volunteer hours my DH and I have put into our older child's private school over the past few years. And the money. Had she been in public we would have given those same hours to the school and a lot of the money we spent would have come back to the local school in the form of donations on Donors Choose. I'm sure that's true of many families in private schools who are zoned to PGCPS. That's a real loss.

[Anonymous]

Another person here whose ES "doesn't really do tours" and who had no open house that I could find out about, anyway. So when you can't tour the school, you hear horrible things from the neighbors (little kids beating up other kids, threatening kids that their dad is going to kill them, stolen bikes) and no one you know has jumped in and sent their kid, the test scores are bad, and there are grammatical mistakes on the school website? Yeah, I can't be the first to send my kid. I wish I had the courage, or the passion for social justice, or something...but I just want my kid to be happy.

[Anonymous]

01:54 Here-
I think that your point about it being a School District responsibility is completely valid but at the same time I think that any steps that can be taken by the individual school, principal and PTA are benefical. I'll be in the PTA next year and will suggest doing the Open House and information session earlier in the year.
They did advertise the open house and round table on the local email list serves that a huge chunk of local families are on.

[Anonymous]

Yes, tours and open houses! Attract us back with more specialty programs, not less. With sibling tag alongs and transportation. Adequate before and after care. Decrease the distance for walkers. More art. Break the county into clusters like in MoCo, since it IS so huge (and it could cut transport costs to specialty programs.) Implement the k-8 plan perhaps. Smaller schools. Get the real bus routing software, pay better and have enough drivers. Every family I know is suffering from late pickup, late dropoff and total unpredictability. No child should be suspended for uniform violations. That is the exact opposite of the purpose we were all told uniforms were for when they have been implemented in our schools. It hits the exact kids most at risk.

I agree the way they time their lotteries and open house calendars seems specifically designed to NOT be accessible to any family that can afford private. It sends the message, "get out and stay out."

More of the schools to me seems more and more authoritarian and I don't think that's working to make kids happier, safer, or more successful. I think it just makes it seems like something is being done. I'd rather see some changes happen in how people communicate, maybe along these lines: http://acestoohigh.com/2012/04/23/lincoln-high-school-in-walla-walla-wa-tries-new-approach-to-school-discipline-expulsions-drop-85/

Everything in the country seems so incredibly adversarial between parents, teachers, admin and students. Poisonously so. It's not the atmosphere I want for my young kids.

[Anonymous]

I forgot to add: recess. Real recess. Not 15 minutes, elementary only with no passing time so recess is more like 7 minutes once you get them lined up, out there, lined up, back in.

[Anonymous]

Private school parent here - your public elementary school only allows 15 min for recess?!? That's crazy.

To our shock we got a spot at Robert Goddard Montessori two weeks ago. We called and asked for a tour. They said no way.

[Anonymous]

Wait what? I thought they weren't going to do any more notifications regarding specialty schools until July? Did you call or did they call you?

I am surprised they did no tours. The french immersion program has had two open houses per month since December. They share the same space so I wonder why the approach is so different.