Westland to BCC

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This surprises me. Our DD was in a middle school magnet and she had the option to return to her home school (BCC), attend any HS school in the DCC, or apply to any HS program where either BCC or DCC students were eligible. I’m not sure why the corollary wouldn’t apply to kids that came up via BCC feeders.

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Supply and demand. The county knows that’s a fake promise. Middle school caliber magnet kids are needed across the DCC so if they are willing to bus them selves, integration points without cost for the few who will chose that. People forget the magnets charter mission was reverse bussing. Instead of sending poor kids to rich schools they made a carrot to get rich kids to bus to poor schools. It grew from there some what but that mission is still baked in the the strategy.

The county was rapidity segregating by income so that is why the consortiums were created. To give the illusion of choice so no neighborhood became a dead zone completely as long as mom thinks “My kid doesn’t have to go to XYZ”. Notice how not one of the upper SES schools is in one?

There are unintended consequences to feeder rights as DC has found. If you give protected feeder rights to attractive more desirable options the flood can spoil the home: see Hardy middle. The neighborhood that goes there gave up on it decades ago due to NE & SE using it as a pipeline to the good NW HS. Hardy still is around majority OOB kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not sure where the idea that it was BCC parents who excluded immersion kids for nefarious reasons came from. In fact, most families at BCC who gave it any thought chose that cluster over Whitman or points north precisely to be at a more diverse school. RCF neighborhoods were and remain zoned for BCC, as do the kids who are zoned for Rosemary Hills.

The formerly immersion students who aren't zoned for BCC come from many different areas (as the RM poster shows), and the inability to continue on to BCC if they aren't zoned for it resulted from an effort to stem overcrowding.

Having been an RCF parent with three kids, I can tell you that the immersion kids, by and large, wouldn’t bring any diversity to BCC as almost all are white.

As for geographic origin, the vast majority live in Silver Spring, or at least they did when there was the automatic entry to BCC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not sure where the idea that it was BCC parents who excluded immersion kids for nefarious reasons came from. In fact, most families at BCC who gave it any thought chose that cluster over Whitman or points north precisely to be at a more diverse school. RCF neighborhoods were and remain zoned for BCC, as do the kids who are zoned for Rosemary Hills.

The formerly immersion students who aren't zoned for BCC come from many different areas (as the RM poster shows), and the inability to continue on to BCC if they aren't zoned for it resulted from an effort to stem overcrowding.

+1. BCC isn't able to expand any further or add portables, and this was a recognition of that. Of course the boundaries may be changing when Woodward opens, so we'll see what happens.

[Anonymous]

My friend's kids went to Rock Creek Forest immersion, then Westland, then Kennedy HS (their home school).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This surprises me. Our DD was in a middle school magnet and she had the option to return to her home school (BCC), attend any HS school in the DCC, or apply to any HS program where either BCC or DCC students were eligible. I’m not sure why the corollary wouldn’t apply to kids that came up via BCC feeders.

.

Supply and demand. The county knows that’s a fake promise. Middle school caliber magnet kids are needed across the DCC so if they are willing to bus them selves, integration points without cost for the few who will chose that. People forget the magnets charter mission was reverse bussing. Instead of sending poor kids to rich schools they made a carrot to get rich kids to bus to poor schools. It grew from there some what but that mission is still baked in the the strategy.

The county was rapidity segregating by income so that is why the consortiums were created. To give the illusion of choice so no neighborhood became a dead zone completely as long as mom thinks “My kid doesn’t have to go to XYZ”. Notice how not one of the upper SES schools is in one?

There are unintended consequences to feeder rights as DC has found. If you give protected feeder rights to attractive more desirable options the flood can spoil the home: see Hardy middle. The neighborhood that goes there gave up on it decades ago due to NE & SE using it as a pipeline to the good NW HS. Hardy still is around majority OOB kids.

This is a really flawed view of Hardy, which is in Georgetown and pulls from as far North as Glover Park. Hardy has always had an in boundary that is mostly Georgetown - and the few families with kids living there are so wealthy they would never dream of sending their kids to DCPS. Thus, Hardy has for many decades been majority OOB - and not as a result of feeder rights.

However, you are right about the use of special programs to integrate. The Spanish immersion program at RCFES was created to integrate a school that had a poor Hispanic population in the condos and apartments around RCF. Rosemary Hills (the African American school) was given a magnet aspect also - now gone. The idea was that magnet programs would convince white parents to stay in the public school system while at the same time pulling motivated parents of any ethnicity and social status from out of boundary. This is why I say that some ChCh parents (not all) viewed the out of boundary applicants from Silver Spring as people who had not “bought into” the BCC cluster like people who lived in boundary did . Some parents were very offended by this - they felt some people were getting for free what others had to pay for. I find it crazy, but I heard it more than once. That is what supported the idea of kicking immersion Spanish students out of the previously held right to continue at BCC. BCC was the crown jewel that in boundary parents paid for but which lesser out of boundary mortals had snuck into for “free”.

[Anonymous]

Why are people talking about DCPS in the MCPS forum? Stay on-topic, folks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why are people talking about DCPS in the MCPS forum? Stay on-topic, folks.

Because the poster to whom I replied was using Hardy as an example of a school whose in boundary families would no longer send kids to due to an influx of out of boundary with rights of matriculation to same cluster HS students. The implication was that letting out of boundary kids progress from MS to Hs would have similarly ruined BCC. But BCC and Hardy are different, as I pointed out, so the analogy is faulty as is the conclusion.

[Anonymous]

I understand your point and don't disagree, but again, this is an MCPS forum, not a DCPS forum. I hope all will stay on-topic.