Superintendent's Recommendation for Richard Montgomery ES #5 Boundaries

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lack of dedicated PTA is hurting the new school. No one had dedicated voice for new school.

Superintended is making a point about reducing farm rate in Beall and RP. All those are getting added in new school.

Why will you point reducing farm rate from 25 to 17 or 17 to 10 if you are taking all those reduction to add into a new school to come up with class farm rate of 53%?

For the last time.....BECAUSE THOSE FARM KIDS ARE FROM THE NEIGHBORHOODS THAT ARE NOW WALKABLE TO RM#5. The site they chose happened to be in an area with high FARMS. The school was always going to have a good amount of FARMS because of the location they chose. This is not the fault of the other schools. No one should be walkable to one school and moved to another 15min away by bus. Like another poster said, that makes it very difficult with parents that need public transportation just to get to a school event. Or how about a latchkey child that needs to get home and misses the school bus? Having those kids around RM#5 in walking distance is very much a positive for the kids and their families. If you look on the map, it is obvious they picked that location to evenly spread out the elementary schools. That area is high density with a lot of smaller lot homes, apartments, and townhouses and having a school inside their neighborhood is very convenient.

http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/departments/planning/Map(2).pdf

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And, since boundary studies don't start 18 months before the school opens, and the new schools completion date is TBD (to be determined), it will be a long time before we know any of that!

Don't worry, whenever it does come out, I'm sure you'll find something to complain about...

This is the high school I'm interested in learning more about! Would it get all the students in the Shady Grove Sector? I could see this potentially being a nice high school

It's 100% going to get the kids currently being bussed from Washingtonia area (that high rise, apartments, and townhouses) to Fallsmeade and Wootton High School.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

For the last time.....BECAUSE THOSE FARM KIDS ARE FROM THE NEIGHBORHOODS THAT ARE NOW WALKABLE TO RM#5. The site they chose happened to be in an area with high FARMS. The school was always going to have a good amount of FARMS because of the location they chose. This is not the fault of the other schools. No one should be walkable to one school and moved to another 15min away by bus. Like another poster said, that makes it very difficult with parents that need public transportation just to get to a school event. Or how about a latchkey child that needs to get home and misses the school bus? Having those kids around RM#5 in walking distance is very much a positive for the kids and their families. If you look on the map, it is obvious they picked that location to evenly spread out the elementary schools. That area is high density with a lot of smaller lot homes, apartments, and townhouses and having a school inside their neighborhood is very convenient.

http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/departments/planning/Map(2).pdf

They picked that location because they already owned the property, no? It used to be Hungerford Park ES.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lack of dedicated PTA is hurting the new school. No one had dedicated voice for new school.

Superintended is making a point about reducing farm rate in Beall and RP. All those are getting added in new school.

Why will you point reducing farm rate from 25 to 17 or 17 to 10 if you are taking all those reduction to add into a new school to come up with class farm rate of 53%?

For the last time.....BECAUSE THOSE FARM KIDS ARE FROM THE NEIGHBORHOODS THAT ARE NOW WALKABLE TO RM#5. The site they chose happened to be in an area with high FARMS. The school was always going to have a good amount of FARMS because of the location they chose. This is not the fault of the other schools. No one should be walkable to one school and moved to another 15min away by bus. Like another poster said, that makes it very difficult with parents that need public transportation just to get to a school event. Or how about a latchkey child that needs to get home and misses the school bus? Having those kids around RM#5 in walking distance is very much a positive for the kids and their families. If you look on the map, it is obvious they picked that location to evenly spread out the elementary schools. That area is high density with a lot of smaller lot homes, apartments, and townhouses and having a school inside their neighborhood is very convenient.

http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/departments/planning/Map(2).pdf

Fallsgrove...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lack of dedicated PTA is hurting the new school. No one had dedicated voice for new school.

Superintended is making a point about reducing farm rate in Beall and RP. All those are getting added in new school.

Why will you point reducing farm rate from 25 to 17 or 17 to 10 if you are taking all those reduction to add into a new school to come up with class farm rate of 53%?

For the last time.....BECAUSE THOSE FARM KIDS ARE FROM THE NEIGHBORHOODS THAT ARE NOW WALKABLE TO RM#5. The site they chose happened to be in an area with high FARMS. The school was always going to have a good amount of FARMS because of the location they chose. This is not the fault of the other schools. No one should be walkable to one school and moved to another 15min away by bus. Like another poster said, that makes it very difficult with parents that need public transportation just to get to a school event. Or how about a latchkey child that needs to get home and misses the school bus? Having those kids around RM#5 in walking distance is very much a positive for the kids and their families. If you look on the map, it is obvious they picked that location to evenly spread out the elementary schools. That area is high density with a lot of smaller lot homes, apartments, and townhouses and having a school inside their neighborhood is very convenient.

http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/departments/planning/Map(2).pdf

Fallsgrove...

Fallsgrove was never walkable to any school. Lakewood is the closest and they would still have to been bussed because it crosses a major road. They decided when it was being built that they were going to the RM cluster. The neighborhood is the same distance to GC, Beall, and RP and RP was the least crowded. So there is went. I personally think they should have split it up but look at the disaster of King Farm?

But Fallsgrove was never walkable and was never promised a new ES - ever. Now King Farm on the other hand? They got royally screwed. But that is what you get when you purchase a plot of land and aren't sure where your kids will go. It is a gamble. Just like Crown.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

For the last time.....BECAUSE THOSE FARM KIDS ARE FROM THE NEIGHBORHOODS THAT ARE NOW WALKABLE TO RM#5. The site they chose happened to be in an area with high FARMS. The school was always going to have a good amount of FARMS because of the location they chose. This is not the fault of the other schools. No one should be walkable to one school and moved to another 15min away by bus. Like another poster said, that makes it very difficult with parents that need public transportation just to get to a school event. Or how about a latchkey child that needs to get home and misses the school bus? Having those kids around RM#5 in walking distance is very much a positive for the kids and their families. If you look on the map, it is obvious they picked that location to evenly spread out the elementary schools. That area is high density with a lot of smaller lot homes, apartments, and townhouses and having a school inside their neighborhood is very convenient.

http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/departments/planning/Map(2).pdf

They picked that location because they already owned the property, no? It used to be Hungerford Park ES.

There are 3 other locations they could have picked too that they own. All in the RM district. There is also land in 2 places they considered.

Again, it was their choice. The 3 other schools shouldn't all have to be bussed further away when then entire RM#5's population is almost walkable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lack of dedicated PTA is hurting the new school. No one had dedicated voice for new school.

Superintended is making a point about reducing farm rate in Beall and RP. All those are getting added in new school.

Why will you point reducing farm rate from 25 to 17 or 17 to 10 if you are taking all those reduction to add into a new school to come up with class farm rate of 53%?

For the last time.....BECAUSE THOSE FARM KIDS ARE FROM THE NEIGHBORHOODS THAT ARE NOW WALKABLE TO RM#5. The site they chose happened to be in an area with high FARMS. The school was always going to have a good amount of FARMS because of the location they chose. This is not the fault of the other schools. No one should be walkable to one school and moved to another 15min away by bus. Like another poster said, that makes it very difficult with parents that need public transportation just to get to a school event. Or how about a latchkey child that needs to get home and misses the school bus? Having those kids around RM#5 in walking distance is very much a positive for the kids and their families. If you look on the map, it is obvious they picked that location to evenly spread out the elementary schools. That area is high density with a lot of smaller lot homes, apartments, and townhouses and having a school inside their neighborhood is very convenient.

http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/departments/planning/Map(2).pdf

Can you explain why RP was taking from middle of Beall earlier? RP was in middle picking up a thin strip full of farm kids and Beall was on both sides of it.

What was was the reason for that?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Again, it was their choice. The 3 other schools shouldn't all have to be bussed further away when then entire RM#5's population is almost walkable.

It's not walk able. If you can walk then it's classified as walk zone. Walk zone of any school was not up for debate. Some kids from non-walk zone can also walk, not many kids can walk. Using your logic most elementary kids can walk, but in reality MCPS have 8-10 bus routes in pretty much all elementary. Even in RM#5, we are going to have 8-10 buses.

Let's not create false impression here. Boundary was not created to have kids walk to school. That's absolutely false. If all we were going to do is to take a map and draw a circle then this boundary study was simply a dog and pony show by MCPS. Distributing SES point was raised by many RM#5 parents when talking about option 1-8. Option 1-8 didn't even have 53% farm rate and now recommendation is for 53% in class farm rate in RM#5.

So it went like this, Hey Rm#5 parents are worried about 30-40% farm rate. Well, who cares, let's raise it to 53% and everything can be explained by kids can almost walk to school.

[Anonymous]

I would think the best way is to keep Twinbrook as it to secure the federal funding, and balance the rest of the 4 ES, because if you look at the bigger picture, if two out of five (~40%) of ES were not performing well, in the long run it will affect the middle school and high school and the whole RM cluster.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would think the best way is to keep Twinbrook as it to secure the federal funding, and balance the rest of the 4 ES, because if you look at the bigger picture, if two out of five (~40%) of ES were not performing well, in the long run it will affect the middle school and high school and the whole RM cluster.

So you think that Twinbrook should have their own little walkable school area with title, while the rest of the entire cluster's neighborhoods get split up and bussed all over to make the FARMS perfectly even?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would think the best way is to keep Twinbrook as it to secure the federal funding, and balance the rest of the 4 ES, because if you look at the bigger picture, if two out of five (~40%) of ES were not performing well, in the long run it will affect the middle school and high school and the whole RM cluster.

So you think that Twinbrook should have their own little walkable school area with title, while the rest of the entire cluster's neighborhoods get split up and bussed all over to make the FARMS perfectly even?

So do you think that schools are not going to run buses because all kids are going walk to school with proposed boundary?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would think the best way is to keep Twinbrook as it to secure the federal funding, and balance the rest of the 4 ES, because if you look at the bigger picture, if two out of five (~40%) of ES were not performing well, in the long run it will affect the middle school and high school and the whole RM cluster.

Problem is that most parents are just focused on short term and how their elementary looks like. RP PTA fought a lot to not take farm kids from other side of 270 despite getting kids from all the way from Falls grove.

Agree here, once we have 50-60% of farm rate, you are going to get 2 under performing schools in RM cluster.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would think the best way is to keep Twinbrook as it to secure the federal funding, and balance the rest of the 4 ES, because if you look at the bigger picture, if two out of five (~40%) of ES were not performing well, in the long run it will affect the middle school and high school and the whole RM cluster.

Problem is that most parents are just focused on short term and how their elementary looks like. RP PTA fought a lot to not take farm kids from other side of 270 despite getting kids from all the way from Falls grove.

Agree here, once we have 50-60% of farm rate, you are going to get 2 under performing schools in RM cluster.

Have you lived here all of you life because I have...

RP fought to not move to RM because their home values went down and kids that could walk to Wootton (they lived right behind) now had to be bussed to RM. They actually protested by going hand in hand to show how close Wootton was to their neighborhood.

No one cared when the slice of Beall kids that went to RP once they moved to RM because they were thinking of closing the school in the 80/90's for low enrollment in many Rockville ES. No one wanted to split up. Adding more kids was a positive for the school.

I absolutely did NOT want Fallsgrove coming to RP. At all. At the time, there was only 1 open classroom in our school. I wanted the community to be split because no school had the capacity to take on that entire neighborhood or should have that burden. Most RP people were oblivious of the numbers it was going to draw because the community was built pretty slowly, families were young, and once again, the BOE said there would be no school kids in the apartments and condos. That couldn't be further from the truth. Within a few years, we had 6 portables at RP. It has been a disaster how overcrowded we were. Fallsgrove is full or pretentious uptights forever complaining about how far they have to go to get to RP - the traffic, the early busses, we pass by 3 Wootton schools, yada yada yada. I wish they were going RM#5 but that would never happen. It is way too far.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like Fallsgrove will be moved to the new Crown HS eventually

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sounds like Fallsgrove will be moved to the new Crown HS eventually

I would be surprised if it doesn't.