Moving - Middle School Advice
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Anonymous
I’d love to hear about your positive experiences. Please do provide more details of your friends’ and coworkers’ middle school experiences. Which cluster are your kids in? Do you feel they had access to a strong curriculum? Did they have good feedback on their writing so that they have become solid writers by high school? Is the Science/Math curriculum engaging? How has Orchestra been handled this year - are they able to meet in person at all? |
Anonymous
Second TPMS. An amazing orchestra teacher! |
neuropoetry
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| Positive and negative posts are welcome. It is good to receive as many opinions about the situation as possible. I know I've had a lot of soul searching about how I envision the perfect education experience while navigating NYC and Westchester school systems. It is true Westchester's schools are ran at a local level but that also means that you can pay as much as private school in your property tax bill, and depending on the town - you do not always get what you pay for. |
Anonymous
I have to laugh at the orchestra question...do you really think that MCPS should be focused on in person orchestra right now? |
Anonymous
OP isn't crazy. I grew up in Westchester, and my sister-in-law teaches there. There is in person learning available in Westchester. |
Anonymous
Westchester County (population ~950,000) has 48 public school districts. |
Anonymous
I do not think OP is crazy but I assume she knows that MCPS is 100% on line. I think if anything were in person it would be special ed, ELL, Head Start etc. |
Anonymous
I’m the Bergen poster from page 1. Here’s my take on the academics - and maybe this only a reflection of my zip code - but nonetheless, my experience. Academically, it’s decent. I have only experienced virtual learning as my gauge, but I do believe some of the teachers are doing the best they can. The district did purchase a new math and reading/writing curriculum - benchmark universe and eureka. I’m not a huge fan of the benchmark but it does work for a virtual setting. I have liked that my kids do get ample time to write, but I do think because there are a lot of students who don’t turn in their work, my children, who have the ability to be supervised by me, tend to get a lot more down time while the teacher figures out a way to get the other students to do their work. You can’t fail a kid in MCPS. I am disappointed that there are not options for on level and honors SS or English for our middle school....because as a secondary teacher I understand what this will really translate into politically. Here’s what I miss the most about leaving a town system. I generally feel like I live in a “town” (it’s still quiet on my side) without the “town benefits. Sports are regional and a 20 min drive at least as opposed to local leagues based on the school district and played locally. My 4th grader has been able to find a school team for soccer only, but my 5th grader Has not - for soccer, baseball, or football. There are kids in our surrounding streets/neighborhood, but the vast majority of them go to private school (all seems extreme but only our neighbors across the street use public), so I do not get the feeling of a tight nit community despite most people being friendly. We left the town of Ridgewood, and while certainly not perfect, kids played after school before extra curriculurs or when middle school got out, would walk to town to hang out. Everyone knew everyone. Not perfect and perhaps a bit bland for adults, but a kids paradise in many ways. So that’s been our experience. I imagine had we done private, which if you have one child only the high NY / NJ property tax makes it a wash, not so if you have two. As for ease and convenience to do “errands”.....meh. I can only compare to what I came from and they are born equally frustrating experiences. I mean everything is here, but I don’t feel like you can really get to anything other than a grocery if you live within the 495 in 10 min: Bethesda Row, yes, but it would have to have the “stores” you’re looking to shop in. I hope that helps. It’s not a bad place....but it is different. You just have to decide what you want more for yourself and for your kid(s). |
Anonymous
The little 5 year old I brought to K barely reading at all now reads chapter books and writes paragraphs. He is on track for algebra in 6th or 7th grade. I really can't rate his science and ss curriculum but he is interested in both history and astronomy. He did not have spelling tests (lots of complaints here about that) but I am not a believer in them. He is learning to spell from reading and writing. I think writing is an area that the large class sizes hurt. It is the one place I spend some time with my kids on. Not a lot but we discuss the papers more after they come home and I give additional feedback. Not there yet but the HSs offer an array of IB, Magnets, AP, Dual Enrollment. This is obviously a crazy time and if your kids are in person and you are comfortable with that it would be hard to move here right now. No orchestra. How are the handling that in NY? Huge room so the kids can be spread out? I guess more masking is possible with orchestra rather than band. |
Anonymous
We moved from a different area of the country with very small school systems. There are advantages and disadvantages. Advantages: MCPS has some amazing programs that would have been unthinkable in our tiny school district. If you can get in to the criteria-based magnets, they are head and shoulders above what my smaller district could provide. At some of them (TPMS and RMIB come to mind), simply being in bounds for the school gives your child a significantly higher chance of admission. There are tons of other interesting programs that we didn't really look at because they didn't fit my kids' needs, but there are some amazing MCPS programs that aren't discussed on DCUM for things like vocational training. MCPS has a far more diverse student body than our old district - racially, linguistically, socioeconomically - which I think is good for my kids (although that will vary from school to school, so if demographics interest you, you need to do some research.) Consistency. Maybe this isn't a big deal, but in the area we moved from, every school had not just its own curriculum, but also its own start and end dates, vacations, holidays... Here there is consistency, so camps, school-day-off programs, etc. won't start when your kid is still in school or still be running when your kid has to be back in school. And if your kid has a friend from church or soccer or whatever who is at a different school, it is easier to make plans, but also to talk about school because everyone is on the same page. From a curriculum standpoint, our old area had K-8 districts and high school districts, with multiple elementary districts feeding into one high school district. This means that kids were differently prepared for high school. MCPS does not have this problem. Tax burden. This isn't really something you'll notice day to day, but obviously it makes a difference to be paying one superintendent's salary per million people as opposed to one superintendent per 20,000. Some of the efficiency is lost when you look at how bloated the administration has to be to handle a big district, but paying more low-level administrators is still probably cheaper than paying more superintendents. Disadvantages: Big ships move slowly. As just one example, our old, tiny school district has had kids in the building this year, and MCPS has not. MCPS is trying to equitably distribute resources and provide an appropriate education to wildly different communities with different needs and demographics. There are some areas where they insist on being consistent, even when it doesn't make sense. So we can have a snow day when there is no snow on the ground because another area of the county is snowed in. On the other hand, different parts of the county do have different needs, and that is sometimes accommodated. So while it seems like they work hard to force some things, there are also cool programs that exist at just some schools or in some geographic areas, and depending on where you live, you find out you can't take advantage of them. For example, you'll read here about Blair CAP, which sounds like a cool program but is only available to kids living in certain areas. Or you'll hear from parents who insist that it is super easy to register your 6th grader for Algebra, while other families don't have that option at all. Like most districts, MCPS focuses most on the students at the very top and the very bottom, which can leave out the kids in the middle. This is more obvious in an area with a bigger socioeconomic spread than it was in our old district, where there wasn't the same range of needs in the middle. Because the middle can be somewhat lackluster, UMC and highly educated families really prize those "top" programs - CES at the elementary level, and criteria-based magnets for MS and HS. There are not enough spots at any of these for the number of qualified kids, and you see a lot of angst from parents every few years as their child hits the next decision point. Even though the DMV has a highly transitory population, MCPS is not good at evaluating needs for gifted kids from outside the system. I'm sure if your child has an IEP, it will carry over, but if you missed the cutoff for a gifted program, you'll just have to wait for the next one. For our kids, they ended up in the "right" places eventually, but it had to wait. We moved at the beginning of 4th and 6th grades, when the CES and MS magnets start, so our kids needed to wait for MS / HS to get a chance at magnet admission. And our 6th grader had to wait until 7th grade when they'd "proven" themselves to be moved to the higher level History class. This wasn't the end of the world, but it was really frustrating at the time. So, I'd say that MCPS has a lot of great opportunities and programs, but you really have to do your homework. Don't trust what you read on DCUM, which is full of both misinformation and disinformation. You need to look at each individual school / cluster separately, because they offer different things. Central admin at MCPS won't break that down for you. You really need to contact each school. Good luck! |
Anonymous
I will also add that he knows that things are much harder for kids who do not speak English well. He also knows some kids who get extra food left in their lockers to cover the weekends. You do not learn about these things as much if no one in your class needs extra help learning the language or having enough food. |
Anonymous
Umm, why not? My kid is in Orchestra and we would love to see it come back in MCPS. It is pretty miserable trying to play the violin at home by yourself on Zoom. It’s definitely possible. We have family in other states, whose districts have brought back Orchestra safely - spacing them out, kids wear masks. It’s definitely possible. |
Anonymous
But, dang, playing Tuba with a mask is hard! 
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Anonymous
That's band. |
Anonymous
There are no tubas in Orchestra. Tubas play in Band. Orchestra is strings - violin, viola, cello, bass. All of those can be easily played while wearing a mask. |