I’m not sure who’s conducting the analysis for these studies, but this really doesn’t make sense to me. Why does BCC get a humanities program when Northwood already has a Law Academy, Environmental Academy, Music and Dance Academy, and a Humanities and Media Academy—all related to the humanities? Wouldn’t it make more sense to give that to Northwood? Why would Einstein have an education program when there’s so little interest that the school was considering cutting it? The Visual and Performing Arts Academy at Einstein houses the majority of its students—why not make that one unified program and give Einstein IB as well? If someone actually took the time to analyze this base off student interest , there wouldn’t be so much panic but instead we got some lazy, last minute slop. |
Ib math is good but not equal to ap. Some of the feeder schools allow algebra in 6th. So, it goes, algebra, geometry, algebra2, precal, calc bc, multivariable calc, then linear algebra or stats is or something else. Einstein slows down kids pushing ab, then bc but a few just do bc. More would do mvc if offered. Right now parents have to drive to Wheaton or students go to MC with driving themselves or parents. We have some classes with ten or less students so it doesn’t make sense not to offer it. |
Good question. The teacher academy as the speciality makes no sense. They were discontinuing it as few years ago due to lack of interest when kids can choose it and lottery in. They never asked parents and students what interests their kids have to cater to the students needs and wants. |
Because CO wants to please our superintendent. The boundary study doesn’t touch a bit of BCC, and the best criteria-based programs are given to BCC (except the SMCS in Blair as they know that move will infuriate parents from Ws). |
Isn’t the company doing the studies out of state and has no clue about the distances or needs. |
Not true. My child had no prior art experience when entering Einstein—just what he learned from his 8th grade art teacher. After spending four years in Einstein’s Art Magnet Program, he was offered nearly full scholarships to RISD, MICA, and SCAD. If it weren’t for Einstein, we could never have afforded to send him to those schools. I will always be thankful for Einstein. |
Thomas is rushing to get this done before he flees just in time for implementation. No time for input from the people that will actually be impacted (not that central office has any clue how to do actual community engagement beyond caving immediately to PTAs from wealthy schools when they complain). |
Yes, boundary study is mostly done by the contractor company under the guidance of Mr. Mamoon from Central Office. |
That’s great and your child is super talented. That can happen but that is just one part of the arts at Einstein. For music and theater the kids are doing outside lessons and programs - PVYO, MCYO, a Jazz group, YAA. Music kids do private lessons. Theater kids do voice and acting lessons. We did not have a good middle school arts experience and had to move everything privately. |
It would be helpful for people to be more explicit with HOW the combination is impacting them. There seem to be a lot of people from DCC who are commenting on boundary threads about how the end of the regional programs will hurt them |
The concern with the combination of the boundary study and the program analysis is that based on the proposals, Einstein will have fewer students, which is good in that it relieves overcrowding, but has the additional effect of taking teachers and other staff away from the school because staff are allocated based on enrollment. This concerns people because Einstein currently does not offer a wide variety of coursework, especially in STEM, so fewer teachers would make this worse. There are kids that can't actually fulfill their graduation requirements at Einstein because they came in advanced in math and there aren't enough math classes. In addition, the proposed boundaries increase Einstein's FARMS rate somewhat, which is not necessarily a bad thing by itself but in combination with lower enrollment may decrease the percentage of high resourced students that come to the school prepared for advanced STEM classes. In addition, the current DCC system brings in kids from throughout the DCC schools that are interested in the arts to participate in Einstein's VAPA program. However, without the DCC, there may be less interest in VAPA from the local population, and that might also lead to reduced offerings at Einstein. MCPS has proposed keeping a visual arts magnet and an interest based education program at Einstein, but the visual arts magnet will become less prestigious since it will be regional and countywide. Einstein does currently have an education program (education as in courses on becoming an educator), but there was limited interest in that and they were actually proposing eliminating it. On top of all this, they are proposing putting an IB magnet and a humanities magnet at BCC. Einstein currently has an IB program, but it is very small. With the regional IB at BCC, this has a very real risk of drawing too many IB kids away from Einstein to sustain Einstein's local program. In the meantime, BCC will not just keep but expand its existing IB program, add a criteria based humanities program, and keep its other local programming like its own education program and its engineering program neither of which will be impacted by any of these changes since their boundaries aren't changing and they don't rely on out of boundary students to sustain their existing programming. |
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Not an expert in all of this, and it sure would have helped if instead of reading from a script that laid out the information, the consultants and MCPS staff laid out the reasons, they why behind the information, but:
-BCC and Whitman probably "not touched" as much because of the walk zones. Not because of perceived equity issues/favoritism toward a specific ethnicity or socioeconomic class -lower capacity numbers at WJ and Einstein because there are a million new buildings in the pipeline, and they don't want both of those schools to be severly overcrowded again in just a few years |
They are free to share data on the housing pipeline within ALL of the proposed boundaries. This is not hard. They didn't because my guess is it is based on WJ families sharing feedback about how many buildings they see going up and not any actual analysis. There is housing going up in the DCC as well. |
Did these justifications anc considerations be shared in any of the webminars and in-person meetings last week? MCPS doesn’t share their webminar slides nor recording. |
| Also if there is so much housing going up in Bethesda why are they putting regional programs in BCC that will draw more kids there? Gmafb, they are doing this because it is more comfortable for the BCC families to not change their boundaries. |