Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:While some parents and families have been happy to be able to select a school, the consortia model has been an abject failure.
The original reason the NEC and DCC were created was so that MCPS/BOE didn't have to draw hard boundary lines when Blake opened and Northwood reopened. Boundary studies and hard boundary lines are divisive and controversial (see what is happening now with Woodward/Crown). Instead, they opted to make soft boundary lines with a promise that families would have choices.
What has happened over time is:
1. The signature programs have become less and less "signature". There really is very little difference in course offerings from school to school within the consortia.
2. The schools in the consortia have very little sense of community, with lots of vertical articulation challenges. Listen to all the outcry about splitting elementary and middle schools in the Crown/Woodward studies. There is a reason those communities are against splitting their feeder schools. In the NEC and DCC, it is splitting feeders on steroids.
3. MCPS is spending significant money by sending five buses to every DCC bus stop and three to every NEC bus stop.
4. In the NEC in particular, there was a goal to try to socially engineer demographics in the three schools through the choice lottery system. As time went on though, the NEC as a whole became more and more homogenous. Twenty years ago, Blake was the "white" school, PB the "black" school and Springbrook the "Hispanic" school. The three schools look very similar to each other now.
5. Extracurricular activity involvement becomes a real challenge in the consortia. Getting rides home after practices or rehearsals or back to school for games or concerts is a big challenge when everyone lives to spread out. Add in the challenge that families don't know each other well and carpooling to/from school activities is extremely difficult.
6. In the DCC in particular, things were never going to be on an even playing field when comparing the schools. From Blair's specialty programs to Wheaton's brand new school, some of the schools were always going to get the short end of the stick (Kennedy and Northwood in particular). Northwood's new facility will hopefully improve things, but the long layover at Woodward exacerbated the gap.
Staff at the schools will be ecstatic if/when the consortia go away. Families will initially be upset - any time choice is taken away it isn't popular. But going away from the consortia is in the best interests of MCPS and the individual schools.
It will be interesting to see if these "region" models have the same negative impacts on all 25 schools, or if the number of students going to their non-home school is minimal.
Northwood will get the CAP from Blair and has the Montgomery College program, so I am optimistic for Northwood.
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