If you could add one thing to mcps what would it be?

[Anonymous]

Real commitment to, and skill at, gathering and listening to parent/teacher/student/community input (throughout all demographics and geographies, not just the noisiest ones.) Doesn't mean they need to defer to it at all times, but if there was a genuine interest and regular practice of actually learning about and paying attention to what stakeholders think and want, it would solve so many of the other problems.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So many good ones here-
1. Real discipline / consequences for poor/illegal/dangerous/disruptive behavior. Can still do therapy, counseling etc but behaving kids shouldn’t have their learning compromised by one disruptive kid in class.

2. Support gifted, accelerated kids. Keep magnet programs. Do not try to bring them down to the mean. They WILL leave the county schools and MCPS will falter. Also our society needs highest performing folks to go out into the world and do good efficient productive work.

3. Yes to textbooks. Allows kids to go back and review material easily without searching through endless web pages. Kids/people learn better when learning from a printed page. Studied in this- teachers should be given these studies in their training. The math workbooks in ES and MS are excellent! More of this please.

3. No to drivers Ed, free busing to private schools, only all gender bathrooms (kids will just hold their urine and not use the bathroom- esp at MS level, their are very self-conscious around opposite gender).

What grades are you talking about? Are you aware of the lottery?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Title.

The ability to fire poor performers

That exists. There’s a process that legally has to be followed unless you think MCPS needs more lawsuits.

As a 22 year veteran, I can say that every time I had a colleague who couldn’t teach but was allowed to stay on, it was because admin was too lazy or disorganized to follow the process. I’ve been at other schools where teachers who just needed a little support to improve were fired because admin had nothing else better to do. Kids smoking weed in the back stairwell and propping the door open to admit adult male “boyfriends” on a daily basis because there’s no cameras wasn’t worthy of their attention.

[Anonymous]

Some more after school activities to build some community-my kids’ middle school has astonishingly little offered-two sports teams in per season which take about 20 kids each in a school of 1200 kids and some Wednesday After school activities that you can pay for if you have the money.

When I was in public school-we had so many options available-any kid who wanted to could do a sport. It’s no wonder kids are always on their screens

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some more after school activities to build some community-my kids’ middle school has astonishingly little offered-two sports teams in per season which take about 20 kids each in a school of 1200 kids and some Wednesday After school activities that you can pay for if you have the money.

When I was in public school-we had so many options available-any kid who wanted to could do a sport. It’s no wonder kids are always on their screens

My middle school offered the standard sports but in addition to that had about 15 after school club opportunities, several of them athletic such as volleyball or basketball drop in.

[Anonymous]

Honesty would be a great start, generally in all the MCPS schools.

I found teachers and admin mostly evasive and dishonest.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some more after school activities to build some community-my kids’ middle school has astonishingly little offered-two sports teams in per season which take about 20 kids each in a school of 1200 kids and some Wednesday After school activities that you can pay for if you have the money.

When I was in public school-we had so many options available-any kid who wanted to could do a sport. It’s no wonder kids are always on their screens

My middle school offered the standard sports but in addition to that had about 15 after school club opportunities, several of them athletic such as volleyball or basketball drop in.

I used to sponser three afterschool clubs, plus chaperone extra evening and weekend events. I cut back for three reasons:

1) subs dried up in 2020 so I usually have to do emergency class coverage 3-4 times a week during one of my two planning periods. The other planning period is committed to meetings. The grading, emailing parents, and other work I would have done during planning periods now has to be done after school and on weekends.

2) job creep. There’s so much just more to do than six years ago. Things that used to be the responsibility of a specialist have now been delegated to classroom teachers. I’m often mentally and physically drained by 3:00 pm and it’s hard to summon up the enthusiasm and focus needed for the clubs I did.

3) the kids and parents require more management now. My school requires clubs to admit any student with a parent permission slip. As a result, we get kids who aren’t interested in the activity, but need a place to hang out. I’m all for kids having a safe place to be, but we get kids who are disruptive, disrespectful, and disinterested in the activity. Then, I have to contend with parents who pick their kids up late. The sponser is responsible for the club attendees until they are picked up. There are parents who are habitually 15-20 minutes late. Some are 30-45 min late. Sponsers don’t get paid more when kids are picked up late. I also got tired of parents who arrive late in the evening or weekend when I was just volunteering my time.

I now sponsor just one club and only do my required two chaperone duties.

Conditions have to improve if students, parents, and admin want more clubs and activities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some more after school activities to build some community-my kids’ middle school has astonishingly little offered-two sports teams in per season which take about 20 kids each in a school of 1200 kids and some Wednesday After school activities that you can pay for if you have the money.

When I was in public school-we had so many options available-any kid who wanted to could do a sport. It’s no wonder kids are always on their screens

My middle school offered the standard sports but in addition to that had about 15 after school club opportunities, several of them athletic such as volleyball or basketball drop in.

I used to sponser three afterschool clubs, plus chaperone extra evening and weekend events. I cut back for three reasons:

1) subs dried up in 2020 so I usually have to do emergency class coverage 3-4 times a week during one of my two planning periods. The other planning period is committed to meetings. The grading, emailing parents, and other work I would have done during planning periods now has to be done after school and on weekends.

2) job creep. There’s so much just more to do than six years ago. Things that used to be the responsibility of a specialist have now been delegated to classroom teachers. I’m often mentally and physically drained by 3:00 pm and it’s hard to summon up the enthusiasm and focus needed for the clubs I did.

3) the kids and parents require more management now. My school requires clubs to admit any student with a parent permission slip. As a result, we get kids who aren’t interested in the activity, but need a place to hang out. I’m all for kids having a safe place to be, but we get kids who are disruptive, disrespectful, and disinterested in the activity. Then, I have to contend with parents who pick their kids up late. The sponser is responsible for the club attendees until they are picked up. There are parents who are habitually 15-20 minutes late. Some are 30-45 min late. Sponsers don’t get paid more when kids are picked up late. I also got tired of parents who arrive late in the evening or weekend when I was just volunteering my time.

I now sponsor just one club and only do my required two chaperone duties.

Conditions have to improve if students, parents, and admin want more clubs and activities.

OP here. I agree 100% with you. Clubs are time consuming and expensive to run. If parents want more choices then they may want to consider being more involved with time and money to make it happen.

[Anonymous]

If I could add one thing to MCPS, it would be to make Kevin Yates the acting principal of every school. And if I could add another, it would be to have Colin Kaepernick make a recording of the pledge of allegiance to be played at every school. After a couple of weeks, we would hopefully have 160,000 students kneeling every morning for the pledge, and Yates on the loud speaker simping for Ukraine!

But I guess that would be asking for more than one thing...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If I could add one thing to MCPS, it would be to make Kevin Yates the acting principal of every school. And if I could add another, it would be to have Colin Kaepernick make a recording of the pledge of allegiance to be played at every school. After a couple of weeks, we would hopefully have 160,000 students kneeling every morning for the pledge, and Yates on the loud speaker simping for Ukraine!

But I guess that would be asking for more than one thing...

Thank you. This made me laugh out loud. I needed this.

I came here to say, it definitely wouldn’t be Colin Kaepernick.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some more after school activities to build some community-my kids’ middle school has astonishingly little offered-two sports teams in per season which take about 20 kids each in a school of 1200 kids and some Wednesday After school activities that you can pay for if you have the money.

When I was in public school-we had so many options available-any kid who wanted to could do a sport. It’s no wonder kids are always on their screens

My middle school offered the standard sports but in addition to that had about 15 after school club opportunities, several of them athletic such as volleyball or basketball drop in.

This is the problem there is no consistency between schools.

[Anonymous]

Cohorting. If it could really be anything it would be to break it up. But cohorting is reasonable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Title.

more built in snow days

[Anonymous]

[twitter]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Title.

The ability to fire poor performers

That exists. There’s a process that legally has to be followed unless you think MCPS needs more lawsuits.

As a 22 year veteran, I can say that every time I had a colleague who couldn’t teach but was allowed to stay on, it was because admin was too lazy or disorganized to follow the process. I’ve been at other schools where teachers who just needed a little support to improve were fired because admin had nothing else better to do. Kids smoking weed in the back stairwell and propping the door open to admit adult male “boyfriends” on a daily basis because there’s no cameras wasn’t worthy of their attention.

How often is admin the problem? Just look at Beidelman and many in his cohort that still work in McPs

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Title.

more built in snow days

Yep More inclement weather days