Seneca Valley HS
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Anonymous
| Does anyone know any concrete information about where the redistricting for the high school will be once they finish construction? |
Anonymous
| According to mcps’ planning department, boundaries for new schools are decided upon 18months before the school opens. |
Anonymous
| I read somewhere that boundary studies will happen this September. |
Anonymous
Look what turned up when I googled Seneca Valley boundary study: MONTGOMERY STRUGGLES WITH SCHOOL BORDERS y Dan Beyers September 15, 1996 The catcalls and booing took Carole Deminco by surprise the night she and a committee of parents tried to finalize their recommendations for new school boundaries in Montgomery County's fast-growing northern tier. People accused them of stacking some schools with low-income children, of acting out of self-interest, of stifling debate. It all seemed so uncalled-for. So nasty. The kind of rancor reminiscent of the desegregation debates of 20 years ago -- in cities, not in places such as Germantown, North Potomac, Darnestown or Gaithersburg. "I have never been through such a gut-wrenching process," Deminco said. "I mean, if kids had acted like that, you'd throw them out of the classroom." School boundary decisions in the northern region used to involve nothing more complicated than finding room for children of the young suburban newcomers. But as the population there has mushroomed -- Germantown alone grew from 2,500 people in 1970 to about 60,000 today -- school officials have struggled to draw boundaries that cut across new but disparate neighborhoods of $350,000 houses, town houses and subsidized garden apartments. Passions roil over notions of community identity, economic status and racial and ethnic prejudice -- issues once thought to be largely the preoccupation of school communities closer to the District line. The preliminary discussions on boundary changes in the upcounty area pitted parent-teacher associations against one another, strained friendships and led to petition drives and angry threats of legal action. Superintendent Paul L. Vance, who is scheduled to make his own boundary recommendations to the school board in November, said the debate "came to a head much sooner than I thought it would." And it reinforced, for him, the need to balance schools not just by race but also along social and economic lines so that no school becomes typecast by the kinds of students that attend it. "It's all part of this insidious practice of labeling youngsters, and we need to move away from it," Vance said. The demographic debate in the upcounty area is one echoing throughout the outer ring of communities surrounding Washington, as Prince William, Loudoun, Howard and Anne Arundel counties try to realign school districts to make room for growing and increasingly diverse school populations. Andrea Eaton said her family moved to Gaithersburg five years ago thinking it was one nice, integrated and mostly middle-class community until she saw the way people tried to draw school boundaries. "I'm really afraid we're going to end up with have and have-not schools," she said. "We're becoming just like downcounty." The northern Montgomery debate is driven by the need to open new middle and high schools by 1998 to relieve crowding in the secondary schools that make up the Quince Orchard and Seneca Valley high school clusters. A cluster includes the middle and elementary schools that feed into a high school. By opening a new high school, school officials will create a new, third cluster in the region. Although many parents have for years clamored for the new schools, there has been far less agreement on what schools should be tapped to fill that new cluster. Much of the debate stems from the location of the new schools. Both will be in Germantown, in what is the Seneca Valley cluster. To draw students from the crowded Quince Orchard cluster, school officials must bus children to the other side of Seneca Creek State Park, a huge park that serves as a natural boundary between Quince Orchard and Seneca Valley. Few parents favor any solution that would put their children on long bus rides across the park, and some chafe at the idea of sending their children to a school in Germantown, regarded by some as a cut below their communities in North Potomac, Darnestown and the wealthier enclaves of Gaithersburg. "There's been concerns that if one school building is perceived as being better than another, it will have an effect on property values," said Geoff Ferri, a co-president of the Quince Orchard PTA cluster. "But we're supposed to be talking about kids, not property values." Such tensions made the setting of new boundaries a nearly impossible task for a committee of parents, whose members were drafted by the school system to come up with recommendations this year. Members quickly rejected three options floated by a school planner and studied four others before discarding those and coming up with nine more. In May, by a vote of 21 to 19, the committee endorsed a plan called Option 15 -- which later was amended -- arguing that it minimized busing costs while still ensuring that schools in the new cluster remain reasonably balanced demographically. The decision, however, immediately prompted a backlash from critics who complained that the proposal left the new high school with a disproportionate number of low-income students. According to school system figures, 27.3 percent of the incoming students at the new, as-yet unnamed high school would qualify for free or reduced-price meals, called FARMs, compared with 16.7 percent at Quince Orchard and 23 percent at Seneca Valley. "You're talking a 60 percent difference between {the new school and Quince Orchard}, and when there are two high schools next to each other with that kind of difference, parents will fight to get their children into the school with the lower FARMs numbers," said Denise McQuighan, whose husband served on the boundary committee. McQuighan transferred two of her three children out of her neighborhood elementary school and into another school serving a less diverse population after trying unsuccessfully for four years to get administrators to offer more courses for students who are above grade level. "Diversity is good, but teachers cannot be expected to address the needs of a significant number of children who are below grade level at the same time they must address the needs of a significant number of students who are above grade level," McQuighan said. She said she would be less likely to send her children away from her neighborhood school if all schools had to contend with similar demographics and offered similar programs. But drawing the boundaries to create such balance can be difficult. At the middle school level, parents at Jones Lane Elementary in Darnestown rebelled when they were confronted with a proposal to bus children past their current middle school to the new school planned for Germantown. Some complained that their relatively affluent community was selected for the move to lower the proportion of poor children at the new school, and they said they resented being used for that purpose. Officially, community leaders argued that other boundary plans could achieve the same social and economic balance without taking Jones Lane middle school students so far from home. "Unfortunately, when boundary decisions are put into the community, housing values, bigotry and prejudice often overshadow the rights' of all students to be successful' students," Fields Road Elementary PTA leaders Tami Blowers and Beth Rosenfeld said in a letter to the Board of Education. School officials say the desire for demographic balance often conflicts with county housing patterns in which apartments and town houses are clustered in one part of a community apart from more affluent neighborhoods of single-family houses. Also, they say, achieving balance can be especially difficult in a fast-growing region such as northern Montgomery, where the relative numbers of rich and poor can change significantly with each new housing development that opens. Compounding the problem is the fact that FARM numbers are a crude indicator of the census of poor children in a given school, particularly at the high school level, where many students choose not to apply for the lunch discounts for fear of being tagged as impoverished, school officials said. When they draw boundaries, school officials try to consider the number of students who don't speak English fluently and those who change residence frequently. School board member Stephen N. Abrams (2nd District) said county officials may have to begin looking at tried-and-proven downcounty tactics to resolve the debate. Abrams said it may be time to turn the new high school into a magnet school and use it like the Montgomery Blair High School math and science magnet in Silver Spring to attract students to a school they otherwise might not want to attend. But school board member Nancy J. King (1st District) said any solution is likely to leave some parents unhappy: "It's one of the most emotional decisions we face this coming year." https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1996/09/15/montgomery-struggles-with-school-borders/93e60665-4a07-4a6e-aff7-e0282a064d8c/?utm_term=.5d560cfed9a3 |
Anonymous
From the CIP: Planning Study: A boundary study is recommended to explore the reassignment of Clarksburg and Northwest high school students to Seneca Valley High School. As part of the boundary study, middle school articulation patterns in the Seneca Valley Cluster will be reviewed in order to evalu- ate utilizations and articulation patterns, therefore Roberto Clemente and Martin Luther King, Jr. middle schools will participate in the boundary study. The boundary study will begin in September 2018 with Board action scheduled in November 2019. |
Anonymous
More: A BATTLE OVER BALANCE A debate has erupted over a proposal to change school boundaries in the section of northwest Montgomery County that will be served by two new schools. Some parents fear that the new boundaries could change the demographic balance of schools, leading to some schools serving a disproportionate number of poor students and those who are transient or not fluent in English. Here's how a proposal by a PTA committee could affect the socioeconomic makeup of the schools. STUDENTS WHO: Receive free and reduced meals/Take English as a second language/Attend more than one school* Quince Orchard High Current 18.9%/4.7%/17.4% Projected 16.7/4.1/15.7 Seneca Valley High Current 24.7/2.5/18.9 Projected 23.0/2.6/17.2 Northwest High Current n/a/n/a/n/a Projected 27.3/4.1/22.2 Ridgeview Middle Current 18.9/4.7/17.4 Projected 20.4/5.0/18.7 Clemente Middle Current 25.4/2.2/14.2 Projected 23.3/4.5/19.9 King Middle Current 23.9/2.8/17.2 Projected 23.9/2.8/17.2 Northwest Middle [Kingsview] Current n/a/n/a/n/a Projected 20.3/1.9/17.1 County 23.2%/6.9%/18.8% * Known as the mobility rate, this figure represents the percentage of students who do not attend a high school for all four years or a middle school for three. NOTE: Projected numbers are based on Northwest Middle School opening in September 1997 and Northwest High opening in September 1998. SOURCE: Montgomery County Public Schools |
Anonymous
| After the reconstruction, SV will be the largest HS in MOCO. The boundary studies will include Clarksburg and Northwest High schools. It's going to be a painful process I'm sure. Interesting though that in the CIP it states that with the school under reconstruction, there is an opportunity to expand career technology education for students living in the upcounty area and the 4th floor should be built with that in mind. It sounds like the school would eventually have some type of magnet program or perhaps upcounty might start following the DCC approach? |
Anonymous
| UMC parents won’t be satisfied unless there is true tracking or clustering. |
Anonymous
| 900 seats will be available to alleviate the overcrowding in Northwest and Clarksburg. I do think that they will try to put all the Germantown kids at Seneca Valley. |
Anonymous
Why? Northwest HS is also in Germantown. |
Anonymous
Sorry, I meant I think they will try to put all Germantown kids currently in the Clarksburg cluster in Seneca Valley.. |
Anonymous
Oh, ok. If I had to bet, I'd bet that Daly and Fox Chapel will stay in Clarksburg and that Gibbs will go to Seneca Valley. But fortunately I don't have to bet. 
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Anonymous
I agree on Gibbs. Honestly they need to put Daly and Fox Chapel there as well since so much building is still happening in Clarksburg. Cabin Branch is going to be bringing in tons of families. |
Anonymous
| Cabin Branch could go to Seneca Valley too. After the new Clarksburg ES across from the Harris Teeter is built, the next Clarksburg ES would be at Cabin Branch. |
Anonymous
| Why does someone keep posting articles from the 90s? |