Having more magnets is good, but the transportation and structure, if you are also an arts or other interest student, is a huge issue. Plus, with the longer day, it impacts extracurricular activities, especially those outside school. Ideally all schools would have advanced classes so the smarter students will stay, but they don't and MCPS isn't caring about those schools. Only specific schools are getting the extra classes and remodeling and the rest just have to continue to deal with what they have and its up to the parents to figure it out. +1000 If the STEM magnet is in a rich school, it's a brain drain from poor schools. If it's placed in the poorest school in that region, the rich kids will stay home and the magnet is going to be a failure - think Watkins Mill IB program. Expanding should happen in small limited schools if Blair and Poolesville cannot meet the needs, not in 6 schools for each type - STEM, Humanities, Biotech and so on. If these people had any sense they will expand this in 2 or 3 schools and go from there. Some will go, transportation will be a huge barrier. |
+1000 If the STEM magnet is in a rich school, it's a brain drain from poor schools. If it's placed in the poorest school in that region, the rich kids will stay home and the magnet is going to be a failure - think Watkins Mill IB program. Expanding should happen in small limited schools if Blair and Poolesville cannot meet the needs, not in 6 schools for each type - STEM, Humanities, Biotech and so on. If these people had any sense they will expand this in 2 or 3 schools and go from there. Some will go, transportation will be a huge barrier. Blair stem is very limited. The kids already leave the schools now. I don’t get all these comments as this new plan is no different except there are six fake regions. There are no true new offerings as they are not allocating funding, staffing and transportation. Only giving kids their home schools will lead to more flight. |
MCPS is trying to expand CTE programs so students meet the 45% goal in the MD Blueprint. That’s why more than half of the programs have an industry recognized credential listed under “student outcomes” in that long document MCPS released. The academic magnets aren’t the priority in this process and they don’t seem to care if the new ones are comparable to current, successful programs. https://www.gwdb.maryland.gov/policy/gwdb2024blueprintgoalpolicyoverview.pdf |
They need to pick programs students will be interested in. |
Arts is part of Humanities. Much like, IB is not strictly humanities but interdisciplinary. I have no idea why MCPS keeps confusing these things. |