B-CC/WJ capacity cluster meeting

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

PP here, and absolutely. But isn't Whitman similarly full to the brim? Perhaps make room at BCC by shifting kids to WJ?

Not sure what can be done here, but it illustrates that the planning can't just address the issues now, but needs to deal with things that are coming 5, 10, and 15 years down the road.

Walter Johnson is so over capacity that MCPS decided to reopen Woodward as a high school.

Seriously. PP above, have you been following along at all?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Isn’t there more open space in the DCC than in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area that is very dense. It seems like they need Woodward and another site in the DCC to actually deal with all the overcrowding in lower MoCo. There is no need to pit overcrowded school against each other. Instead advocate for doing both.

Why would you think that there was more open space in Kensington, Wheaton, Aspen Hill, Glenmont, Forest Glen, etc., than in the Bethesda/Chevy Chase area? Keeping in mind that MCPS says it needs at least 35 acres for a high school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know much about the new plans for Woodward, but it seems like you could easily fill up a new cluster by siphoning off the excess from the already overcrowded Whitman, BCC, WJ, and possibly Einstein and Richard Montgomery clusters. If you shifted one ES east in each cluster, you could then redistribute the other ES boundaries. It doesn’t seem practical to keep stuffing more kids into the existing elementary schools just to overcrowd the MS and HS.

What a good thing that MCPS is doing a boundary analysis to assess the feasibility of ideas just like this one!

But, it seems like they aren’t really doing this. If you keep looking at adding additions to existing ES buildings and also won’t consider returning the BCC elementary schools to neighborhood K-5 buildings, you are not really focusing on getting each kid into a right-sized, non-overcrowded school with a reasonable commute all the way through HS.

Decoupling BCC elementaries does not address capacity at all - you are merely moving kids around. It’s like re-areanging deck chairs on the Titanic. The longest commutes are between Chevy Chase East of wisc and RHPS. Also kids from RHPS get home late because the school starts later - around 9:30. Some buses have a 20 minute commute time from first pick up to school door. Others are as long as 40 minutes, but these are the buses which have many stops. Lobby to change that rather than use it as your Trojan Horse to re-segregate. Your family can’t spend 20 minutes in the service of integration? Mine was happy to. I was happy as a child when the cluster desegregated. I had many friends of all backgrounds and that experience served me well in college and career.

[Anonymous]

Between the completely siloed school consultants who have no mandate to consider quality of life issues and recommend converting park land to paved school surfaces and the Planning Board, who have never met a development they did not like, there will not be a single tree left down county.

As others have said, BCC merely needs to shuffle the deck chairs. WJ is a whole different story. Farmland, Garret Park and Ashburton are all packed to the gills. They should look in the White Flint master plan area for a space.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Between the completely siloed school consultants who have no mandate to consider quality of life issues and recommend converting park land to paved school surfaces and the Planning Board, who have never met a development they did not like, there will not be a single tree left down county.

As others have said, BCC merely needs to shuffle the deck chairs. WJ is a whole different story. Farmland, Garret Park and Ashburton are all packed to the gills. They should look in the White Flint master plan area for a space.

There are two sites in the White Flint sector plan.

• Public Schools The proposed residential development in the Sector Plan area will generate new students at each level, but primarily at the elementary school level. Projections from proposed development indicate the need for an additional elementary school, whereas new middle and high school students can be accommodated at the existing high school and middle school facilities.There is no site large enough for a typical 10 to 12-acre elementary school site within the Sector Plan area. MCPS has identified • two sites that are suitable for an elementary school. The preferred site is located on the White Flint Mall Property, along the southern boundary south of the proposed Nebel Street Extended. The second site is the Luttrell Property, in Block 1 of the NoBe District.Designate an elementary school site in the southern portion of the White Flint Mall Property as the preferred site.,Designate the Luttrell Property as an alternative school site

https://www.montgomeryplanning.org/community/whiteflint/documents/WhiteFlintSectorPlanApprovedandAdopted_web.pdf

[Anonymous]

Right, but because the consultants were looking for a “joint” BCC/WJ space, they aren’t on the list of 10

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Right, but because the consultants were looking for a “joint” BCC/WJ space, they aren’t on the list of 10

Montrose Center is on the list and it’s further north than White Flint. And the North Bethesda Community Center site is not County-owned. So I don’t know why the White Flint sites weren’t included. Come on Monday to the meeting and you can ask!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know much about the new plans for Woodward, but it seems like you could easily fill up a new cluster by siphoning off the excess from the already overcrowded Whitman, BCC, WJ, and possibly Einstein and Richard Montgomery clusters. If you shifted one ES east in each cluster, you could then redistribute the other ES boundaries. It doesn’t seem practical to keep stuffing more kids into the existing elementary schools just to overcrowd the MS and HS.

What a good thing that MCPS is doing a boundary analysis to assess the feasibility of ideas just like this one!

But, it seems like they aren’t really doing this. If you keep looking at adding additions to existing ES buildings and also won’t consider returning the BCC elementary schools to neighborhood K-5 buildings, you are not really focusing on getting each kid into a right-sized, non-overcrowded school with a reasonable commute all the way through HS.

Decoupling BCC elementaries does not address capacity at all - you are merely moving kids around. It’s like re-areanging deck chairs on the Titanic. The longest commutes are between Chevy Chase East of wisc and RHPS. Also kids from RHPS get home late because the school starts later - around 9:30. Some buses have a 20 minute commute time from first pick up to school door. Others are as long as 40 minutes, but these are the buses which have many stops. Lobby to change that rather than use it as your Trojan Horse to re-segregate. Your family can’t spend 20 minutes in the service of integration? Mine was happy to. I was happy as a child when the cluster desegregated. I had many friends of all backgrounds and that experience served me well in college and career.

Your assumption that every person’s biggest focus is segregation is counterproductive. I’m from a part of the country that has a much higher minority population, so the concern between relatively small differences in FARMS rates between these schools needs to be kept in perspective.

My kids are little and are in a Westland-zoned elementary school, so I am also not complaining about the busing from a personal perspective. However, we deliberately avoided house hunting in neighborhoods with split articulation because we have three kids close in age and two different schools would have been a logistical hardship on us. I can personally attest to the benefits to my entire family of a close-by neighborhood school. To flip your argument on its head, I don’t see why only rich white people should be allowed the positive benefits of convenience and community.

Personally, my biggest concern is overcrowding. I have been a high school teacher at a very diverse school with many challenges. All of these challenges are made more difficult by overcrowding and the accompanying class sizes. Returning the Silver Lake elementary schools to neighborhood schools has the dual outcome of giving those neighborhoods local community schools and allowing at least one of them to be moved into the new Woodward district to reduce the size of BCC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

PP here, and absolutely. But isn't Whitman similarly full to the brim? Perhaps make room at BCC by shifting kids to WJ?

Not sure what can be done here, but it illustrates that the planning can't just address the issues now, but needs to deal with things that are coming 5, 10, and 15 years down the road.

Walter Johnson is so over capacity that MCPS decided to reopen Woodward as a high school.

Seriously. PP above, have you been following along at all?

Sorry, I meant Woodward, not Walter Johnson.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Personally, my biggest concern is overcrowding. I have been a high school teacher at a very diverse school with many challenges. All of these challenges are made more difficult by overcrowding and the accompanying class sizes. Returning the Silver Lake elementary schools to neighborhood schools has the dual outcome of giving those neighborhoods local community schools and allowing at least one of them to be moved into the new Woodward district to reduce the size of BCC.

What is Silver Lake?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Personally, my biggest concern is overcrowding. I have been a high school teacher at a very diverse school with many challenges. All of these challenges are made more difficult by overcrowding and the accompanying class sizes. Returning the Silver Lake elementary schools to neighborhood schools has the dual outcome of giving those neighborhoods local community schools and allowing at least one of them to be moved into the new Woodward district to reduce the size of BCC.

What is Silver Lake?

Sorry- Silver Creek. Silver Lake is a place near my hometown and I always revert to that in my head.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Personally, my biggest concern is overcrowding. I have been a high school teacher at a very diverse school with many challenges. All of these challenges are made more difficult by overcrowding and the accompanying class sizes. Returning the Silver Lake elementary schools to neighborhood schools has the dual outcome of giving those neighborhoods local community schools and allowing at least one of them to be moved into the new Woodward district to reduce the size of BCC.

What is Silver Lake?

Sorry- Silver Creek. Silver Lake is a place near my hometown and I always revert to that in my head.

But BCC just got an addition and it's not in urgent need of downsizing. And no one is going to impose a split articulation on Silver Creek - the boundary study was heavily contested and bumping one of the elementaries out of BCC would create a new furor without solving any real problem.

Look, I've had kids at Rosemary Hills and while I liked the school, I'd prefer a single K-5 pattern for simplicity's sake. And I'm not totally sold that the desegregation purpose of Rosemary Hills exists in quite the same way that it did in the 1970s when this arrangement was established. But MCPS has huge capacity & equity issues to address and for the most part the BCC zone is in pretty good shape on both counts. The study of BCC/WJ elementaries actually reinforces the issues raised in the Woodward planning process, which is that WJ and its feeder elementaries are wildly overcrowded. MCPS needs to focus on solving those problems, rather than satisfying some Chevy Chase moms who resent that their kiddos have to go to kindergarten near brown people in Silver Spring.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

PP here, and absolutely. But isn't Whitman similarly full to the brim? Perhaps make room at BCC by shifting kids to WJ?

Not sure what can be done here, but it illustrates that the planning can't just address the issues now, but needs to deal with things that are coming 5, 10, and 15 years down the road.

Walter Johnson is so over capacity that MCPS decided to reopen Woodward as a high school.

Seriously. PP above, have you been following along at all?

Sorry, I meant Woodward, not Walter Johnson.

It's been very clear in the CIP that Woodward is for Walter Johnson and the Downcounty Consortium. So no, that's not how you'd make room at BCC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Personally, my biggest concern is overcrowding. I have been a high school teacher at a very diverse school with many challenges. All of these challenges are made more difficult by overcrowding and the accompanying class sizes. Returning the Silver Lake elementary schools to neighborhood schools has the dual outcome of giving those neighborhoods local community schools and allowing at least one of them to be moved into the new Woodward district to reduce the size of BCC.

What is Silver Lake?

Sorry- Silver Creek. Silver Lake is a place near my hometown and I always revert to that in my head.

But BCC just got an addition and it's not in urgent need of downsizing. And no one is going to impose a split articulation on Silver Creek - the boundary study was heavily contested and bumping one of the elementaries out of BCC would create a new furor without solving any real problem.

Look, I've had kids at Rosemary Hills and while I liked the school, I'd prefer a single K-5 pattern for simplicity's sake. And I'm not totally sold that the desegregation purpose of Rosemary Hills exists in quite the same way that it did in the 1970s when this arrangement was established. But MCPS has huge capacity & equity issues to address and for the most part the BCC zone is in pretty good shape on both counts. The study of BCC/WJ elementaries actually reinforces the issues raised in the Woodward planning process, which is that WJ and its feeder elementaries are wildly overcrowded. MCPS needs to focus on solving those problems, rather than satisfying some Chevy Chase moms who resent that their kiddos have to go to kindergarten near brown people in Silver Spring.

I don’t disagree with you that WJ is in worse shape than BCC in terms of overcrowding. That’s why most of the new feeder pattern for it will come from WJ and the DCC. All the clusters in lower MoCo are overcrowded. However, you have significant new development in downtown Bethesda and Westbard that is going to impact both BCC and Whitman in the next decade. Since there is no plan to build West of Wisconsin Ave, the logical solution is to shift each district West and create more space in a new (or probably two new) high schools in the East in the next decade. Woodward is just the first one.

You also undermine your own rebuttal by returning to the jab “satisfying some Chevy Chase moms who resent that their kiddos have to go to Kindergarten near brown people in Silver Spring.” The whole point was to show you that there are reasonable arguments on the side of decoupling that have nothing to do with segregation. There really isn’t that much segregation going on at this point and there are very valid reasons to make a change. You can disagree with how to weight the balance of those reasons, but don’t continue to argue as if the only reason anyone disagrees with you is that they are a raging racist hell-bent on segregation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

PP here, and absolutely. But isn't Whitman similarly full to the brim? Perhaps make room at BCC by shifting kids to WJ?

Not sure what can be done here, but it illustrates that the planning can't just address the issues now, but needs to deal with things that are coming 5, 10, and 15 years down the road.

Walter Johnson is so over capacity that MCPS decided to reopen Woodward as a high school.

Seriously. PP above, have you been following along at all?

Sorry, I meant Woodward, not Walter Johnson.

It's been very clear in the CIP that Woodward is for Walter Johnson and the Downcounty Consortium. So no, that's not how you'd make room at BCC.

It could be. That’s the whole point of doing a study and asking the community for feedback.