Initial boundary options for Crown/Damascus study

[Anonymous]

The discussion here is useless, the ways the fours options are presented demonstrates a lack of consideration for the families and communities affected, and MCPS treat this process as a numbers game—shuffling students and neighborhoods like pawns to improve statistics.
Pls provide feedback to their survey as minimal and organize the community engagement activities:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScFJdfdw3J1V0hIMZI440SsK5P40X-SRTNRrMQla-mbI0g3PA/viewform?pli=1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

brightwood wrote:

Although I don’t love it, I feel the same. The kids will still be at a W school and my property value remains the same.
It’s a win for us.

This "W" school thing is such BS. I was at a non-W MCPS high school and I have a fantastic career and multiple gradate degrees. I have friends who went to "W" schools and are no more successful than I am, many less successful. Even the "worst" high school in Montgomery County is better than 99% of the schools around this country. People need to chill out. Your kids will be just fine at Crown. There are kids at RM and Rockville and Gaithersburg who will go on to be doctors, lawyer, and scientists. People need to get over themselves.

+10000

I graduated from Rockville HS and am very successful. I know many of my classmates have also done very well for themselves.

It’s not where you go to school, it’s having the parental support that makes a kid succeed. It doesn’t matter how you switch up the demographics A kid will succeed if it is important to the family. If the parents value education, the kid will feel it and understand it.

My parents valued education and told me it is something no one can take away from me.

People are not entitled to got to a W school because they bought a home in a certain area. You need a new real estate agent if that is the case. The boundary study has been discussed at least for the last 5 years.

I bought my home in 1994 for the schools Wootton. We were redistricted then from frost to cabin John we have done our time. Stone mill should stay at Wootton

Wayside should be moved out of Churchill

Parts if Dufirf should go to QO

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We moved from a QO-zoned neighborhood to a Wootton one when our kids started school (which may get shifted now) so I completely get all the anxiety.

I’m also a school integration researcher and wanted to share a few considerations:

1) School integration is one of the most effective ways of improving school quality. There’s tons of research showing integrated schools significantly reduce achievement gaps - students from underresourced communities perform better and crucially students from resourced communities perform just as well as they always have - their test scores do not decline at all.
2) Students from well resourced communities also see benefits - as adults they are more open to other people’s perspectives, better communicators, more tolerant of differences.
3) For those of you concerned about your kids’ future earnings, high performing kids from schools with higher FARM rates actually have a significantly better chance of getting into elite colleges than kids from a W school - if you move a student who is applying to an Ivy from a W school into QO/Gaithersburg etc., their odds of getting admitted increase - and again, evidence suggests that their academic performance will not go down because of that move.

For this boundary study to work and to help create an MCPS that doesn’t have such a massive bifurcation between its high and low performing schools, the district needs to build an affirmative case for why these moves matter and a coalition of supporters - something they absolutely have not done. But there is a case to be made that these moves can be good for all kids, including those who parents don’t have the resources to effectively advocate for their desired outcome.

Totally agree with you, PP. This is ultimately a PR problem, and then also somewhat of a logistics problem.

There are almost 3 years to prepare for this: the kids will be fine, and the kids who struggle with social anxiety or depend on deeply entrenched existing networks will have time to prepare (via waivers, or creating new supports, or seeing that over time many of their their friends will move with them and their communities will adapt). Will kids still struggle? Yes. And unfortunately there will always be kids who struggle and that's not really all on the boundaries.

There are YEARS here for the kids, parents, teachers, schools, and communities to work on creating new communities around split articulation. Split articularion is a regularly occurring thing and it can be contended with. Watch the kids themselves, who will know by Christmas where they are going to MS and HS; they are not going to be cry babies about it - they are going to start developing school pride and groups around this immediately. Will it mix some things up? Maybe But in the end, groups get mixed up at these ages. It's a normal, good thing.

The logistical piece is important: if a 13 year old with parents who work will be playing a sport at a school they can not walk to, the county needs to ensure buses are provided at appropriate times AND that programming exists around those times (looking at you, rabid high school coaches with weird practices). This can be contended with, and this needs to be focused on as a real solution as opposed to senseless whining.

I say this as someone who sent my kid to a school as "an other" and say my kid benefit from it. I also have a kid who switched schools in 9th and attended some magnets that saw mass-dispersion. These kids ARE resilient partly because they are, but these things kind of help to build resiliency in otherwise healthy kids.

Everybody relax and try to be productive rather than insufferable. And show your kids their schools are going to be great and they are going to do well and have a good experience and have friends.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know why people talk about RM like it is a high poverty school. It only has a 28% FARMS rate. It’s a hair below the W schools economically, and it’s wealthier than QO, Sherwood, Damascus, Blake, and every DCC/NEC school. BCC is socio-economically closer to RM than it is to every W school except for WJ.

RM consistently ranks in the top 10 high schools in MD. There are other high schools in MCPS with magnet programs that still don’t rank anywhere near that high, so clearly it’s not just magnet students who are high-performing.

And frankly, WJ families who will be redistricted to Woodward are going to attend a high school that is much higher FARMS than RM.

+1 exactly.

If you look at JWMS, it's not a super high FARMs school, and their scores, while not great, are not as bad as many other MS. It's not in a W cluster, too be sure, but it's certainly not ganglandia with very low test scores. It's on par or better than some MS with similar FARMs rate, like Lakeland MS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We moved from a QO-zoned neighborhood to a Wootton one when our kids started school (which may get shifted now) so I completely get all the anxiety.

I’m also a school integration researcher and wanted to share a few considerations:

1) School integration is one of the most effective ways of improving school quality. There’s tons of research showing integrated schools significantly reduce achievement gaps - students from underresourced communities perform better and crucially students from resourced communities perform just as well as they always have - their test scores do not decline at all.
2) Students from well resourced communities also see benefits - as adults they are more open to other people’s perspectives, better communicators, more tolerant of differences.
3) For those of you concerned about your kids’ future earnings, high performing kids from schools with higher FARM rates actually have a significantly better chance of getting into elite colleges than kids from a W school - if you move a student who is applying to an Ivy from a W school into QO/Gaithersburg etc., their odds of getting admitted increase - and again, evidence suggests that their academic performance will not go down because of that move.

For this boundary study to work and to help create an MCPS that doesn’t have such a massive bifurcation between its high and low performing schools, the district needs to build an affirmative case for why these moves matter and a coalition of supporters - something they absolutely have not done. But there is a case to be made that these moves can be good for all kids, including those who parents don’t have the resources to effectively advocate for their desired outcome.

Totally agree with you, PP. This is ultimately a PR problem, and then also somewhat of a logistics problem.

There are almost 3 years to prepare for this: the kids will be fine, and the kids who struggle with social anxiety or depend on deeply entrenched existing networks will have time to prepare (via waivers, or creating new supports, or seeing that over time many of their their friends will move with them and their communities will adapt). Will kids still struggle? Yes. And unfortunately there will always be kids who struggle and that's not really all on the boundaries.

There are YEARS here for the kids, parents, teachers, schools, and communities to work on creating new communities around split articulation. Split articularion is a regularly occurring thing and it can be contended with. Watch the kids themselves, who will know by Christmas where they are going to MS and HS; they are not going to be cry babies about it - they are going to start developing school pride and groups around this immediately. Will it mix some things up? Maybe But in the end, groups get mixed up at these ages. It's a normal, good thing.

The logistical piece is important: if a 13 year old with parents who work will be playing a sport at a school they can not walk to, the county needs to ensure buses are provided at appropriate times AND that programming exists around those times (looking at you, rabid high school coaches with weird practices). This can be contended with, and this needs to be focused on as a real solution as opposed to senseless whining.

I say this as someone who sent my kid to a school as "an other" and say my kid benefit from it. I also have a kid who switched schools in 9th and attended some magnets that saw mass-dispersion. These kids ARE resilient partly because they are, but these things kind of help to build resiliency in otherwise healthy kids.

Everybody relax and try to be productive rather than insufferable. And show your kids their schools are going to be great and they are going to do well and have a good experience and have friends.

+1 well said.

A new HS is being built. Boundaries will change because they need to change. Demographics shifts over the past 20 years means changes are required. HS boundaries around this area haven't changed in 20 years. MS are also over capacity.

Boundaries are going to change. Stop throwing tantrums because *you* don't want to move. It's not just *you*. Lots of people will have to move. If you have a "woe is me attitude", your kids will pick up on it. Make the best of it.

It's like a kid who doesn't get into the college they want, but instead, has to go to a "lesser" school. You can still get your kid excited about it, and more than likely, they will be happy there. My kid went through exactly this very thing.

[Anonymous]

I’m a former MCPS teacher. Taught at Churchill and Wheaton. The biggest difference academically is that lower performing students at Churchill had more outside of school options (private tutoring, Kumon, etc) that’s the reason they have higher test schools. Some of my brightest students were at Wheaton. That being said, there was a vast difference between the schools, discipline wise. Just adding my two cents because we all get caught up on which is a “better” school when there are great teachers (and bad ones) at every school. Parental involvement is 1000% the difference is what makes a school better.

[Anonymous]

The boundaries are changing. Folks just need to accept that and get over it. Property values are not the focus or problem of the school district. Should the district maintain walkers, YES , but because it makes good sense in terms of resource usage (buses, people, finances). Will there be some splits articulations, YES, it’s inevitable given where schools are located and the amount of kids we’re talking about. Should they minimize the split articulations as much as possible(again for resource usage) and spread it around where makes sense, YES.

This whole “W school” thing is old and over emphasized. Frankly it would do the district a world of good to publicly toss it in the graveyard once and for all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The boundaries are changing. Folks just need to accept that and get over it. Property values are not the focus or problem of the school district. Should the district maintain walkers, YES , but because it makes good sense in terms of resource usage (buses, people, finances). Will there be some splits articulations, YES, it’s inevitable given where schools are located and the amount of kids we’re talking about. Should they minimize the split articulations as much as possible(again for resource usage) and spread it around where makes sense, YES.

This whole “W school” thing is old and over emphasized. Frankly it would do the district a world of good to publicly toss it in the graveyard once and for all.

+1 It would be great if MCPS could even out the FARMs rate across all of the schools so we can stop with the "W" school nonsense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: Property values are not the focus or problem of the school district.

Yeah this is true unfortunately, I recently bought a property that is probably moving from Wootton to Crown. This change is definitely going to hurt the net worth.

Luckily my kids are still young, I'll have time to recoup losses and move down the street back into Wootton before they hit HS, but I feel for my neighbors who dont have that kind of time. Hopfully the Wootton cluster just ends up sticking together and this isn't a problem.

[Anonymous]

This seems to be what MCPS is trying to do. They hate that they have "good schools" because that means they have "bad schools."

This effort is about carving out boundaries for new properties (great), alleviating overcrowding (wonderful), but a heaping helping of "let's use this opportunity to change perceptions because we are out of ideas."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The boundaries are changing. Folks just need to accept that and get over it. Property values are not the focus or problem of the school district. Should the district maintain walkers, YES , but because it makes good sense in terms of resource usage (buses, people, finances). Will there be some splits articulations, YES, it’s inevitable given where schools are located and the amount of kids we’re talking about. Should they minimize the split articulations as much as possible(again for resource usage) and spread it around where makes sense, YES.

This whole “W school” thing is old and over emphasized. Frankly it would do the district a world of good to publicly toss it in the graveyard once and for all.

+1 It would be great if MCPS could even out the FARMs rate across all of the schools so we can stop with the "W" school nonsense.

I agree in theory, but how do you do this in a county where the wealth is largely concentrated in the western portion and the poverty is largely concentrated in the eastern portion and these portions are miles and miles and almost an hour apart? This is how they're trying to do their best at doing that. The only improvement I can see that would help is to create MORE high-achieving magnets in the poorer parts of the county, but when you already have strong schools in the western part, people opt out because too far is too far. I mean, just look at Churchill's Beyond the Bulldog 2025 Instagram: these kids don't need magnets to get into good colleges or to have a strong HS experience, and yes I realize a lot are full pay and don't have to do the donut-hole dance so that is also part of the reason why the colleges are so impressive (they can simply afford them).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This seems to be what MCPS is trying to do. They hate that they have "good schools" because that means they have "bad schools."

This effort is about carving out boundaries for new properties (great), alleviating overcrowding (wonderful), but a heaping helping of "let's use this opportunity to change perceptions because we are out of ideas."

Or, let’s change boundaries because now is the opportune time to do so as we haven’t had a massive review and realignment of them in multiple decades and they were gerrymandered then.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The boundaries are changing. Folks just need to accept that and get over it. Property values are not the focus or problem of the school district. Should the district maintain walkers, YES , but because it makes good sense in terms of resource usage (buses, people, finances). Will there be some splits articulations, YES, it’s inevitable given where schools are located and the amount of kids we’re talking about. Should they minimize the split articulations as much as possible(again for resource usage) and spread it around where makes sense, YES.

This whole “W school” thing is old and over emphasized. Frankly it would do the district a world of good to publicly toss it in the graveyard once and for all.

+1 It would be great if MCPS could even out the FARMs rate across all of the schools so we can stop with the "W" school nonsense.

I agree in theory, but how do you do this in a county where the wealth is largely concentrated in the western portion and the poverty is largely concentrated in the eastern portion and these portions are miles and miles and almost an hour apart? This is how they're trying to do their best at doing that. The only improvement I can see that would help is to create MORE high-achieving magnets in the poorer parts of the county, but when you already have strong schools in the western part, people opt out because too far is too far. I mean, just look at Churchill's Beyond the Bulldog 2025 Instagram: these kids don't need magnets to get into good colleges or to have a strong HS experience, and yes I realize a lot are full pay and don't have to do the donut-hole dance so that is also part of the reason why the colleges are so impressive (they can simply afford them).

Yes, it is difficult to do this given the housing situation, but as much as MCPS can without doing cross county busing, I think they should. And that may mean shifting an ES school to a new HS which may mean an extra 5 min bus ride, so that other schools can be moved around to achieve this. That is not unreasonable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The boundaries are changing. Folks just need to accept that and get over it. Property values are not the focus or problem of the school district. Should the district maintain walkers, YES , but because it makes good sense in terms of resource usage (buses, people, finances). Will there be some splits articulations, YES, it’s inevitable given where schools are located and the amount of kids we’re talking about. Should they minimize the split articulations as much as possible(again for resource usage) and spread it around where makes sense, YES.

This whole “W school” thing is old and over emphasized. Frankly it would do the district a world of good to publicly toss it in the graveyard once and for all.

+1 It would be great if MCPS could even out the FARMs rate across all of the schools so we can stop with the "W" school nonsense.

I agree in theory, but how do you do this in a county where the wealth is largely concentrated in the western portion and the poverty is largely concentrated in the eastern portion and these portions are miles and miles and almost an hour apart? This is how they're trying to do their best at doing that. The only improvement I can see that would help is to create MORE high-achieving magnets in the poorer parts of the county, but when you already have strong schools in the western part, people opt out because too far is too far. I mean, just look at Churchill's Beyond the Bulldog 2025 Instagram: these kids don't need magnets to get into good colleges or to have a strong HS experience, and yes I realize a lot are full pay and don't have to do the donut-hole dance so that is also part of the reason why the colleges are so impressive (they can simply afford them).

yes, as a PP stated, having more poors in your school is not going to change your kid's outcome. But, it will help the lower income kid to have access to more resources, like more challenging courses. If you look at the lower performing schools, they don't have as many AP classes as higher performing schools do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This seems to be what MCPS is trying to do. They hate that they have "good schools" because that means they have "bad schools."

This effort is about carving out boundaries for new properties (great), alleviating overcrowding (wonderful), but a heaping helping of "let's use this opportunity to change perceptions because we are out of ideas."

Or, let’s change boundaries because now is the opportune time to do so as we haven’t had a massive review and realignment of them in multiple decades and they were gerrymandered then.

It isnt a "massive review" because there are entire schools (Sherwood, Paint Branch, Springbrook) with capacity that are not included in either study. Right off the bat, MCPS is violating policy FAA by not considering all its capacity.

And it is far from an opportune time because of the loss of jobs and contracts by MoCo residents has created a great deal of uncertainty that make it both inopportune and a bad look politically to raise taxes to pay for "massive realignment."

Sure add new boundaries for the new schools but don't waste my tax dollars on a boondoggle because maybe/hopefully/Inshallah it will improve test scores.