Initial boundary options for Crown/Damascus study

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

It's not a boondoggle when we have hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in building these two new schools and they need to be filled. When you take the kids from the closest schools, then they need to get more kids into those schools and it impacts the next group of schools and so on. The wootton parents crying about their boundaries are stupid - some of them are CLOSER to Crown than Wootton, Crown has been programmed for year- the land decision was made well over 10 years ago so any current school parent should have known this was going to happen at some point.

Spare me the tears and fears and stop with the BS that we need to leave them be because it's a hard time with federal government cuts. You know who is ACTUALLY having a hard time? The kids at Wheaton and Kennedy whose parents are being deported from their immigration check-in appointments. Your kid who has tutors and travel sports and Kumon will be fine whether they're at Churchill, Wootton, or Crown.

Stop whining.

Moving kids from Wootton to Crown will not help those kids who go to Wheaton and Kennedy, or their parents. These are two irrelevant things.

I never said it would. I am saying that when I think of whose traumas I care about more, the traumas of rich, entitled, whiny wootton and churchill parents are nowhere on my list. You all sound so ridiculously entitled and tone-deaf crying that your precious children might have to mix with kids from other neighborhoods? Give me a break. Other people have real problems. This is not a real problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Crown HS is all new and unknown. Is it really that bad if kids are zoned to there?

No, it isn't bad. It will be a brand new building, with cream of the crop staff attracted to work there.

For me the issue isn’t whether Crown is good or bad but just that they should populate Crown in a way that maintains communities and continuity for kids as much as possible. Some of the proposed changes - like breaking off tiny communities to go to Crown without the kids they’ve gone to school with their whole lives - should be non-starters.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just wondering, is that possible to keep all current clusters and initiate a selective admissions program to Crown HS, like Thomas Jefferson?

Second this.

no, not gonna happen

Can you explain the reasonings behind it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

It's not a boondoggle when we have hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in building these two new schools and they need to be filled. When you take the kids from the closest schools, then they need to get more kids into those schools and it impacts the next group of schools and so on. The wootton parents crying about their boundaries are stupid - some of them are CLOSER to Crown than Wootton, Crown has been programmed for year- the land decision was made well over 10 years ago so any current school parent should have known this was going to happen at some point.

Spare me the tears and fears and stop with the BS that we need to leave them be because it's a hard time with federal government cuts. You know who is ACTUALLY having a hard time? The kids at Wheaton and Kennedy whose parents are being deported from their immigration check-in appointments. Your kid who has tutors and travel sports and Kumon will be fine whether they're at Churchill, Wootton, or Crown.

Stop whining.

Moving kids from Wootton to Crown will not help those kids who go to Wheaton and Kennedy, or their parents. These are two irrelevant things.

I never said it would. I am saying that when I think of whose traumas I care about more, the traumas of rich, entitled, whiny wootton and churchill parents are nowhere on my list. You all sound so ridiculously entitled and tone-deaf crying that your precious children might have to mix with kids from other neighborhoods? Give me a break. Other people have real problems. This is not a real problem.

Wasteful spending is a legitimate concern because there is a vast amount of historical evidence to point too (electric buses anyone?), and I call observing that costly, lengthy and unnecessary travel times will have all sorts of unintended consequences "foresight." Attacking people personally who raise these legitimate concerns actually reveals that you do not have sound counter arguments. Please keep it up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just wondering, is that possible to keep all current clusters and initiate a selective admissions program to Crown HS, like Thomas Jefferson?

Second this.

no, not gonna happen

Can you explain the reasonings behind it?

MCPS is trying to create smaller regional magnets. For example, they want to convert RMIB to a regional magnet rather than a whole county magnet, and look at creating additional magnets at other schools.

Creating a whole school magnet is counter to MCPS' desire to create more regional magnets.

It's not gonna happen.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can someone explain why activities or sports might be affected due to school change? I have been the one picking up and dropping off my kid at school and sports/activities because kid is at ES. Do kids at MS or HS go to activities/sports by themselves with biking/walking/taking bus? I am expecting that they still need parents to drive them around until they have their own transportation.

I posted about it in this thread on 6/4/2025 at 15:43 and will copy and paste below at the end of my comment.

But basically for our neighborhood's case, our kids would go to elementary school in Rockville, originally slated to go to a high school in Rockville. But under some proposed changes, they will go to the elementary school and middle school in Rockville and be a small group of 5-10 students in their grade that they went to elementary school with to go to the new high school in Gaithersburg.

Gaithersburg and Rockvlle have two different set of groups and organizations that provide the same services. And most people pick one based on region. ie if you live in Gaithersburg/Germantown, chances are you'll do SAM soccer. Rockville and south will do MSI.

Part of the things I hoped my kids would get out of after school activities is to interact with their classmates outside of a school setting. For example I see one team of players that will go to Rockville High and see how they all basically will be together from grades K through 12 together and they do everything together. And you see it how they run from activity to activity together and how their families all know each other and are friends. I often look at them and wonder if they know how lucky they are to have this type of lifelong friendship.

But with these proposed split articulation proposals, my kid would potentially be split off from the rest of the classmates they knew since elementary school. So it's okay right, I'll just sign them up for groups in this new high school area. But no one will know him or vice versa, as well as us and other families. This is compared to the leagues they're currently in, where we've been in them long enough where we recognize and know the families on various teams. It's one of the reasons why I picked a more local organization compared to one run by the county.

Even for community service, I was going to have them volunteer for a food bank in the area that sponsors one of the activities they do. But there is a similar food bank in the other city that their high school is in. So should I have them volunteer for the organization that sponsored their activity to help with that community feel. Or to the food bank that serves the actual community that their school is in?

I'm kind of typing quickly but that's my basic issue with the matter. The copy and paste of my previous comment is below:

In regards to the previous commens about Wayside and Wootton, I think one of the things that doesn't look like is being taken into account these initial options is the community or neighborhood feel.

Parts of the area that go to Wayside are borderline Wootton.

But the school itself and likely the majority of the area is right around the corner from the Potomac Community Center. When my kids had activities at Wayside it took me less then five minutes, if even that, to get from Wayside ES to the community center where I hung around there while they were at the activity.

So it's likely that families in that area do activities more in the Potomac area and with most of the students going to Churchill.

One benefit of activities is that it does give my kids opportunities to interact with kids from other areas where they would likely never have.

But one of the things we hoped to get out of activities is for our kids to interact with their classmates and neighbors outside of school. That helps build the camaraderie and friendships in school.

It's likewise for the northwestern area of Wootton near the Gaithersburg/North Potomac/Rockville divide. Gaithersburg and Rockville have their own separate organizations. Such as for baseball UMAC (Uppper Montgomery Baseball Club) vs RBBA (Rockville Baseball Association), MSI (Montgomery Soccer Inc) vs SAM (Soccer Association of Maryland), Gaithersburg City rec sports and camps vs Rockville City rec sports and camps. For our family we're at the point where we recognize a lot of the other families in the leagues on other teams and makes the area seem a lot smaller because you see them around and helps with the community feel. And the leagues and organizations in the other city seems like a while another world to us.

So in some of the proposals, they have students attending a school in one city, where most of the students probably do activities in a particular area. But then move a subset of the students from that school into another area, where the majority of students from that area are involved in other organizations for the same type of activities.

They should at the very least keep students from the same elementary school together.

[Anonymous]

MS are also over capacity. They are not going to build a new MS, so now is the time to redraw boundaries for the MS, too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

It's not a boondoggle when we have hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in building these two new schools and they need to be filled. When you take the kids from the closest schools, then they need to get more kids into those schools and it impacts the next group of schools and so on. The wootton parents crying about their boundaries are stupid - some of them are CLOSER to Crown than Wootton, Crown has been programmed for year- the land decision was made well over 10 years ago so any current school parent should have known this was going to happen at some point.

Spare me the tears and fears and stop with the BS that we need to leave them be because it's a hard time with federal government cuts. You know who is ACTUALLY having a hard time? The kids at Wheaton and Kennedy whose parents are being deported from their immigration check-in appointments. Your kid who has tutors and travel sports and Kumon will be fine whether they're at Churchill, Wootton, or Crown.

Stop whining.

Moving kids from Wootton to Crown will not help those kids who go to Wheaton and Kennedy, or their parents. These are two irrelevant things.

I never said it would. I am saying that when I think of whose traumas I care about more, the traumas of rich, entitled, whiny wootton and churchill parents are nowhere on my list. You all sound so ridiculously entitled and tone-deaf crying that your precious children might have to mix with kids from other neighborhoods? Give me a break. Other people have real problems. This is not a real problem.

Conversely you sound like those people who are giddy about sticking it to Wootton / Churchill because the DCC sucks. You are playing into the MCPS game of it’s too difficult to do an actual good job and make everyone happy but we’re experts on making everyone miserable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:MS are also over capacity. They are not going to build a new MS, so now is the time to redraw boundaries for the MS, too.

They are doing that. Each of the options includes new middle school boundaries.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

It's not a boondoggle when we have hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in building these two new schools and they need to be filled. When you take the kids from the closest schools, then they need to get more kids into those schools and it impacts the next group of schools and so on. The wootton parents crying about their boundaries are stupid - some of them are CLOSER to Crown than Wootton, Crown has been programmed for year- the land decision was made well over 10 years ago so any current school parent should have known this was going to happen at some point.

Spare me the tears and fears and stop with the BS that we need to leave them be because it's a hard time with federal government cuts. You know who is ACTUALLY having a hard time? The kids at Wheaton and Kennedy whose parents are being deported from their immigration check-in appointments. Your kid who has tutors and travel sports and Kumon will be fine whether they're at Churchill, Wootton, or Crown.

Stop whining.

Moving kids from Wootton to Crown will not help those kids who go to Wheaton and Kennedy, or their parents. These are two irrelevant things.

I never said it would. I am saying that when I think of whose traumas I care about more, the traumas of rich, entitled, whiny wootton and churchill parents are nowhere on my list. You all sound so ridiculously entitled and tone-deaf crying that your precious children might have to mix with kids from other neighborhoods? Give me a break. Other people have real problems. This is not a real problem.

Churchill parent here. Right now we would be moved to Wootton and I posted somewhere upthread that worse things could happen. Honestly I couldn't care less whether the kids are sent to Churchill or Wootton. I just want my home to be districted to a strong high school, and luckily it will be either Wootton or Churchill by the looks of it. My kids are grown and off to college, and I didn't even bother sending them to Churchill...too crowded and too much grade inflation. I just want to get a good profit when we sell our home in a few years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can someone explain why activities or sports might be affected due to school change? I have been the one picking up and dropping off my kid at school and sports/activities because kid is at ES. Do kids at MS or HS go to activities/sports by themselves with biking/walking/taking bus? I am expecting that they still need parents to drive them around until they have their own transportation.

I posted about it in this thread on 6/4/2025 at 15:43 and will copy and paste below at the end of my comment.

But basically for our neighborhood's case, our kids would go to elementary school in Rockville, originally slated to go to a high school in Rockville. But under some proposed changes, they will go to the elementary school and middle school in Rockville and be a small group of 5-10 students in their grade that they went to elementary school with to go to the new high school in Gaithersburg.

Gaithersburg and Rockvlle have two different set of groups and organizations that provide the same services. And most people pick one based on region. ie if you live in Gaithersburg/Germantown, chances are you'll do SAM soccer. Rockville and south will do MSI.

Part of the things I hoped my kids would get out of after school activities is to interact with their classmates outside of a school setting. For example I see one team of players that will go to Rockville High and see how they all basically will be together from grades K through 12 together and they do everything together. And you see it how they run from activity to activity together and how their families all know each other and are friends. I often look at them and wonder if they know how lucky they are to have this type of lifelong friendship.

But with these proposed split articulation proposals, my kid would potentially be split off from the rest of the classmates they knew since elementary school. So it's okay right, I'll just sign them up for groups in this new high school area. But no one will know him or vice versa, as well as us and other families. This is compared to the leagues they're currently in, where we've been in them long enough where we recognize and know the families on various teams. It's one of the reasons why I picked a more local organization compared to one run by the county.

Even for community service, I was going to have them volunteer for a food bank in the area that sponsors one of the activities they do. But there is a similar food bank in the other city that their high school is in. So should I have them volunteer for the organization that sponsored their activity to help with that community feel. Or to the food bank that serves the actual community that their school is in?

I'm kind of typing quickly but that's my basic issue with the matter. The copy and paste of my previous comment is below:

In regards to the previous commens about Wayside and Wootton, I think one of the things that doesn't look like is being taken into account these initial options is the community or neighborhood feel.

Parts of the area that go to Wayside are borderline Wootton.

But the school itself and likely the majority of the area is right around the corner from the Potomac Community Center. When my kids had activities at Wayside it took me less then five minutes, if even that, to get from Wayside ES to the community center where I hung around there while they were at the activity.

So it's likely that families in that area do activities more in the Potomac area and with most of the students going to Churchill.

One benefit of activities is that it does give my kids opportunities to interact with kids from other areas where they would likely never have.

But one of the things we hoped to get out of activities is for our kids to interact with their classmates and neighbors outside of school. That helps build the camaraderie and friendships in school.

It's likewise for the northwestern area of Wootton near the Gaithersburg/North Potomac/Rockville divide. Gaithersburg and Rockville have their own separate organizations. Such as for baseball UMAC (Uppper Montgomery Baseball Club) vs RBBA (Rockville Baseball Association), MSI (Montgomery Soccer Inc) vs SAM (Soccer Association of Maryland), Gaithersburg City rec sports and camps vs Rockville City rec sports and camps. For our family we're at the point where we recognize a lot of the other families in the leagues on other teams and makes the area seem a lot smaller because you see them around and helps with the community feel. And the leagues and organizations in the other city seems like a while another world to us.

So in some of the proposals, they have students attending a school in one city, where most of the students probably do activities in a particular area. But then move a subset of the students from that school into another area, where the majority of students from that area are involved in other organizations for the same type of activities.

They should at the very least keep students from the same elementary school together.

Please share your story with MCPS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

It's not a boondoggle when we have hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in building these two new schools and they need to be filled. When you take the kids from the closest schools, then they need to get more kids into those schools and it impacts the next group of schools and so on. The wootton parents crying about their boundaries are stupid - some of them are CLOSER to Crown than Wootton, Crown has been programmed for year- the land decision was made well over 10 years ago so any current school parent should have known this was going to happen at some point.

Spare me the tears and fears and stop with the BS that we need to leave them be because it's a hard time with federal government cuts. You know who is ACTUALLY having a hard time? The kids at Wheaton and Kennedy whose parents are being deported from their immigration check-in appointments. Your kid who has tutors and travel sports and Kumon will be fine whether they're at Churchill, Wootton, or Crown.

Stop whining.

Moving kids from Wootton to Crown will not help those kids who go to Wheaton and Kennedy, or their parents. These are two irrelevant things.

I never said it would. I am saying that when I think of whose traumas I care about more, the traumas of rich, entitled, whiny wootton and churchill parents are nowhere on my list. You all sound so ridiculously entitled and tone-deaf crying that your precious children might have to mix with kids from other neighborhoods? Give me a break. Other people have real problems. This is not a real problem.

Churchill parent here. Right now we would be moved to Wootton and I posted somewhere upthread that worse things could happen. Honestly I couldn't care less whether the kids are sent to Churchill or Wootton. I just want my home to be districted to a strong high school, and luckily it will be either Wootton or Churchill by the looks of it. My kids are grown and off to college, and I didn't even bother sending them to Churchill...too crowded and too much grade inflation. I just want to get a good profit when we sell our home in a few years.

Are you a fake wayside parent?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can someone explain why activities or sports might be affected due to school change? I have been the one picking up and dropping off my kid at school and sports/activities because kid is at ES. Do kids at MS or HS go to activities/sports by themselves with biking/walking/taking bus? I am expecting that they still need parents to drive them around until they have their own transportation.

I posted about it in this thread on 6/4/2025 at 15:43 and will copy and paste below at the end of my comment.

But basically for our neighborhood's case, our kids would go to elementary school in Rockville, originally slated to go to a high school in Rockville. But under some proposed changes, they will go to the elementary school and middle school in Rockville and be a small group of 5-10 students in their grade that they went to elementary school with to go to the new high school in Gaithersburg.

Gaithersburg and Rockvlle have two different set of groups and organizations that provide the same services. And most people pick one based on region. ie if you live in Gaithersburg/Germantown, chances are you'll do SAM soccer. Rockville and south will do MSI.

Part of the things I hoped my kids would get out of after school activities is to interact with their classmates outside of a school setting. For example I see one team of players that will go to Rockville High and see how they all basically will be together from grades K through 12 together and they do everything together. And you see it how they run from activity to activity together and how their families all know each other and are friends. I often look at them and wonder if they know how lucky they are to have this type of lifelong friendship.

But with these proposed split articulation proposals, my kid would potentially be split off from the rest of the classmates they knew since elementary school. So it's okay right, I'll just sign them up for groups in this new high school area. But no one will know him or vice versa, as well as us and other families. This is compared to the leagues they're currently in, where we've been in them long enough where we recognize and know the families on various teams. It's one of the reasons why I picked a more local organization compared to one run by the county.

Even for community service, I was going to have them volunteer for a food bank in the area that sponsors one of the activities they do. But there is a similar food bank in the other city that their high school is in. So should I have them volunteer for the organization that sponsored their activity to help with that community feel. Or to the food bank that serves the actual community that their school is in?

I'm kind of typing quickly but that's my basic issue with the matter. The copy and paste of my previous comment is below:

In regards to the previous commens about Wayside and Wootton, I think one of the things that doesn't look like is being taken into account these initial options is the community or neighborhood feel.

Parts of the area that go to Wayside are borderline Wootton.

But the school itself and likely the majority of the area is right around the corner from the Potomac Community Center. When my kids had activities at Wayside it took me less then five minutes, if even that, to get from Wayside ES to the community center where I hung around there while they were at the activity.

So it's likely that families in that area do activities more in the Potomac area and with most of the students going to Churchill.

One benefit of activities is that it does give my kids opportunities to interact with kids from other areas where they would likely never have.

But one of the things we hoped to get out of activities is for our kids to interact with their classmates and neighbors outside of school. That helps build the camaraderie and friendships in school.

It's likewise for the northwestern area of Wootton near the Gaithersburg/North Potomac/Rockville divide. Gaithersburg and Rockville have their own separate organizations. Such as for baseball UMAC (Uppper Montgomery Baseball Club) vs RBBA (Rockville Baseball Association), MSI (Montgomery Soccer Inc) vs SAM (Soccer Association of Maryland), Gaithersburg City rec sports and camps vs Rockville City rec sports and camps. For our family we're at the point where we recognize a lot of the other families in the leagues on other teams and makes the area seem a lot smaller because you see them around and helps with the community feel. And the leagues and organizations in the other city seems like a while another world to us.

So in some of the proposals, they have students attending a school in one city, where most of the students probably do activities in a particular area. But then move a subset of the students from that school into another area, where the majority of students from that area are involved in other organizations for the same type of activities.

They should at the very least keep students from the same elementary school together.

Please share your story with MCPS

At the risk of doxxing myself this is one of the issues that I am trying to emphasize. That and there is no way I will let my kids walk to Crown High school, having to cross Darnestown Road, Great Seneca Highway and and Key West Ave (28), all three of which are major commuter routes in our area

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

It's not a boondoggle when we have hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in building these two new schools and they need to be filled. When you take the kids from the closest schools, then they need to get more kids into those schools and it impacts the next group of schools and so on. The wootton parents crying about their boundaries are stupid - some of them are CLOSER to Crown than Wootton, Crown has been programmed for year- the land decision was made well over 10 years ago so any current school parent should have known this was going to happen at some point.

Spare me the tears and fears and stop with the BS that we need to leave them be because it's a hard time with federal government cuts. You know who is ACTUALLY having a hard time? The kids at Wheaton and Kennedy whose parents are being deported from their immigration check-in appointments. Your kid who has tutors and travel sports and Kumon will be fine whether they're at Churchill, Wootton, or Crown.

Stop whining.

Moving kids from Wootton to Crown will not help those kids who go to Wheaton and Kennedy, or their parents. These are two irrelevant things.

I never said it would. I am saying that when I think of whose traumas I care about more, the traumas of rich, entitled, whiny wootton and churchill parents are nowhere on my list. You all sound so ridiculously entitled and tone-deaf crying that your precious children might have to mix with kids from other neighborhoods? Give me a break. Other people have real problems. This is not a real problem.

Conversely you sound like those people who are giddy about sticking it to Wootton / Churchill because the DCC sucks. You are playing into the MCPS game of it’s too difficult to do an actual good job and make everyone happy but we’re experts on making everyone miserable.

I think the main point is that these are not catastrophic traumas, these are not extreme movements (like bussing across county and the like) and the affected families are some of the most capable of addressing issues that might occur.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can someone explain why activities or sports might be affected due to school change? I have been the one picking up and dropping off my kid at school and sports/activities because kid is at ES. Do kids at MS or HS go to activities/sports by themselves with biking/walking/taking bus? I am expecting that they still need parents to drive them around until they have their own transportation.

I posted about it in this thread on 6/4/2025 at 15:43 and will copy and paste below at the end of my comment.

But basically for our neighborhood's case, our kids would go to elementary school in Rockville, originally slated to go to a high school in Rockville. But under some proposed changes, they will go to the elementary school and middle school in Rockville and be a small group of 5-10 students in their grade that they went to elementary school with to go to the new high school in Gaithersburg.

Gaithersburg and Rockvlle have two different set of groups and organizations that provide the same services. And most people pick one based on region. ie if you live in Gaithersburg/Germantown, chances are you'll do SAM soccer. Rockville and south will do MSI.

Part of the things I hoped my kids would get out of after school activities is to interact with their classmates outside of a school setting. For example I see one team of players that will go to Rockville High and see how they all basically will be together from grades K through 12 together and they do everything together. And you see it how they run from activity to activity together and how their families all know each other and are friends. I often look at them and wonder if they know how lucky they are to have this type of lifelong friendship.

But with these proposed split articulation proposals, my kid would potentially be split off from the rest of the classmates they knew since elementary school. So it's okay right, I'll just sign them up for groups in this new high school area. But no one will know him or vice versa, as well as us and other families. This is compared to the leagues they're currently in, where we've been in them long enough where we recognize and know the families on various teams. It's one of the reasons why I picked a more local organization compared to one run by the county.

Even for community service, I was going to have them volunteer for a food bank in the area that sponsors one of the activities they do. But there is a similar food bank in the other city that their high school is in. So should I have them volunteer for the organization that sponsored their activity to help with that community feel. Or to the food bank that serves the actual community that their school is in?

I'm kind of typing quickly but that's my basic issue with the matter. The copy and paste of my previous comment is below:

In regards to the previous commens about Wayside and Wootton, I think one of the things that doesn't look like is being taken into account these initial options is the community or neighborhood feel.

Parts of the area that go to Wayside are borderline Wootton.

But the school itself and likely the majority of the area is right around the corner from the Potomac Community Center. When my kids had activities at Wayside it took me less then five minutes, if even that, to get from Wayside ES to the community center where I hung around there while they were at the activity.

So it's likely that families in that area do activities more in the Potomac area and with most of the students going to Churchill.

One benefit of activities is that it does give my kids opportunities to interact with kids from other areas where they would likely never have.

But one of the things we hoped to get out of activities is for our kids to interact with their classmates and neighbors outside of school. That helps build the camaraderie and friendships in school.

It's likewise for the northwestern area of Wootton near the Gaithersburg/North Potomac/Rockville divide. Gaithersburg and Rockville have their own separate organizations. Such as for baseball UMAC (Uppper Montgomery Baseball Club) vs RBBA (Rockville Baseball Association), MSI (Montgomery Soccer Inc) vs SAM (Soccer Association of Maryland), Gaithersburg City rec sports and camps vs Rockville City rec sports and camps. For our family we're at the point where we recognize a lot of the other families in the leagues on other teams and makes the area seem a lot smaller because you see them around and helps with the community feel. And the leagues and organizations in the other city seems like a while another world to us.

So in some of the proposals, they have students attending a school in one city, where most of the students probably do activities in a particular area. But then move a subset of the students from that school into another area, where the majority of students from that area are involved in other organizations for the same type of activities.

They should at the very least keep students from the same elementary school together.

Please share your story with MCPS

At the risk of doxxing myself this is one of the issues that I am trying to emphasize. That and there is no way I will let my kids walk to Crown High school, having to cross Darnestown Road, Great Seneca Highway and and Key West Ave (28), all three of which are major commuter routes in our area

Also if you believe that we have a justifiable concern, please sign the petition for our community:

https://www.change.org/p/don-t-divide-lakewood-keep-all-our-community-together-in-wootton