What does tabling the SSIMS closure mean for the boundary options?
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Anonymous
+1 This poster is laser focused only on how this proposal—which would affect thousands of kids and many SS communities—would affect just their individual child. This is not about your kid! It’s about east county losing an entire middle school and the creation of the largest middle school in the whole county. Stop blaming families for advocating to keep their school, and for asking to be treated with some modicum of respect by Taylor rather than completely gaslit and bulldozed over. |
Anonymous
Nobody's blaming anyone for trying to keep their school. I think it's great that SSiMS families love their school and want to stay there. However, if what some people are implying is true-- that this is primarily about SCES families wanting to keep SSIMS for their own kids, but they don't care about their kids' classmates staying at SSiMS and so they don't see the boundaries as part of their "save our schools" fight because *they* will be zoned there no matter what-- that's pretty messed up. (Or if they're saying it's fine for those other families to be zoned away because they don't want to stay at SSIMS in the first place and the "save our schools" campaign just pretended that the whole SSIMS community desperately wanted to keep SSIMS when it was really only a couple hundred families in the close-in neighborhood, that is also messed up, but in a different way.) |
Anonymous
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I’m honestly confused. The boundary study was several years underway when the proposal to close SSIMS was introduced. It’s bad timing on the part of Mcps to float closing a school at the same time they are changing school boundaries. But the SSIMS parents who are advocating to keep the school open are not also advocating about the SSIMS boundaries. That’s a much broader discussion that involves all the schools in the Woodward boundary study. SSIMS parents are filling out the survey like everyone else, and are also as in the dark as other parents are regarding how the proposed closure affects the boundary study.
Your anger at this group of parents for trying to keep their school open is really misplaced. You should be angry at Mcps for suggesting a school closure so late in a school boundary study and then trying to ram it through in an expedited timeframe that included zero community engagement. Are you suggesting families should have just accepted that their neighborhood school would close for the sake of not further complicating the boundary study? They are the victims here of a rogue superintendent throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. There is not some hidden agenda regarding SSIMS boundaries, I promise you. |
Anonymous
Sorry, what? It’s not enough that we’re fighting to keep our neighborhood schools, fighting against mega middle schools, fighting to stay at SSIMS, needing to somehow advocate for Northwood and regional programming…. We also need to rally to make sure other neighborhoods are zoned correctly? |
Anonymous
Oof. Is this seriously the way SCES families think? That SSIMS is "our neighborhood school" and everyone else who goes there is from "other neighborhoods" whose interests it feels vaguely ridiculous to be asked to care about? |
Anonymous
I’m so sorry if my wording was clumsy, but my point was very much that there is so much going on that we are being asked to pay attention and advocate for. It is too much. |
Anonymous
| And I’m not aware of any current SSIMS neighborhoods rallying to keep that boundary. I’m not aware of the agitation you are talking about. |
Anonymous
This person is a troll deliberately stirring the pot and using what parents are saying against them. |
Anonymous
Not a troll, just someone annoyed I supported what I thought was a unified community who loved their middle school and were committed to fighting to all be able to stay there together... only to discover that apparently it was just a small neighborhood near the school that is satisfied as soon as they know they're not moving and don't care what anyone else at the school thinks or wants, but were happy to give everyone else in the county the impression they were speaking on behalf of the majority of the SSIMS community because it gave them a better chance to advance their own narrow interests. |
Anonymous
Good grief. I’m sorry my response set you off. I’m a SCES parent. I’m not yet familiar with the broader SSIMS community and am happy to hear any views you want to share. |
Anonymous
You’re not making any sense at all. Can you please explain what neighborhood or school you think is being mistreated by the parents who are trying to keep two schools open? I think this person is just annoyed some of the boundary options have their kid rezoned to SSIMS and they were hoping the closure went through. |
Anonymous
I think you're exactly right. Also, I've been to the SSIMS and SCES meetings and it's not just the "small neighborhood" near the school that wants SSIMS to stay - there are a ton of SSIMS families not in the immediate neighborhood who were at the meetings and were very vocal about opposing the school closure. Again, if you don't like some of the boundary options, then tell MCPS that. Whining on an online forum isn't going to get you anywhere. |
Anonymous
Not sure what the disconnect is here. My impression, and the impression I believe the folks trying to save SSIMS were trying to give, was "almost all of us families currently zoned to SSIMS love SSIMS and want to make sure we can keep going to SSIMS, so we are all working together to keep our school." It's pretty self-evident that such a fight needs two steps: 1) keep SSIMS from closing, because then obviously no one can go to SSIMS; 2) keep SSIMS boundaries the same because if they change then many of the families currently at SSiMS will get sent away. (While families living right near SSIMS only had to do step 1 to accomplish their goal, the rest of the SSIMS community needs both step 1 and step 2 to accomplish the goal of keeping SSIMS kids at SSIMS.) Many of us elsewhere in the county signed the SSIMS petitions, engaged in advocacy to keep SSIMS open, etc, in solidarity and wanting to support the SSIMS community when we saw how badly they wanted to stay at their school, even though otherwise we might have agreed that the closure would make more sense for MCPS as a whole. We assumed we were supporting the SSiMS community in their efforts towards both step 1 (stop the SSIMS closure) and step 2 (stop SSIMS kids from being zoned out of SSIMS), although of course step 1 was naturally much higher profile and step 2 would only need to be discussed after winning step 1 because otherwise it would be irrelevant. I am genuinely and deeply confused about how suddenly there are SSIMS people acting like step 1 and step 2 are unrelated. You all said that SSIMS families love SSIMS and want to stay there, which obviously involves not just keeping the school open but keeping the boundaries the same. If the SSIMS community is now not all working together to keep the current SSIMS boundaries, there are only two other options, right? Either 1) the further-away families never cared about staying at SSIMS in the first place, in which case close-in families misrepresented the opinions of the larger school community in their advocacy; or 2) the further-away families do care about staying at SSIMS but the closer-in families think that since accomplishing step 1 solved their personal problems, it's fine to stop there and leave the rest of the neighborhoods to advocate for step 2 on their own (meaning that even though many of us from elsewhere supported SSIMS as a whole just because it was the right thing to do, some SSIMS families don't even see helping their own kids' classmates stay at SSIMS as something they should care about and organize around.) Is there some option or explanation besides those two? Is there something I am missing? I honestly don't understand how we're talking past each other. I am absolutely not trying to stir the pot here, just frustrated at what feels like a bait-and-switch, and I would love for there to be a more positive explanation of this, even if it's just "close-in families didn't really think about step 2 before because it didn't affect them personally, but are now realizing that it is important to support the rest of their school community by advocating for boundaries that keep SSIMS together." |
Anonymous
Don’t underestimate how much of the opposition to closing SSIMS was about retaining an area middle school and keeping those school sizes down. Also, a significant portion of the opposition came from French Immersion families who will go there regardless of the zoning. Otherwise, you’re talking very generally. Which neighborhoods are looking at potentially being zoned away from SSIMS? I don’t personally know. If you have a problem with the proposed zoning, get specific. |
Anonymous
SSIMS has both Spanish Immersion and French Immersion. I think Spanish is larger. They also would go there regardless of zoning. |