Reply to Question on FARMs and Rosemary Hills

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Interesting.  My best guess is that the pre-k classes are skewing the stats (I think there are 2 pre-k classes which would have higher FARMS ratios and 2 pre-k classes for kids with autism-- but I have no idea what the FARMS ratios would be for those kids in comparison to the rest of the school). [/quote]

This is correct.  The pre-K classes at RHPS are limited by income -- in other words you have to be below a certain income level to qualify for access to these pre-k classes.  As a parent in the school, I often walk by the bulletin boards outside these preK classrooms and have been stunned to see from pictures of students on the board, that all (or almost all) of these students are students of color.  In this day and age of integration, I think it's a little unhealthy whenever schools or classrooms are full of students that are all one color (all white or all kids of color).  But, that said, I understand the county rationale that limited funding for preK should be spent on lower income kids, who are much more likely to be kids of color.

At one of the last community meetings at RHPS the speaker (a man from MCPS planning department, Bruce somebody, I think) said (in response to parent concerns about the highly skewed FARMS rates across the cluster which would result from the BE withdrawal from the RHPS pairing) that these income-qualified preKs @ RHPS skew the FARMS rate at RHPS, which were 19% school-wide, but only 12% on a K-2 level.

I don't know a lot about the preK programs, but I don't think the autism program is income-limited.  And, I don't think that the kids in the income-limited preKs necessarily go on to K-2 at RHPS.

12% is still higher than the FARMS rates at any of the upper feeder schools.  But, when you consider that many families in the RHPS district opt to skip RHPS and wait to enter their kids at 3rd grade in one of the upper schools (thus, presumably, adding more wealthy and predominantly white kids to the denominator), one can see how the FARMS rate could drop from 12% to 8.9 or even 5.6% at the upper schools.  Plus, BE upper grades currently draws from a set of kids that don't go to RHPS, thus adding numbers to the denominator there and likely diluting the FARMS rate in the upper grades across these three schools. 
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