Reply to Can someone explain to me the BCC Middle School final decision?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]8:56 - I appreciate your thorough response and am pretty ignorant about this matter, but I do wonder if the class/race thing isn't a bigger deal than you think it is.  It's a pretty clear line between the kids that would be geographically closer to Westland and the kids that would be geographically closer to the new school.  From just a quick look at a map, and realizing that there will be more to it than geography, it would appear that the richer kids will go to Westland and the poorer kids would go to BCC MS and then they would meet together, presumably with disadvantages for the BCC MS kids, at the BCC HS.  No?[/quote]

Yes, that is one of the main objections.  Unfortunately, there are no actual legal tools to slow down or top the the RCH site on the basis of future demographic balance, so the neighborhood is using what it can about how the legal constraints on the land.

But, you can absolutely bet that a major issue is the racial and SES composition when the two schools are split.  RCH is a site that forces two undesirable options -- 1)  district the new middle school so those living closest will go, virtually ensuring that the new middle school will have most of the minority and poorer kids or 2)  district the schools so that Westland and the new middle school will have similar minority and FARMS rates, ensuring that some kids will still travel long distances to school (which was the problem many parents thought they were solving when they asked for a new middle school anyway).  In fact, the new Super's comments when the final RCH site decision (round 2) was delivered indicates that #2 is likely to happen.

As a child who grew up in the cluster, I can say that the pairing of the schools and the creation of the current districts was a direct response to the efforts to integrate the community.  Prior to the elementary pairings RHPS was majority AA and the other elems were basically all white.  As a child who went through the integration, I am grateful that I grew up in a school system that was both integrated and academically strong.  I moved back to this cluster so that my kids could experience the same.  I didn't want them to go to mostly white and wealthy Whitman.

There were other sites that would have allowed easier boundary drawings promoting better racial and economic integration (Norwood or Lynbrook for example).  These sites were dismissed without any creative thought to how MCPS could design a school that would fit the available land.  The site process didn't include as important criteria the future boundaries or how the demographic mix would shift, so it wasn't considered.

As a BCC alum and just generally a person who favors integration, I will be saddened if the result in this cluster is middle schools with significantly different minority and FARMS rate.  While it's true that the new middle school is unlikely to have a FARMS or minority rate of 50%, I still think it will be unhealthy if the new middle school is 20% minority and FARMS and Westland is at 1%.  My kids are too old to be affected by this, but I still find it sad.[/quote]

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