Reply to Would folks at richer schools rather have longer travel or lower funding/bigger classes?

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Reply to "Would folks at richer schools rather have longer travel or lower funding/bigger classes?"

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[quote=Anonymous]Since everyone seems to hate options that include longer travel times to try to balance out demographics, maybe the answer is to pick a different option that doesn't improve demographic disparities, but then try to make the schools fairer in other ways?  Like crank up the funding to poorer schools so they can have smaller class sizes, better supports, help cover some of the things well-funded PTAs cover at richer schools, etc?  I personally would be glad to fund this through higher taxes but people seem to hate that so it probably would have to involve larger class sizes/etc at the richer schools.  Do folks prefer that if you had to choose?

It just feels like we can't go on this way with some schools with only a handful of poorer kids and English language learners, and others with tons of them, and yet act like funding levels and class sizes should be similar.  In fact, my understanding is that although schools with more poor and special ed kids get some extra state and federal funding, MCPS itself doesn't use county funds to provide more to poorer schools, but actually provides more county funding to richer schools (i.e. if school A gets, say, $9000 per kid in state and federal funding because it has higher-need kids and school B gets $6000 per kid in state and federal funding because it has fewer, MCPS might give $9,000 in local funds to school A and $10,000 to school B, so even though the total per-student funding at school A ends up higher than school B, the local funding amounts are actually weighted towards the richer and less needy schools.). This has always struck me as pretty unfair, that my local tax dollars are going disproportionately to the richer schools despite there being some extremely poor schools that could really use more support.

As someone in a medium-poverty school/area who likes it for multiple reasons, I lean towards the idea of having more mixed-income schools and more equal funding, but I understand people's hesitation about longer travel times.  So would folks prefer funding changes instead?[/quote]

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