Reply to current and potential immersion parents - watch out sneaky tactic to kick you out of bcc

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[quote=Anonymous]I agree totally with the prior post at 14:59.  I am a parent of 2 RCF Spanish immersion students (one current and one alum) and live in the BCC cluster.  Although my children can matriculate at BCC, I feel the proposed COSA policy change impacts our family directly.  When we chose the immersion route, we became a part of the county-wide immersion community.  My children formed close ties with children not around the corner, but around the county.  While parents whose children attend the local school meet and form bonds with parents living in their neighborhoods, we formed bonds with other immersion parents living far from us.  The proposed policy change fails to respect the community that immersion students and parents create, and go to great efforts to maintain. The new policy will destroy those bonds at a critical time in my children's development, and they will lose that community that they shared learning and life with for the past nine years.  The principle justification, to reduce overcrowding at BCC, seems hollow since there are so few (25? 30?) immersion students who actually request COSAs to BCC.  The benefits to the immersion students and their families as well as the entire BCC community, as so eloquently stated by the prior poster, appear to outweigh these considerations.

The 14:59 poster also highlights the benefits to the BCC language program of having the immersion students at BCC, and the lack of appropriate language course offerings at the home schools that those students who are denied COSAs will attend.  I can speak to the impact that the lack advanced language courses has on immersion students from personal experience.  My older child elected to attend a different MS magnet program and did not continue to Westland.  In 6th grade, my child was only allowed to take Spanish One, so to avoid a wasted year, my child sat out Spanish for a year.  In 7th grade, my child took Spanish Two, and was still way ahead of the other students, and won an award for language proficiency.  Clearly, my child is not being challenged, but was not allowed to take Spanish Three as a 7th grader, because that is the highest level of Spanish offered at that middle school, and there would be no Spanish course course appropriate for my child in 8th grade if my child completed Spanish Three in 7th grade.  In light of my child's experience, I fear the immersion students denied COSAs would find Spanish instruction insufficient at their home high school, and the proficiency they worked so hard to develop, with the assistance of  MCPS, would be lost.

There are many parts of this process that I do not understand.  I do not understand why the BOE, after promising the RCF community an open process and dialogue on any changes to the matriculation path, chose to proceed in an indirect manner.  I do not understand why the BCC Cluster rep gave the testimony in support of the proposed change without getting input from all the members of the BCC cluster who would be impacted by the change.  I do not understand why this proposed change is justified by the goal of reducing overcrowding at BCC, when the number of students who are denied a COSA will not make a material impact on BCC overcrowding. I do not understand why the RCF PTA has failed to take a position on this matter, and has only, within the past week, polled the RCF community to determine how its constituency feels about the proposed change.  I plan to write to the BOE and urge them to reject the proposed policy change and I hope others do the same.[/quote]

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