Reply to Taylor's Feb Rec for Crown Boundary Study

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Reply to "Taylor's Feb Rec for Crown Boundary Study"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What should have been done that wasn’t done? [/quote]

Direct, fulsome answers/responses to [i]all[/i] of the pointed, nuanced questions asked/issues raised (not just the ones hand picked as easily addressable by gatekeeping moderators),

With all questions/issues and corresponding answers/responses made public for fully informed stakeholder consideration,

With public access to the data/map [i]construction[/i] tools used by MCPS/the consultant such that any variation could be equivalently presented for BOE consideration (if they so chose),

With timing to allow for all of that.[/quote]

Thanks for answering. I’m not aware of every question/issue raised that has gone unanswered so I can’t really comment on that without knowing more about what answers the community needs still. I think this is what a lot of us are asking and trying to understand. I haven’t been all the posts asking so there seems to be multiple of us here wondering.

I doubt that there is any obligation or right to public access to those tools or information that you seek.

Timing… sure I guess, if the public really should have more access to this information.[/quote]

MCPS has all the questions from the online survey, the online meetings and the live meetings (or should have -- they said they were taking down everything asked at the various meetings).  I suppose you might go back through every related thread, here, to glean some of what was asked and determine if they were or were not addressed with nuance and clarity, but that would be only a subset (not everything is discussed on DCUM, of course).  Maybe you could get an AI agent to do that for you.

Doing only that which is obligatory is box-checking.  I was assuming that the question posed, "What should have been done that wasn’t done?" intended to evidence something more meaningful than that.  The way they set things up, [i]not even BOE members[/i] could play with the model to have any real sense if something would be feasible before proposing it.

This is [i]despite[/i] repeated attestation by MCPS that BOE-proposed alternatives were the only way out of the Superintendent's recommendation (aside from flat rejection, which would be a disaster in and of itself).  The back & forth of hearing stakeholder thoughts, a BOE member requesting MCPS investigate, having that come back not modeled with fidelity to the stakeholders' thoughts, the stakeholders pointing this out, a BOE member requesting an adjustment, etc., etc., necessary to produce something that might pass muster would have taken many, many months, months they and the BOE didn't have, months that were unnecessary if the underlying data (if not the planning tool) were made publicly available for independent construction of an option, [i]and they knew that from the get-go last spring[/i].[/quote]

DP.

The issue many people are raising is that the analytical capability stayed entirely inside MCPS. The district controlled the data, the modeling tool, and the scenarios that were evaluated. As you pointed out, even members of the Board of Education apparently couldn’t interact directly with the model or test ideas themselves. That means the only alternatives that could realistically move forward were the ones MCPS chose to analyze. When the same entity that produced the recommendation also controls the modeling used to evaluate alternatives, it naturally creates skepticism about whether other options were fully explored.

So the criticism isn’t just that the process could have had “more meetings.” It’s that the structure of the process limited the ability of anyone outside MCPS to meaningfully test or develop alternatives, even though the district knew months ago that the BOE might want to consider options beyond the superintendent’s recommendation. When a decision reshapes the geography of multiple high schools for decades, people expect a process where the analysis is more transparent and the ability to evaluate alternatives isn’t confined to one institution.[/quote]

Is there a precedent of letting the outside test or develop alternatives? Real question. Wondering if there’s a process used elsewhere that models that kind of interaction. 
[/quote]

Not the PP, so not sure there is to the extent they are thinking about, but MCPS did have an interactive tool that let people play around with the data more during the last boundary study: 
https://mytest.mcpsmd.org/

It’s a surreal time capsule of the challenges they were trying to address back when this all started. 
[/quote]

Cool tool. If we went back in time to see the cost of building that, I am sure heads would roll. And yet people are freaking the F out over the money spent with the consulting firm who helped with the data on this latest study. The experts aren’t within MCPS. The experts outside of MCPS are too expensive and don’t know MoCo. Lose lose it seems. [/quote]
If they didn’t go with an objective firm to do the study, then everyone would cry foul and favoritism by people who “know moco” so yeah it’s lose lose but cya too [/quote]

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