Reply to MoCo is diverse, for sure, but MCPS schools are not

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Reply to "MoCo is diverse, for sure, but MCPS schools are not"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

And they are building MORE apartments/condos in Bethesda, in the Westbard area.  Where will those kids go?  The school that is zoned for Westbard is something like 150 students overcapacity, at over 800 students.  Should the school go to 1000 students, so the kids can start lunch shifts at 9:30 am until 2:30 pm?  There may never be enough housing made available in Bethesda to make sure that everyone who wants to live there can live there affordably.  The MPDU units are gone in a flash.  So I guess the solution people here want is to make a county-wide lottery so that people who spent their life's savings on houses in certain neighborhoods (and left DC to avoid constant school lotteries) will just have to suck it up and go wherever their lottery draw sends them?  And when the entire county is in gridlock because people are schlepping their kids all over the county daily, then what?  I mean, really -- this is the utopia people are hoping for?  You won't get diversity because the people who have the means will leave MCPS or MoCo altogether if they have to bus their kids out of what they consider a good school cluster.

In any event, my kids' classes ARE actually pretty diverse.  It's not like it was in DC, that's for sure, but it's not lily-white...in part because MY kids are not.  [/quote]

They will go to new schools that MCPS needs to build, with the developers contributing to the school construction funding. This is not an argument against building apartments and affordable housing. It's an argument for making school construction keep up with housing construction.

Also, I think that there is a middle ground here, which you are missing. It's good to build more housing where people want more housing, even if that doesn't mean that every person who wants to live there will be able to live there. It's good to have school policies that reduce segregation, even if that doesn't mean that every child in MCPS will go to a unsegregated school. Less segregation may not be the perfect outcome, but it's a whole lot better than more segregation.

And yes, if you bought in Bethesda based on the assumption that that you would never be rezoned, then you were gambling, and the whole point about gambling is sometimes you win the gamble, and sometimes you don't.[/quote]

I agree that development should be made to consider schooling needs.  I find it bizarre that developers aren't contributing to school construction or even apparently required to consider where students living in their buildings/developments would go.  I don't disagree that policies to enhance diversity are good.  [b]My problem is the idea that this is the silver bullet to closing the achievement gap -- that if only everyone could live in Potomac or Bethesda, or go to a W school, our problems would be solved.  [/b]

And no one buys in a school district in MoCo thinking they could be involuntarily rezoned to a school across the county on a lottery basis.  If I wanted to subject my kids to that, I would have stayed in DC.  Rezoning on the margins, yes, that's always a possibility, but that's not what people on this thread are advocating for -- because apparently even the margins of Potomac and Bethesda are too rich and there's no other way to spread or dilute the wealth of these communities besides forced busing county-wide.[/quote]

It seems to me that the people who live in Potomac or Bethesda are considered the wealthier citizens of the county.  And if they had to go into a county wide lottery, there would be a good chance that those people might pull their children out of the lottery system and choose other educational opportunities.  If the local residents were not a part of the W schools, what would that leave you and what benefit would other students gain?
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