Reply to MCPS Boundary Reassessment

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Nothing in this County can be done that quickly.  This SMOB will be gone by the time any report would actually be produced.  But there is growing support in the County for a “County-side boundary study.”  How that would actually logistically be accomplished is anyone’s guess.  I find it really hard to believe any elected official wants to see such a thing go down, but the County Councilmembers seem to think the madness that would ensue would only fall on the BOE and not on themselves...[/quote]

It makes sense to better utilize the resources that exist presently and even reduce transportation costs in some cases all the while improving diversity when possible.[/quote]

[b]There are very few under-enrolled schools.[/b]  Some of the people advocating this are looking at 20-50 seats in elementary schools and saying boundaries should be changed to "use" those seats.  There is a reason that MCPS considers 80-100% utilization to be ideal.  It's very hard to do a boundary change that would add only 20-50 students.  Then you get the question of how stable are these numbers and how often are you going to be doing the boundary changes?  The more frequently you do boundary changes, the more problems you have with siblings being assigned to different schools.

There are a few boundary changes that would make sense to do - Westbrook/Somerset is one.  I don't know enough about further upcounty but maybe there are a few up in the Wootton area that make sense too.  But the idea that we can get to 100% utilization in every school with boundary changes is not reasonable or feasible.  Also, the last time the Board proposed re-drawing boundaries between Gaithersburg Elementary and under-enrolled Wootton elementary schools the Gaithersburg parents were very opposed and came to the BOE and County Council meetings in a chartered bus to say so.  [/quote]

There are more under-enrolled schools than you might think. If you look at the School Utilization Analysis chart from the Nov. 15th BOE meeting, there are 34 schools which are projected to have over 100 available seats each by 2024-25. See pp. 16-24:
[url]https://www.boarddocs.com/mabe/mcpsmd/Board.nsf/files/B6NK2S4FB611/$file/181108%20Boundaries%20Facilities%20Hearing%20Follow-up%20Qs.pdf[/url]
[/quote]

1) MCPS has been incredibly inaccurate with their 6 year numbers for the last decade at least.  In my area of the County they under-projected enrollment increases from 2000-2015 by multiple hundreds of students, and it is still not clear what, if any, of the already approved development for Bethesda/North Bethesda is included in their current 6 year predictions.  MCPS staff is unable to answer those questions, and it remains to be seen whether the consultant they hired will answer those questions.  (Note, this is not simply that they will not answer those questions to parent advocates; they also have not and do not intend to explain which developments are included and which are not TO THE PLANNING BOARD which is required to use MCPS's numbers for development planning/approval/moratorium, etc.)  So I take their 2024-2025 numbers with at least multiple mL of salt.

2) Only half of the 34 schools you mention are elementary schools.  The number of seats at a school that can be reasonably filled by boundary changes is different for each different level of school.

3) There are at least a few on the list that absolutely WILL be filled by micro boundary changes.  For example, Luxmanor is projected to have 104 seats available.  Next door Farmland is projected to have a deficit of 183 seats.  When the Luxmanor addition opens in 2020 there is going to be a boundary study to even out the Farmland/Luxmanor numbers.  The community knows and expects this.  However, that Luxmanor addition was originally intended to absorb the increased student population of the White Flint 1 and White Flint 2 development projects.  White Flint 2 hasn't happened yet, and White Flint 1 is not fully built either.  When the Luxmanor addition opens and is filled with students currently overcrowded at Farmland, what is the County's plan to deal with additional students from approved planned development at White Flint?  Second example, the B-CC cluster is pushing for boundary changes between Westbrook and Somerset that would even out those numbers.  It doesn't take a county-wide boundary study or any new procedure that MCPS doesn't already engage in to do this kind of boundary change when a school that consistently has seats is next door to a school that is consistently overcrowded.

4) The only cluster that is pretty consistently under-enrolled at the ES level is Wootton, and when the BOE proposed to do some re-districting between the Gaithersburg cluster and Wootton a couple years ago, the Gaithersburg community came out strongly, in force, at meetings, against it.

5) Boundary changes are not nimble and not a good way to deal with MCPS projection numbers being consistently sh**.  Families want siblings in the same school/s.  If you are constantly changing boundaries to deal with a little shift here or a faulty projection there, then there will be a lot more younger siblings expected to go to different schools than their older siblings.  It does a number on school and community spirit and makes parents less connected to their kids' school and school community.  I have ES kids at two different schools by choice, and we have less of a connection to both of the schools than we did when they were at the same school.     [/quote]

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