Reply to Parents protest having two different school calendars for children in the same house

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]another complaint from the county's complainer-in-chief[/quote]

Roscoe Nix ES parents are not complainers.  They are saddled with an impossible situation and want relief. [/quote]

And it's not just the parents complaining. Staff have complained about it to the BOE.

It's time for MCPS to kill the innovative school year as yet another theoretical fantasy that is infeasible due to practical realities.[/quote]

I'm not an educational policy expert (and I hope one weighs in) but ISY is not the most nonsensical or theoretical approach MCPS has ever tried. I agree with you about approaches like "honors for all" that have failed elsewhere, but year-round school has succeeded elsewhere and has a strong theoretical basis.

I've skimmed the report above, as well as the response from MCPS and the overall cover memo from Superintendent McKnight. All of them point to some common problems: staff retention and student attendance.

Staff recruitment retention is an issue in part because a lot of teachers are also parents. There's not much to be done about that, but MCPS has tried to ameliorate the recruitment issue by letting the ISY schools recruit earlier than the traditional calendar schools.

Student attendance is a real problem. According to the report, only 76 percent of Arcola and 79% of Roscoe Nix kids were there on the first day last year. The report also details ongoing attendance issues for the first 30 days of school. So, it could be that the ISY kids are doing about the same as the other kids because they simply aren't attending the ISY portion of the school year.

Honestly, from my layperson's view, the biggest issue here is that you have two schools out of a hundred-something doing a different schedule, which is hard on staff and on students.

[/quote]

You wrote all of that in an attempt to defend the idea of Innovative School Year, but really there's no defense. You proposed some potential reasons for why it failed (the schools they're piloting it in already had attendance issues even without ISY or that doing ISY when the rest of the system is traditional doesn't work), but none of those are reasons to continue with the ISY program. It is objectively not working.[/quote]

I'm the PP and none of what I wrote was meant to be a defense of ISY. It was just a comment about why this felt different than some of the other untested stuff MCPS has thrown at parents. This model has worked in other places, so it's interesting to look at why it isn't working here. [/quote]

MCPS is not using the model. Read what parents and teachers are saying before you jump to conclusions.[/quote]

Where would a person see those comments? No one in this thread has identified themselves as a parent or teacher at one of the schools being discussed.[/quote]

Read the post in the link. [/quote]

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