Reply to Should MCPS start busing or open enrollment?

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Reply to "Should MCPS start busing or open enrollment?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Because parents like myself would take their kids out of school sooner than see them bussed to some failing school in Wheaton as part of some social experiment.

Anyone who lives in a million dollar house in Chevy Chase has a choice - and most of us choose to support public schools. But if you started bussing to radically change the demographics, then we would just go private. You wouldn't eliminate the attainment gap, you would make it much worse.[/quote]

I have to agree.  The higher SES folks can afford to send their children to private.  If you tell them that they have to go to a lower performing school than they are currently zoned for, most probably will.  They what...you will have the lower SES folks bussed into a building in Bethesda, Potomac, Chevy Chases but their classmates will also be bussed in lower SES students.  The parent support, motivated students will flee and you'll be left with a Wheaton HS demographic and motivation in the Churchill building.[/quote]

Bussing kids hither and yon is not without cost.  We didn't even bother to apply to magnets, no matter how lauded, because we did not want our child to spent 2+ hours in transit each day in lieu of playtime and after-school activities.  We came from DC, and in our neighborhood, kids went to something like 15 different DCPS, charter, private/parochial schools.  That's just for ES, not MS or HS...neighbor kids rarely went to school together.  So much for having a neighborhood school that the whole community could invest in.  Choice in theory was great, but it was highly stressful to have to apply every year (because the high-performing schools had obscene waitlists and you had to try over and over again), and to possibly subject your child to a new school every year -- and maybe switch them mid-year when new options arose.  We came to MCPS because we were tired of all the shuffling, uncertainty, and disruption.  And imagine what it was like for the kids.[/quote]

I would agree busing kids too far is not a good idea, but it seems MCPS already does some of this.   In some ES school districts, the districting is a hodge-podge of different neighborhoods far and wide.  Some ES school buses pass several ESs on the way to the home school.  That's crazy.  There have been too many new developments to keep the districting the way it is. [/quote]

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