Reply to Woodward boundary study public hearing

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Woodward boundary study public hearing"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I did not watch the hearing, but recently heard from a neighbor that there is growing advocacy to push for option B.  Is there truth to this and did it come up in the public meeting?  That option would be terrible for our neighborhood- we are walking sitance to Sligo but kids would be sent to SSIMS- I don't know why that was thrown out there as a potential option to begin with.  So overall I was ok with Taylor's recommendation as it relates to our neighborhood.  It's just hard to keep up with the changes and to anticipate what MCPS will throw out there next.  The options for our neighborhood changed pretty drastically from the first to second round and caught a lot of people off guard.[/quote]

There is some push for original Option B with regard to the now Current WJ cluster (sounds mainly like the Farmland/Luxmanor crew at the BOE mtg), not necessarily rest of map (but clearly would send WW back to Wheaton High).[/quote]

Wasn't there someone from Silver Spring who mentioned it too?  Either way, there were definitely SSiMS folks who wanted to increase the number of kids assigned to SSIMS and wanted to go back to one of the original maps, and I can't imagine the Board would choose the option B map for WJ/Wheaton and a totally different map for Silver Spring...[/quote]

The Northwood Cluster Coordinator from MCCPTA testified about SSIMS going down to 55% utilization being an attempt to start the closure without appropriate process and being problematic for the kids who go there at that low utilization.

The options really treat the 2 regions as separate entities and the Board could adopt a different option for region 3 and for region 1 without causing domino effect problems but so far no one seems to be talking about it that way. I think the Board would have to vote to consider a different option and then also vote to adopt it but I’m not sure. I am not a Robert’s Rules of Order aficionado.[/quote]

After being called out by the BOE, Elrich, Kate Stewart and others for lack of community engagement, Taylor is trying to use the boundary study to justify a future closure of SSIMS. It’s laughably transparent and also very manipulative. If this goes through he is inviting a law suit. [/quote]

I don't think it has anything to do with justifying the closure-- he will either get support for closing it or not, no one's going to say "you assigned fewer kids there and now there are fewer kids there, it's my deciding reason to close it!"

I think it is about trying to make it simpler and less disruptive to families if/when it does get closed.  No one at other schools wants to get sent there for a couple years just to live through the dying years of a closing school and then get reassigned away again.  So they minimized the new students they added-- just a portion of Woodlin-- so fewer families have to go through that (and fewer families get upset and protest being assigned to SSIMS.)  They could have kept the current Forest Knolls and Montgomery Knolls kids there, which probably would have made the most sense, but I think I heard that SSIMS families all supported them leaving?   So that all adds up to only 650-700 kids left at SSIMS.  [/quote]

They're upset about going down to 650-700 kids?  I mean, that's a tad low, but there's a bunch of MCPS middle schools will less than 800 kids.  Sligo only has about 700.  When I first heard about it I thought they were talking about going down to like 400-500 kids or something.

(Plus isn't that only "resident students" and doesn't factor in all the immersion kids transferring in?  That adds another 150 kids or so, right?  So they'd actually be at like 800-850.)  [/quote]

I don't think the concern is the absolute number of students. Many would agree that small middle schools can be great and may even be preferred. It's more that it's clearly being done to justify a future closure.

MCPS has said that it will use facility condition and facility utilization to decide which schools to close. Taylor has been very clear and adamant that he wants to close SSIMS. He couldn't get the closure through the appropriate ways (expedited closure was voted down unanimously by BOE and then funding for expansions to Sligo and Eastern were pulled by Elrich from CIP) so he is obviously trying another way.

This community has been lied to and jerked around so many times that they are rightfully not willing to trust Taylor here. There's no way he is doing this to help SSIMS and make it smaller. 
[/quote]

They'll use capacity and facility conditions to identify schools for potential closure, but SSIMS has already been identified and even if they have super high utilization it would never take them off the target list.  It will get put up for a vote either way, and do you really think that anybody is going to base their closure vote on whether or not SSIMS has another 150 kids more or fewer? It's all gonna be about politics and whether the politicians who weighed in to say "not now" end up saying "not ever," or if they decide they don't care enough to prioritize fighting to keep it open.  [/quote]

I don’t know but do you fault SSIMS parents for calling him out on decreasing utilization without even acknowledging it? I get that it’s going to come up for a vote regardless and it’s going to be political but that doesn’t mean the SSIMS community should just silently sit by while their school is devalued over and over. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics