Reply to Nancy Van Doren just went off the deep end

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Nancy Van Doren just went off the deep end"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No, they're not redoing them again, pp is stirring up drama. Or is late to the party and just learned about how sibling priority is being applied to the montessori program. [/quote]

I'm late to the party. How is sibling preference being applied differently at montessori relative to other options, and why?[/quote]

At the other APS elementary choice schools, priority is given to students who attend VPI preschool at the site and younger siblings of concurrently-enrolled students at the choice school. The remaining seats are filled via the lottery. This works because there are significantly fewer VPI students in the pre-K year at those schools than there are kindergarten seats, so there's room to take all of the siblings as well as the VPI students who wish to stay at the school and still have seats leftover for the lottery. This works because VPI students get priority only for the school where they attend VPI, so a student who goes to VPI at Claremont or Barrett doesn't get priority admission for ATS; only students who go to VPI at ATS get priority there.

Montessori is different because all of the students in the APS Montessori preschool program get elementary Montessri priority at Drew, regardless of whether they attend preschool Montessori at Drew or at one of the satellite sites. In past years, between attrition from the program at the elementary level and expansion elementary program size, they've been able to give elementary Montessori priority to APS Montessori preschool students and to siblings of concurrently-enrolled students. Children who attended Montessori preschool elsewhere also got lottery priority over children who had no prior Montessori experience, which meant there was a lot of room for people who sent their kids to private Montessori programs to get their oldest child lotteried into the APS Montessori elementary program and then get all of their younger children in via sibling preference.

Now that the program will be moving to Henry the year after next, they're halting the growth of the Montessori elementary program because there isn't enough room at Henry to keep growing it the way it has. After the applications started coming in this past winter, they realized they had more applicants who qualified for priority enrollment either betweeen the APS preschool kids and the siblings than they had seats available. So they clarified the priority system so that priority goes first to students enrolled in the APS Montessori preschool program, and then to siblings who weren't in the APS preschool program (and they've done away with any preference for students who attended Montessori preschool elsewhere, they go into the general lottery pool with students who have no Montessori experience). The result this year was that only students who were in the APS preschool program were offered seats in the elementary program, and students who would have gotten in via sibling preference were waitlisted. Parents who were counting on getting their younger children into the elementary Montessori program via sibling preference are livid.[/quote]

PP here. Thanks for the info. Sounds like "clarifying" actually meant changing the policy from what had been done in years past. My guess is the communications about it were also bungled, knowing APS. What's the difference between "private" Montessori and "public"/APS? I can't see any. Both require the family to pay some portion if not all of the tuition. It's all "private", but at least aps private gets guaranteed admission to Henry...until they demolish that building to build a 4th high school and have nowhere to put the montessori program.[/quote]

They aren't demolishing Henry. They don't have the money to take an entire ES offline and rebuild it somewhere else. There will be no 4th HS at the CC. [/quote]

There will be a fourth high school, it'll just have off-site parking and only one field to come a few years later so that Henry can stay.[/quote]

No, there will be a program at the CC site, next to or incorporated with the other programs onsite. That's not a 4th HS.[/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