Reply to Please be aware of what is about to go away:

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Give me a break. The Blair magnet serves more than 400 students, it has served thousands of moco families well over the years, stabilized and improved the largest and most diverse high school in Maryland (Go Blazers), and brought national rep to the school district. Pretty good ROI. I would care about that collateral damage. [/quote]

400 a year is not very much, given the need.  That's 100 per grade.[/quote]

Well, even the 400 is a little bit of a "hide the ball" situation. Of the 100 kids per grade, only a handful are taking the massively accelerated courses that might not be sustainable when the program is duplicated.

When people talk about the "gem" that is SMCS, they don't actually mean that 400 kids per year are taking Linear Algebra or Organic Chemistry. Most Blair magnet kids are taking a normal math progression, ending with Multivariable or AP Statistics, and a normal math progression ending with Physics C (or whatever).

A very small number of kids are doing much more, and there is a critical mass of ES and MS parents who are convinced their children will be in that group, and who are lamenting what they perceive to be a loss of programs.

But it actually doesn't make sense to stand up a magnet around 15 kids per year, and I credit Taylor for being willing to walk away from the madness.

[/quote]

First, your sharing about the stats has some wrong numbers. Each year there are about 80 kids taking MVC/Diff Eqn, among which 10-15 are juniors and the rest are seniors, so on average 80% per grade students will end up with taking MVC/Diff Eqn. This is a significant amount. Spreading them back to their regions will cause some of these kids lose the opportunity to take these courses. Secondly, the reason for declining enrollment number of Linear Algebra is because the teacher is unpopular among kids. Again, this proves how difficult to train and retain a good high-level math (or any other STEM subject) teacher and now we are talking about 5X more. Thirdly, if you check the college admission (e.g., this year's data: https://bethesdamagazine.com/2025/09/10/mcps-students-college/), you'll see 10% of Blair SMCS students end up in MIT, 30% end up in Top 10, and 50% end up in Top 20. Even TJ can't achieve this high rate of elite college admission. Destroying this program is like destroying Apple or Nvidia for U.S. [/quote]

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