Reply to LEMON ROAD AAP CENTER

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "LEMON ROAD AAP CENTER"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I think the problem is not with the Shrevewood principal skewing class sizes. It is with the AAP parents still being allowed to opt to send their children to a Center when there is now a perfectly good AAP program offered at the local school.

LLIV is not intentionally designed to be a smaller class. I recognize that this has been the outcome, but if ALL the AAP students opted to stay rather than go to the center, there would not be a disparity in class size in any of the grade levels that currently have AAP at Shrevewood. Or, at least it would only be a difference of about 3-4 kids.

But as it is, we have this bizarre choice to make that basically compares apples to apples...but makes the LLIV principal and the Center principal feel as though they need to demonstrate that their apple is somehow shinier than the other school's apple.

For example, when we attended the Center presentation, parents were told that one advantage of a Center is that "at the Center, we GUARANTEE your child will be in a class with ONLY AAP children...and (beware! implied) a Local Level IV principal cannot offer that, and therefor the 'integrity' of the program 'may be' compromised." Those were the words used. So if the LLIV parents seem threatened by having the LLIV principal hand-pick a few kids to add to the AAP class to even out the numbers, it's because we were specifically told by the AAP Center that this practice "may" compromise the "integrity" of the program.

I'm not trying to Center Bash here, but I happen to believe that's garbage because there are many children who were not county-identified as AAP eligible who easily could thrive in the AAP class, but there are some parents who were likely influenced by this claim. (In the Center's defense, though, I get that they needed to have a strong pitch. My impression was that they needed "our" kids to go there in order to make the numbers work to have two classes per grade level. It was also pretty clear in the presentation that if not enough of us opted to send our kids to the Center, then they would end up with ONE AAP class per grade level that could potentially contain somewhere between 28-32 kids!)

The problem is, this puts the LLIV principal in a terrible bind! If she does choose to add in some hand-picked non-AAP children to the class in order to balance the numbers, some of the AAP parents will surely panic and be worry that they aren't getting the same experience as the Center program--because that is what they were told.

It's just a bad system to pit the center vs. LLIV and put the choice into the hands of the parents. And the principal is in an impossible position if she wants to both sustain the LLIV program and appease the (valid) class size concerns of the parents of gen-ed students. Just doesn't seem like they have figured out how this is all workable.

[/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