Reply to interesting discussion regarding abysmal decline of MoCo schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have worked for MCPS for a long time.  I don't think MCPS has changed, but our county demographics certainly have changed.  We have more newcomers with limited to no English language.  We have much higher rates of poverty and trauma.  Parents who are struggling to keep roofs over their heads, substance abuse, domestic violence, etc.  All of these societal problems are spilling into our school buildings and quite frankly, staff are overwhelmed.  It's very, very challenging to try and teach or run a building when you have a few kids in each grade-level who are consistently occupying 95% of your bandwidth.  These kids didn't ask to be born into crappy conditions but they're in our schools and are having a really tough time despite the best efforts by staff to support their SEL needs.  
We have to be honest with ourselves - until the parents (society) gets in a better place, we're going to continue to see the effects in our buildings.  The curriculum standards have become harder with CCSS but we've lowered our expectations.  Students know that there aren't any real consequences.  We don't suspend students because of the school to prison pipeline.  Trust me when I tell you, there are kids I would have advocated for suspension years ago but now knowing what they'd do at home, I'd rather them be safe and fed in our building.  Admin are basically spending any free moment covering duties, dealing with behavior issues, etc.  This gets in the way of them being able to get into classrooms to observe actual teaching and instruction.  
Personally, I'm tired of schools and MCPS being blamed for all of the problems that we've created as a society.  We aren't private schools - we take whoever comes to enroll and we do the best that we can with limited staff and training in trauma-informed practices. [/quote]

NP without direct experience so forgive me if this is a dumb question but why don’t they specify that one school is basically for the kids who are real problems, just as a daycare to keep them fed and off the streets and out of prison like you said, and then leave the other schools for the kids who want to learn or at least whose parents want them to learn? I imagine that most of these kids people are talking about aren’t the ones with official diagnoses who are protected right? Then one school in every city could be a write off but the rest could go back to actual education. [/quote]

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