Reply to Cliff Notes summary of MCPS boundary study fight?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]MCPS has had recent significant growth, while use of facilities is uneven. Some schools are overcrowded and some underutilized. The district hired a consultant to review all current boundaries with an eye to how they affect overcrowding, diversity, and students’ proximity to their schools. The consultants will not recommend any boundary changes and the county will not make any boundary changes during this initial process.

Parents on DCUM and Facebook groups have spread the rumor that children will be bussed far from home in order to balance out school demographics, and that their home values will suffer as a result. MCPS has specifically responded that they are only looking at schools and clusters adjacent to one another and have no intention of bussing students across the county.[/quote]

This seems like a fair summary. I'd also mention there are many cases now where students don't attend the geographically closest high-school to their home. There are also some boundaries that resemble a congressional district designed by the RNC. There's a lot of room for improvement and there's no reason to go crazy or fearmonger.[/quote]

Just to say the obvious -- given the fixed locations of the high schools, and their fixed capacities, one should not expect all students to attend their closest high school.       Consider a school in a population dense region of the county.      It might be the closest high school for 3000 kids but only have a capacity for 2000 kids.       So 1000 students will not attend their closest high school.

I have done some work on similar optimization problems.       Given the locations of the high schools and their capacities,, and the locations of all the kids, create school boundaries that minimize the (root mean square) travel time of all the students.      There a reasons why one might want to modify such a "neutral" boundary map, but it would make a  useful start.      I could do it for MCPS, for say, $50,000.[/quote]

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