Reply to S/O: New middle school for BCC

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I haven't been following the debate but live in the BCC cluster.  Does anyone know why they aren't just using the money to add facility space to and then beautify the building and grounds and athletic fields of Westland?[/quote]

It was my understanding that there is no way to expand the core facilities-those are the cafeteria, gym, lockers.  It would lead to a lot of locker sharing which is far from ideal.  It also creates a school that is large, and if you look at BCC's recent "Color Day", potentially hard to control.[/quote]

What is the standard size for a middle school in MoCo?  There is a recommendation to do an addition at Julius West Middle School which would bring the program capacity to over 1,400 students (for 3 grades!!).  I think that is way too big for a middle school.  I wish the RM cluster was getting a new middle school too.  Consider yourselves lucky.[/quote]

Parents in the BCC cluster revolted at the thought of a Westland that would be around 1500 students.  The reason that BCC got a new middle school is that the BCC cluster parents had a bargaining chip -- the 6th grades at CC and NCC.  In fact, most parents at CC and NCC would have preferred to keep their kids in 6th grade at these elems, provided some reasonable proximity of academic equity could be maintained.  MCPS desperately wanted these last 2 6th grades to become part of a middle school and threatened the parents at CC and NCC with sharply declining academic offerings, leaving these kids behind, unless these grades were transferred to MS.  So, it was a swap in some ways -- MCPS got these 6th grades out of elem.  but the parents refused to have them go into a behemoth middle school.

The irony is that, it is clear from the core number proposed for a new middle school at RCH (a core at 1200) and from the Super's recommendation to use Westland to relieve overcrowding at Pyle, that MCPS intends to build a new middle school that ultimately will be as large as Westland, and in the end, 10 years down the line, it is unlikely that the BCC cluster parents will have what they wanted -- 2 reasonably sized middle schools.  I think there are many parents who divided the current middle school population totals by 2 and thought that each middle school would be around 750-800.  Instead, the new middle school was proposed at 930+ with a core for 1200 and Westland would take an additional unknown number of students from Pyle.[/quote]

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