Reply to Oak View and New Hampshire Estates- separating into two different schools?

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Reply to "Oak View and New Hampshire Estates- separating into two different schools?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One of the really weird things about his decision is that, to support it, he expresses concern that all of the students who currently COSA-out of the schools might decide to actually come back and attend if they had a neighborhood school, creating a capacity problem that MCPS would be forced to address.  So basically the real utility of the pairing to MCPS isn't that it fosters diversity, but rather that it is so reliably and consistently unattractive to so many families that Starr can count on them not to attend.  And voila! Capacity problem in densely populated corner of Silver Spring is kept at bay indefinitely.  The whole point of the pairing was to blend poor and middle class students to give all kids access to a diverse learning environment, and now they're declaring it a success because it so effectively prevents middle class students from enrolling in these otherwise perfectly fine schools.   If a public school system is deliberately implementing policies whose purpose is to repel middle class families from schools in poor neighborhoods as a capacity-control tool, and the school system invokes diversity purely as a pretext to support the practice, is that even legal?  [/quote]

I was also bothered by this language. I think that this decision came down the cost of an addition at Oak View.  There are so many capacity issues at MCPS schools right now that they just weren't willing to take on another building addition.  Its also interesting that Starr recently wrote an editorial in the Washington Post basically saying that balancing out the demographics of schools is not a priority. [/quote]

They may not want to face the capacity problem, but it already exists.  The kids who would come back into the schools already live in these neighborhoods.  The school system has elected to hide behind this unpopular arrangement as a convenient way to avoid making investments in these schools.  So now the question is whether it is permissible for MCPS to pursue a policy that knowingly and intentionally discourages middle class families from enrolling in these schools, both of which are situated in high-poverty neighborhoods. I'm just not sure they have the discretion to take an approach that is structured in a way that openly depends upon its unpopularity, and that needlessly guarantees high concentrations of poverty at schools that local middle class residents would gladly attend but for the imposition of compulsory busing arrangements that the rest of the county is not asked to participate in.   Starr's report freely acknowledges that having the local residents absorbed back into the schools would be a problem.  It's like he doesn't even get how offensive it is that this pairing, which was ostensibly created to establish diversity and which MCPS promised to support with a vibrant magnet program to ensure middle class participation, is now being exploited by the county as a way to artificially reduce the enrollment of the very students it originally promised to work hard to attract.  The intellectual dishonesty surrounding MCPS's framing of the issue and the way it tries to spin the numbers to support the conclusion that this pairing benefits students from a diversity-standpoint is a complete embarrassment. [/quote]

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