Reply to Should MCPS start busing or open enrollment?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I agree, but I suggest that busing be designed so that no elementary school has more than 20% of students on FARMS. That means that some low SES kids get bused to Potomac, Chevy  Chase, and Bethesda and some high SES kids get bused to Silver Spring, Wheaton, Gaithersburg.
All middle schools and high schools should either have a magnet program, immersion program, or some other special program to attract high performing students and those that have potential, but have not yet been motivated to highly perform. There should be some programs that you must test into and some that are purely lottery based.

Of course, this will never happen because high SES parents would vote out any school board members who dared suggest it. Starr would be ridden out of town on a rail for even hinting that their snowflakes might rub elbows with a poor kid.

So the gap will remain.

[/quote]

Given that 33 % of MCPS kids are on FARMS, what do you propose to do with that 13%?

I'm torn on this.  On one hand, I'd love to see more diversity in our local school.  On the other hand, having lived in DC and traipsed across the city for "school choice" and experienced living on a block where the 10 kids went to 9 different schools, I really appreciate the fact that my kid can walk to school, and walk to friends' houses, and see school friends at the local park, etc . . . I would hate to give that up.

What MoCo really needs is more scattered site low income housing.  Rather than busing low income kids to our neighborhood, I wish they'd figure out a way for those families to live here.  [/quote]

This.  We can debate the point at which the %FARMS starts to become counterproductive, but what to do to make the theory into reality?  On some other thread someone explained how school choice worked in another state -- the county published lists of schools with open slots and parents could apply for those spaces, but would need to reapply at the next stage (MS or HS) and were responsible for their own transportation.  That's more or less the way that DC works, and those of us who had kids in DC and who lived through this process can attest to how chaotic it can be.  We got into our first choice out of the block, and with sibling preferences, we were set for ES.  But many people applied every year (and sometimes mid-year) to try to get into a school, drove their kids all over town in the meantime, and we all missed out on the concept of a neighborhood school, school friends you could visit on foot or by bike, and the simple pleasure of not spending 2 hours a day in transit.  I can see where open enrollment can, on the margins, even out some places like the Cold Spring/Ritchie Park imbalance pointed out elsewhere, but it's no silver bullet for county-wide imbalances, especially in a county as big as Montgomery.[/quote]

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