Reply to RM Cluster Overcrowding?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Got behind on commenting - but I wanted to go back to the complaint that "RM is a bad school - just look at the report card - why would anyone want to move here".  I know it's more fun to make broad categorizations especially when they fit your view of the world, but if you really want to understand what is happening, you need to look at the details in the data. RM has two main areas of impact - chronic absenteeism and ESOL students.

[b]RM has ~9% ESOL students and when ESOL[/b] 1 students arrive, they are classified as 9th graders, no matter their age. The impact of ESOL students isn't just in the progress towards learning English category. It also hits "on track in 9th grade", "well rounded curriculum beyond HS graduation requirements", "graduation in 4 years", and "proficiency in English". The state should really just break out ESOL students in high school separately and have more appropriate measure for them. This would also prevent masking actual problems with your English speaking students because of a high amount of ESOL students.

Chronic absenteeism is absent 10% or more of school, regardless of whether the absences are excused or not. That's 18 days out of 180, or 4.5 days per quarter. There are a lot of kids out due to being sick, being pulled for doctor's appointments, being pulled early for vacations, staying home for a "mental health day", etc. Sure, there are probably 20-30 kids per grade with extreme absence issues, but the bulk of the chronic absenteeism is from the well-performing students who feel they can afford to miss a day of school here and there. I think this is another bad measure from the state - it should be unexcused absences.

For the majority of students in RM, they have access to a strong academic program and they are very successful with it. This is why people still want to move into the RM cluster. An overlooked group of people who will move into those condos is families experiencing divorce who have older children and teens. One parent keeps the house in a cluster with a less desirable high school, and the other parent moves into a condo in RTC and the kids end up at JW and RM. Part of the projections challenge at RM has been the surprise arrival of high school students that weren't already in the feeder pattern coming from JW or the magnet. I think every fall for the past 5 years has started with ~30-40 more students than were enrolled in June when people leave for the summer. So yes, more building in RTC will generate more students at higher than previously projected rates, and I think those students are biased towards the MS and HS, not ES level.[/quote]

Rockville high school has higher FARMs and higher ESOL. It doesn't have IB magnets. Still it is at 63 percentile while IB is 56 percentile.  Something is not right with RM to be at 56 percentile despite hosting IB magnet.

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