Reply to Initial boundary options for Woodward study area are up

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]https://moderatelymoco.com/mcps-50-school-redistricting-how-boundary-changes-could-impact-families-opinion/

Great article here about the history of the four factors as well as some information on how lengthy bus rides to school contribute to absenteeism.[/quote]

Thank you for this very helpful link! I was unaware of the 2019 MCPS Countywide Boundary Analysis and that’s very helpful background for those of us who haven’t been following this for years and years.

I find this fascinating: “More than 70% of respondents stated that minimizing boundary changes, ensuring students attend the school closest to home, cohort stability and maximizing walkers were extremely important. Only 10% responded that school diversity was extremely important.”

So there was clearly a large, broad consensus on what variables matter to the community when doing this boundary study, yet some of these variables, such as cohort stability, aren’t even a priority. How is that? How did MCPS arrive at these final 4 priorities, which do not fully reflect the priorities of our community?

Demographic characteristics of student population
Geography
Stability of school assignments over time
Facility utilization

This whole process seems rather ridiculous. They ask for feedback from
the community and then ignore what people say they want as their priorities. They then establish their own priorities (still not clear on how this happened) that do not reflect the values of the community. And now we’re expected to weigh in (and probably get ignored) on some really poor options, most of which are in direct contradiction to the previously stated community priorities? How many millions of taxpayer dollars are funding this insanity?

[/quote]

FYI that survey only covered about 2,000 people out of the hundreds of thousands of MCPS parents, less than 10% were Black or Hispanic (despite the majority of MCPS students being Black or Hispanic), 57% of respondents were from Bethesda/Chevy Chase/Potomac, and there was a lot of hubbub and organizing around fighting the "countywide boundary study plans to bus your kids across the county for diversity" that led people very opposed to diversity-based changes to get people to fill the survey saying that, to basically set up exactly the narrative you and Moderately Moco are running with.  It may in fact be true that people in the county prioritize those things, but those survey answers can't tell us those things because it's about as far from a representative, unbiased sample as you can get.[/quote]

Also the 4 factors are from Board Policy FAA (the same policy/factors they use for every boundary study), every time they update the policy they do it at a Board meeting in public and there is a chance for community input, and you can always lobby them to update it if you don't like it (but most people just focus on lobbying around the specific boundary changes themselves.) Nothing nefarious or secret here.  If your complaint is that they didn't overhaul their list of factors based on the results of the WXY survey, well, see again the explanation of how ridiculously unrepresentative it was

And cohort stability/avoiding split articulation is in there under the geography factor (although it looks to me like for this study the contractor [/quote]

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