Reply to Do Rock Creek Forest parents know about potential changes to SP Immersion, middle school, etc. ?

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Reply to "Do Rock Creek Forest parents know about potential changes to SP Immersion, middle school, etc. ?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]None of these responses offer a reason why the continuation of the Spanish Immersion program at Westland should not move to Silver Spring International Middle School where there is already a SP immersion program as part of the effort to relieve capacity pressures on Westland.   If it strengthens immersion, then consolidating the program to one location should be a good thing for the majority of students whose base area is the DCC.

The smaller number of immersion students who are in the Westland boundary will be able to apply to Blair's CAP program if they continue with immersion at Silver Spring International since that great program is only open to students who attend DCC middle schools.  And, barring any changes next year, MCPS already provides transportion.

[/quote]

Non-RCF parent here.  I don't think it's a good idea for MCPS to consolidate immersion programs.  These should be spread out, but still large enough so that they have a critical workable mass (i.e. a one-class immersion probably wouldn't work well).  Kids all over the county apply to immersion.  For someone who lives in W. MoCo, RCF/Westland is much closer than Silver Spring.   If kids were moved from Westland to SSIMS, then the only remaining MS SP immersion programs would be SSIMS and Key, both of which are in Silver Spring.  Why should SS have 2 SP immersion programs and the rest of the county none?  Also, SSIMS is the continuation for the French immersion elementary, and I think it is wiser to have approximately equal number of MS immersion students in each program at SSIMS.  French is a harder language to sustain in terms of getting enough interested students.  It's not a helpful dynamic to have twice as many fluent SP immersion students as French.  The within school dynamic becomes "everyone takes Spanish," which is already hard enough to fight.

Also, Rolling Terrace and SSIMS are partial immersion programs, but Rock Creek Forest and Westland are full immersion. This means if you re-route RCF/Westland students to SSIMS, you will have problems with the kids from the two different programs having differing level and scope of fluency.

Plus, personally, as a BCC cluster parent, although my kids aren't in immersion, I'm glad it's in the cluster.  It probably raises the level of Spanish at the high school level, enables more upper level Spanish classes at BCC, benefits the IB program, etc.  The number of SP immersion kids at Westland won't significantly relieve capacity pressure at Westland.  (What's the difference between being 400 over capacity and 500, really?)

Weast's focus on the immersion is a diversionary tactic, pretending to help address a problem at Westland that he wants to create by sending the CCES/NCC 6th grades to Westland when that school doesn't have the capacity.  [/quote]

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