Reply to Moving - Middle School Advice

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=neuropoetry]Positive and negative posts are welcome. It is good to receive as many opinions about the situation as possible. I know I've had a lot of soul searching about how I envision the perfect education experience while navigating NYC and Westchester school systems. It is true Westchester's schools are ran at a local level but that also means that you can pay as much as private school in your property tax bill, and depending on the town  - you do not always get what you pay for.[/quote]

We moved from a different area of the country with very small school systems.  There are advantages and disadvantages.

[b]Advantages: [/b]
MCPS has some amazing programs that would have been unthinkable in our tiny school district.  If you can get in to the criteria-based magnets, they are head and shoulders above what my smaller district could provide.  At some of them (TPMS and RMIB come to mind), simply being in bounds for the school gives your child a significantly higher chance of admission. There are tons of other interesting programs that we didn't really look at because they didn't fit my kids' needs, but there are some amazing MCPS programs that aren't discussed on DCUM for things like vocational training.

MCPS has a far more diverse student body than our old district - racially, linguistically, socioeconomically - which I think is good for my kids (although that will vary from school to school, so if demographics interest you, you need to do some research.)

Consistency.  Maybe this isn't a big deal, but in the area we moved from, every school had not just its own curriculum, but also its own start and end dates, vacations, holidays...  Here there is consistency, so camps, school-day-off programs, etc. won't start when your kid is still in school or still be running when your kid has to be back in school.  And if your kid has a friend from church or soccer or whatever who is at a different school, it is easier to make plans, but also to talk about school because everyone is on the same page.  From a curriculum standpoint, our old area had K-8 districts and high school districts, with multiple elementary districts feeding into one high school district.  This means that kids were differently prepared for high school.  MCPS does not have this problem.

Tax burden.  This isn't really something you'll notice day to day, but obviously it makes a difference to be paying one superintendent's salary per million people as opposed to one superintendent per 20,000.  Some of the efficiency is lost when you look at how bloated the administration has to be to handle a big district, but paying more low-level administrators is still probably cheaper than paying more superintendents.

[b]Disadvantages: [/b]
Big ships move slowly.  As just one example, our old, tiny school district has had kids in the building this year, and MCPS has not.

MCPS is trying to equitably distribute resources and provide an appropriate education to wildly different communities with different needs and demographics.  There are some areas where they insist on being consistent, even when it doesn't make sense.  So we can have a snow day when there is no snow on the ground because another area of the county is snowed in.

On the other hand, different parts of the county do have different needs, and that is sometimes accommodated.  So while it seems like they work hard to force some things, there are also cool programs that exist at just some schools or in some geographic areas, and depending on where you live, you find out you can't take advantage of them.  For example, you'll read here about Blair CAP, which sounds like a cool program but is only available to kids living in certain areas.  Or you'll hear from parents who insist that it is super easy to register your 6th grader for Algebra, while other families don't have that option at all.

Like most districts, MCPS focuses most on the students at the very top and the very bottom, which can leave out the kids in the middle.  This is more obvious in an area with a bigger socioeconomic spread than it was in our old district, where there wasn't the same range of needs in the middle.  Because the middle can be somewhat lackluster, UMC and highly educated families really prize those "top" programs - CES at the elementary level, and criteria-based magnets for MS and HS.  There are not enough spots at any of these for the number of qualified kids, and you see a lot of angst from parents every few years as their child hits the next decision point.

Even though the DMV has a highly transitory population, MCPS is not good at evaluating needs for gifted kids from outside the system.  I'm sure if your child has an IEP, it will carry over, but if you missed the cutoff for a gifted program, you'll just have to wait for the next one.  For our kids, they ended up in the "right" places eventually, but it had to wait.  We moved at the beginning of 4th and 6th grades, when the CES and MS magnets start, so our kids needed to wait for MS / HS to get a chance at magnet admission.  And our 6th grader had to wait until 7th grade when they'd "proven" themselves to be moved to the higher level History class.  This wasn't the end of the world, but it was really frustrating at the time.

So, I'd say that MCPS has a lot of great opportunities and programs, but you really have to do your homework.  Don't trust what you read on DCUM, which is full of both misinformation and disinformation.  You need to look at each individual school / cluster separately, because they offer different things.  Central admin at MCPS won't break that down for you.  You really need to contact each school.

Good luck![/quote]

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