Reply to Overwhelmed with moving to MCPS

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Overwhelmed with moving to MCPS"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So I moved to Bethesda, "the rich part of MoCo", 14 years ago to get my oldest with special needs into K. You know why I picked that location?

Because rich parents are more attuned to and have more resources to get their children evaluated (it's terribly expensive), and they feel more entitled to pressure their school to give their kids services and accommodations. Also there are slightly fewer poverty-associated social issues in the schools. This all combines to give schools in wealthy areas of MoCo an edge in giving out IEPs and 504s, because they're pushed by parents and they aren't focused on solving more dire student problems.

My kid was given an IEP even without a full neuro, on the base of his developmental pediatrician's assessment he possibly had ADHD (not even a definitive diagnosis). He did present with visible behavioral differences, so for Bethesda Elementary, it was a no-brainer. He received a ton of services in elementary I hadn't even though to ask for. I will forever be grateful to them.

I know it's not politically correct to write all these things, but I made the cold hard calculus that paying through the nose for housing was worth it in the end to not have to fight every year for services and accommodations. My son kept his IEP until 11th grade, well past the stage where he actually needed it, and then was given a 504 in 12th, to help him transition to college. We literally bought the cheapest house there was that year, inbounds for that elementary school :-)

[/quote]

OP, this post is one of the ones to be leery of.  If someone has zero experience with schools beyond the wealthy ones, they're not qualified to opine on the differences between wealthy and less wealthy.  We're inbounds for Oakland Terrace Elementary, which ultimately feeds to Einstein.  We've had zero trouble establishing an IEP for our son with SLD (dyslexia).  We know many other families who also have IEPs, for this or other reasons, in our school.  While the services aren't perfect, no one with whom I've spoken had significant difficulty getting these established and implemented reasonably well.  Because we're a Focus school, we have small class sizes in elementary; my kids never had more than 18 kids in a class from K-2, and usually more like 16 kids.  There are tons of highly educated parents here and, surprise, we're not the only ones who care about our kids' educations.  Parents of all backgrounds show at back to school night, concerts, events, etc.  Middle school (Newport Mill) has been a positive experience so far.

I could go on.  You've gotten great advice.  We have lots of friends at Flora Singer and they seem very happy there.  OTES is great, but the dual language immersion isn't ideal for some kids with special needs.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics