Reply to Recap of last night (Nov. 13) in-person meeting at Churchill for academic program & boundary analysis

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Reply to "Recap of last night (Nov. 13) in-person meeting at Churchill for academic program & boundary analysis"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I hope this thread can collect ppl's feeling/feedback from last night's in-person meeting as well as new information. I'll share first my experience:

1. Central office sent like 50 employees, so people can't gather in large groups or voice out loudly. Essie and Nikki were both in the feedback room, but they didn't host a gathered session but rather only allow individual discussion. Jennie was in the cafeteria presenting the regional model, which consistently gathered good size of audience (~ 30 or more). It's like a conference poster session setting.

2. They will present a &quot;version 3&quot; regional model in Nov. 20 BOE meeting, where some details will be modified.

3. A NEC/DCC transportation POC was there, and said they would use the NEC/DCC transportation model rather than the HS-HS model so to make sure visiting neighborhoods. I've checked the 2016 METIS report and estimated the 2025 dollar-equivalent: it's about 1.6 million/year operating cost for DCC. As a contrast, the Oct. 16 BOE meeting slides had $740K/year operating cost estimation. So expecting the yearly operating cost to double at least.

4. Nikki and Jennie gave very different answers to questions. They appeared thinking right on spot of whatever answer they can think of. For example, I asked if a program is later evaluated not sustainable (e.g., low enrollment, can't acquire teachers, poor score metrics, etc.), will this program get cancelled across-board. Nikki said they would put more money into that program until it's successful, and no program would fail. Jennie gave a much more realistic reply, although still quite funny. They would maintain the same &quot;theme&quot; but change the program to another &quot;sub-theme&quot; to see if it would work. She gave an example that they could change &quot;fashion design&quot; to &quot;game design&quot;, as if they would require the same set of expertise from teachers.

5. STEM program POC said she hadn't contacted SMCS coordinators nor teachers for curriculum design. She &quot;will do&quot; once the regional model gets approved. So current 7th grader need to make a decision based on a program without curriculum or teaching staffs. Jennie said the STEM program will have the 8th period to accommodate the additional CS courses.

6. I've told two staffs that my questions/feedback using the online google form never got addressed in Q&A doc or BOE meeting. They told me to &quot;keep on submitting another form&quot;.

7. Jennie said the criteria-based programs won't use lottery. She might consider use local-norm of MAP-M and other metric scores if waitlist is too long for one region over another.

My gut feeling: Jennie is the one leading the design of details. If you have any detailed suggestion/tweak that you think might be very useful, contact her directly. Nikki and Essie know absolutely no detail and no interest to know at all. So they say nonsense. This entire regional model is an absolute &quot;top-down&quot; thing and they have absolutely no interest of compromising a little bit (e.g., slow down, scale back, use community feedback). The current 7th grader will be the unfortunate guinea pig. [/quote]

Regarding number 7, that is ridiculous. So the scores to get into programs will be different for different regions. So your zip code actually DOES determine your access to programs if they locally norm your score based on your zip code. They are waltzing around saying your zip code shouldn’t be determinative. So then don’t recalculate STANDARDIZED test scores. [/quote]

You do realize the same criteria can get like 1000 qualified applicants in Region 4 (Wootton, Churchill, RM, Rockville) vs. maybe 100 qualified applicants in Region 2 (James hubert, Paint branch, springbrook, sherwood), right? It's not just because of the academic performance, but also parents and students interests and vesting in education. So they'd have to either use a higher criteria for Region 4 or use a lottery. Honestly I'd think a higher criteria would be much more reasonable but then it would result in a much stronger program in Region 4 vs. Region 2 over years, which is inequitable. If you use lottery, the criteria-based program will wither as kids can get much less trouble and equally good or better education in local HSs. [/quote]

I personally would rather they scale the programs than have different criteria or lotteries. If you don’t have as many applicants in a region who can handle a program, have a strong but smaller program there. If you have many, have a bigger program. The issue they are trying to solve is literally having more interested capable students than they have seats. So put more seats where you have interested students, not where you don’t.[/quote]

I wish they could create a bigger program if more qualified applicants are interested. However, they don’t put one dollar into enrolling more teachers, and a school is bounded by its capacity, so expanding is not likely happen in reasonable scale. They other thing I was concerning is if they use the current qualification criteria (taking algebra 1, gpa &gt;=3.0 for SMCS and taking one semester of foreign language), nearly the entire Wootton and Churchill students qualify, and stem program looses its meaning.

The justification for them to create 6 regions is to eliminate the 2000 kids on the waitlist for SMCS and RMIB. Did they ever analyze the stats of those on the waitlist? No they don’t. It can be ridiculously low or vary vastly. The admitted students have a much higher stats than the current criteria.[/quote]

They didn't say 2,000 kids on wait lists for SMCS and RMIB. They said 2,000 kids total are left on a waitlist or wait pool at the end of the process. This could include interest-based programs. I asked for some clarification last night, including how many students apply to programs in general and how many students that remain in a wait list or wait pool were also accepted to/chose to attend a different program. I also asked how many of the 2,000 kids were not accepted into any programs they applied to. The person I was speaking to had no answers to any of these questions. She claimed that the county shared data about number of applicants from each high school, but I'm pretty sure she was referring to the graph that talks about number of attendees for each of the criterion based programs. [/quote]

PP here. Right. My point is they were so insisting on this "2000" number from the beginning when they first announced this regional model plan back in August, but none of them ever explained how they get this number, and what's the make-up of this number. They call this number the "academic program analysis".

I attended the August BOE meeting. If I recall correctly, Laura or one of the BOE members asked this question, and they said they would get it back in a follow-up, and as always, there is no follow-up. [/quote]

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