Reply to MCPS to study later start times

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I hate to be cynical but I wonder if Starr is trying to tank this. It sounds odd that he isn't recommending a study to find a feasible way to address high school start times but is prescribing a very specific constrained solution. The alignment of high school and middle school along with an increased day for elementary schools appears to be far more $$ impacting than other options. It looks like he is setting this up to guarantee a study that comes back asking to double the bus fleet and renegotiate work hours/salary with the teacher unions.

This sounds like a dishonest political play. Parents love the recommendation and he knows he's constructed it in a way where it will never be implemented. [/quote]

I think you've probably pegged this right.  He's done a lot of things that people perceived as in their favor (I'm thinking of the do-over of the middle school site selection in Bethesda/Chevy Chase, but there are other lower-profile things as well), only to have it be a big bag of process leading to the same result that MCPS favored to begin with.  MCPS is pretty much always going to do what works best and is easiest for it, but Starr has figured out that he has to give some sort of visible acknowledgement of peoples' concerns or the masses will harass him to no end.  And engaging in some sort of formal process to discuss and explore an issue will almost always work for him because there will almost never be unanimous consensus among MoCo residents, making it easy for him or the BOE to tip the scale whichever way they want by cherry picking the views expressed that favor their approach or by pointing to the lack of consensus as a reason for maintaining the status quo.

This issue has come up many times and I think the fact remains that the day only has so many hours and the county only has so many buses.  This makes for a hard and relatively inflexible reality that in order to give high schoolers a later start time you have to shift that burden to another set of students.  It's a math thing.[/quote]

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