Reply to Oak View and New Hampshire Estates- separating into two different schools?

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Oak View and New Hampshire Estates- separating into two different schools?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One of the really weird things about his decision is that, to support it, he expresses concern that all of the students who currently COSA-out of the schools might decide to actually come back and attend if they had a neighborhood school, creating a capacity problem that MCPS would be forced to address.  So basically the real utility of the pairing to MCPS isn't that it fosters diversity, but rather that it is so reliably and consistently unattractive to so many families that Starr can count on them not to attend.  And voila! Capacity problem in densely populated corner of Silver Spring is kept at bay indefinitely.  The whole point of the pairing was to blend poor and middle class students to give all kids access to a diverse learning environment, and now they're declaring it a success because it so effectively prevents middle class students from enrolling in these otherwise perfectly fine schools.   If a public school system is deliberately implementing policies whose purpose is to repel middle class families from schools in poor neighborhoods as a capacity-control tool, and the school system invokes diversity purely as a pretext to support the practice, is that even legal?  [/quote]

On one hand, I agree with your points.  On the other, there's a disturbing trend (and it's happened in my nieghborhood) to unpair and/or reboundary schools to in effect isolate FARMS / low income kids.  This may make middle class and wealthier families happy, but it creates an island for those who are left with a school with a high FARMS rate and - in the case of the school in my nieghborhood - very low test scores.  I get the arguments for the other side, but as someone who is now left with a school where approximately 70% of the kids are on FARMS (as opposed to 45% seven years ago), this is a serious concern.  [/quote]

The &quot;isolated island&quot; concern just doesn't fit well as a justification for the NHE and OV pairing because BOTH schools, without any pairing, have exceptionally high poverty rates.  Unpaired, the in-zone kids of OV have a FARMS rate of 77%, yet MCPS is treating OV as the affluent side of the pairing, intended to offer more middle class interaction with the kids from NHE.   If you're going to try to prevent isolation of poverty at a school like NHE that has a FARMS rate &gt;90%, paired or unpaired, you need to try to link it in with a more affluent school than OV.   These are the two poorest schools in the Blair Cluster.  It seems pretty obvious that by pairing them together, it is the other neighboring schools who are experiencing the upside of the pairing, not NHE and OV.   I agree that MCPS should be doing its best to prevent poverty from being consolidated at just a few schools.  And it's pretty easy to look around at neighboring schools in Silver Spring and realize that's exactly what's happening to BOTH NHE and OV due to this pairing.[/quote]

PP here.  Thank you for the additional information and context.  The situation is discouraging and it seems that this is a growing trend in MCPS.  [/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