Reply to Longfellow MS AAP overcrowding plans?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'll just point out again that it's not Longfellow enrollment trends that will force changes at Cooper.  It's the declining enrollment at Cooper and the overcrowding at Kilmer, which gets the Cooper AAP kids from Great Falls. [/quote]

So it's fair to all of a sudden overcrowd Cooper overnight and force kids into trailers when Longfellow just undertook a nice renovation to increase capacity (I can't comment on Kilmer since I know nothing about their building or future renovation plans).[/quote]

Longfellow is at capacity even with its Reno.  It is slated to go over capacity shortly.  People are not saying to do it over night.  This has been talked about for at least a year and Cooper is slated to be under capacity.  I don't think it is fair for Cooper parents to continue to deny AAP to their neighborhood children and require them to be bussed all the way across town to Longfellow.  I also don't think it is fair for Cooper parents to say they don't want their AAP students but that they perfectly fine for them to be overwhelming another school's resources.  Cooper should take care of its own students - all of them.[/quote]

The AAP kids attending Longfellow from the Cooper district are a small part of Longfellow's overcrowding problem and the school is not actually at capacity.  But Cooper would definitely go over capacity very quickly with these kids being moved over from Longfellow and/or Kilmer, and what's worse, in a building that doesn't even have a planned reno yet. [b] But anyway, the real issue is not just a building and capacity issue.  Like the Haycock battle last year, it's a substantive issue about the quality and equivalency of the programs offered.[/b]  Do you really think the bulk of the opposition to this move is from "Cooper parents" who don't want to provide AAP to their "neighborhood children" or are you trying to spin it that way to avoid the real issue . . . the primary opposition is from parents of AAP students at Longfellow whose base school is Cooper (and parents of AAP students at Kilmer whose base school would be Cooper).  Their kids and often their siblings have been attending Longfellow (or Kilmer) for years and they feel just as invested in those schools as you do.  And as many other posters have pointed out, no one believes that a Cooper program would be anywhere near the quality of Longfellow or Kilmer for many years, especially in light of the lack of planning on the County's part.[/quote]

I could not agree more with this poster. Longfellow is the most established center school in Cluster 1 in terms of teachers and extracurricular resources, so I really think doing the following (if FCPS plans to do anything at all) makes the most sense:

1-Make Longfellow a CENTER school only for Cluster 1, and absorb the Longfellow, Cooper, and Kilmer AAP populations. This should not exceed school capacity. If you like, establish an additional screening process in 6th grade (perhaps based on IOWA scores or an additional screening tool in addition to teacher recs)

2-Have Cooper absorb GE population of Longfellow.

3-Establish limited busing to the centers if you live outside the Longfellow base boundaries (maybe clustered at local shopping malls or churches the way Potomac school does)

This would go a long way to addressing everyone's concerns and eliminate the AAP vs Non AAP friction that currently exists in elementary school. By middle school, the kids have a proven academic track record and it would behoove everyone (students and parents alike) to focus on the academics and not friction created by the current system in place.[/quote]

Longfellow has more GenEd students than AAP students and the AAP students come from both Cooper and Longfellow.  If the Cooper AAP students go back to Cooper, Cooper posters have claimed it will be overwhelmed with students and the school will be littered with trailers.  Yet you think it's OK to send all of Longfellow's GenEd students to Cooper.  The numbers simply don't work.

In addition, having an AAP-only middle school at Longfellow would result in howls of protests from parents in other parts of the county whose children attend other AAP centers.  Longfellow would be under-enrolled, yet it would still send far more students to TJ than any other middle school.  Parents at other AAP centers would think their kids were getting a raw deal.

Finally, if you had GenEd kids who lived within walking distance of Longfellow, you'd be unhappy that FCPS was now bussing your kids miles away to an unrenovated Cooper because AAP parents living further away had decided they liked your building.

As a result, I wouldn't hold my breath on this one. [/quote]

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