Reply to Initial boundary options for Crown/Damascus study

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Moving Wayside out of Churchill helps with utilization. How else will they get Churchill below 100%?[/quote]

It’s a BS utilization at Churchill. They’ve reduced capacity by 100 seats from when it first opened. What happened did the school shrink? Churchill has just had a period of a few years with higher enrollment which was consistently in lower figures and never had a portable until a year or two I believe. Kids there have stated it’s not crowded aside from the portable there’s no evidence to that.[/quote]

Churchill parent here.  There's no problem with Churchill being overcapacity.  Yes, there are a couple of portables and I'm sure those teachers aren't excited about them.  But I've never felt Churchill had too many kids generally.  It's not hurting education or the social environment.  And there's not much new construction in this area, so I wouldn't expect the problem to become worse in the next decade.

I have always wondered, though, why there are kids sooo far west that come to Churchill.  Those are largely Wayside kids, and some Potomac kids.  So yes, to drive from Wayside ES to Wootton HS, it may be about the same distance as going to from Wayside ES to Churchill HS.  But a huge part of that geography is far closer to Wootton than to Churchill.  Same with the Northern part of the Potomac ES boundaries.  The culprit is that they're not looking at ES boundaries.   I'd be interested in knowing the *average* student's bus time to both high schools-- there is certainly some house that is closer to Churchill and some house that is closer to Wootton.  In sum, I think, capacity-wise, it would be fine for Wayside to continue to go to Churchill.  But I think the quality of life for the average Wayside kid might improve by going to the closer school.[/quote]

Wayside going to Wootton should be the least controversial decision in entire boundary change. Wayside going to Wootton makes perfect sense. Folks who are arguing about leave this school or that school are missing the point. Boundaries will change when we have 2-3 near HS a same time. We can't leave schools.

No boundary will cover all bases, but positive outweighs negative in moving Wayside to Woottoon.[/quote]

In regards to the previous commens about Wayside and Wootton, I think one of the things that doesn't look like is being taken into account these initial options is the community or neighborhood feel.

Parts of the area that go to Wayside are borderline Wootton.

But the school itself and likely the majority of the area is right around the corner from the Potomac Community Center.  When my kids had activities at Wayside it took me less then five minutes, if even that, to get from Wayside ES to the community center where I hung around there while they were at the activity.

So it's likely that families in that area do activities more in the Potomac area and with most of the students going to Churchill.

One benefit of activities is that it does give my kids opportunities to interact with kids from other areas where they would likely never have.

But one of the things we hoped to get out of activities is for our kids to interact with their classmates and neighbors outside of school.  That helps build the camaraderie and friendships in school.

It's likewise for the northwestern area of Wootton near the Gaithersburg/North Potomac/Rockville divide.  Gaithersburg and Rockville have their own separate organizations.  Such as for baseball UMAC (Uppper Montgomery Baseball Club) vs RBBA (Rockville Baseball Association), MSI (Montgomery Soccer Inc) vs SAM (Soccer Association of Maryland), Gaithersburg City rec sports and camps vs Rockville City rec sports and camps.  For our family we're at the point where we recognize a lot of the other families in the leagues on other teams and makes the area seem a lot smaller because you see them around and helps with the community feel.  And the leagues and organizations in the other city seems like a while another world to us.

So in some of the proposals, they have students attending a school in one city, where most of the students probably do activities in a particular area.  But then move a subset of the students from that school into another area, where the majority of students from that area are involved in other organizations for the same type of activities.

They should at the very least keep students from the same elementary school together. [/quote]

Agreed re: keeping elementary kids together, but the problem is the elementary boundaries are all messed up. Thry need to restart at the foundation by redoing elementary boundaries and that will fix most of the split articulation issues at the middle and high school labels.

And why has no one mentioned that Tobytown students should go to Potomac ES and Churchill instead of Travilah and Wootton.[/quote]

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