Reply to Option H is permanent and the old Wootton HS campus will be closed for good?

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Reply to "Option H is permanent and the old Wootton HS campus will be closed for good?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I"m confused. If they use Crown for Wootton, and move one or two additional GHS neighborhoods to Crown, how does that the overcrowding at the neighboring schools like RM, QO, NW?[/quote]

It doesn't.  It achieves the following:

1. Removes the political pressure from Wootton families on MCPS to remediate (not renovate) issues at Wootton
2. Removes Wootton from the Capital Improvement Plan in 2035 (after being removed twice previously, but now permanently - third time's a charm)
3. Moves the Wootton boundary to include GHS neighborhoods by moving Wootton 3 miles, achieving previous boundary study goals/recommendations that were rejected
4. Redistributes the high achievers from Wootton to a new school and mixes them with kids from much lower-achieving school(s), hoping for improved grades by peer influence
5. Removes the political pressure from vocal, non-W school neighborhoods that such schools are bastions of white, privileged, rich families
6. Frees up prime real estate on Wootton Parkway for substantial residential development, enriching a developer that will make campaign contributions for years to come
7. Covers up a mistake by MCPS in accepting "free land" and building a new high school in a congested, high-traffic area right off the highway
8. Generates more tax revenues from increased business at the shops and restaurants surrounding Crown (and potential campaign contributions for years to come from those businesses)[/quote]

Can you expand a little more on your #4?[/quote]

Not the pp but It means Wootton will not be a top performing school anymore. That list that comes out with the best high schools in MD-it will no longer be on it. Basically it will probably be a very small step up from Gaithersburg HS. [/quote]

What lists?
Why do you think that will happen?
What actual impact would it have if that does happen?[/quote]

US News and World report-heard of that? Wootton is ranked 191 nationally. 
What makes a school great? It’s usually a very strong and active PTA. It correlates to high parent involvement. Rosemont basically has no PTA. And the reviews of Fields road are absolutely awful. The impact will be much time that is supposed to be for instruction now devoted to managing behavior issues. [/quote]

Are you concerned about dilution?  Because the Wootton cohort & PTA would pretty much stay intact with a move to the Crown location.  What does the ranking, in and of itself, generate, aside from marginally higher real estate prices?  The understanding is that it does not result in preferential admission to college on an individual basis.

High school is by period/course.  The likely placement of academically minded Wootton students in honors-level/advanced classes, which certainly stay available with any reasonably sized portion of the intact cohort, would tend to keep them with others similarly interested and less prone to being difficult (in the manner about which you may be expressing concern) in the classroom, even if from (gasp!) Fields Road.[/quote]

Did you ever actually go to high school? You think kids are only with the kids they are in classes with and that’s it? It’s a community. There is so much more to it than just being in classes with other similarly academic kids. [/quote]

Sure, it is a community.  If there is no relative [i]loss[/i] of that community between an option to have Wootton at its current location and an option to move it to the Crown location, then it would seem the "community" concern is limited to that which would be [i]added to[/i] the community...like Fields Road, perhaps.

If that is not the case, it might be better to provide detail.  If that [i]is[/i] the case, then just ew.[/quote]

It’s not just adding fields road and rosemont. It’s also about removing some Wootton ES to other clusters. Whole Wootton and fields road and half rosemont dont fit in crown.  [/quote]

But those removals seem only to have been presented in the first four options (A, B, C & D), mostly with DuFief moving out.  All of the options wherein there is a holding facility, with Wootton staying where it is (E, F & G) or moving to the Crown location (H), all of current Wootton stays together.  This thread, for the most part, is about those latter four, with the focus on the last.

And those four are the only examples where the boundaries aren't shifted such that Wootton loses one or other of their feeder elementaries (or a portion thereof).  Of course, they really are varied agglomerated possibilities set up to elicit discussion, not really options from which to choose, though a final choice may use one or other as a starting point, adjusting to the expressed interests of MCPS, the BOE (likely to a lesser extent than we might hope) and the community (definitely to a lesser extent than we hope).  But keeping Wootton exactly as it is remains unlikely if a shift can better balance capacity utilization, etc.

Then there is the upcoming system-wide elementary boundary study.  The ~70 seat shortage at the Crown location (and there might be others with similar shortages) if H were modified to include Fields Road could be addressed via minor adjustments -- some already quite likely to occur during that ES process.  I suppose [i]some[/i] Wootton stakeholders might always look at the upcoming ES boundary study with the hope that the [i]one[/i] change, if the HS remained at its current location, would be the removal of the Rio, but, again, ew...[/quote]

It’s not 70 seats shortage. It’s rather 200 if fields road is added. And overcrowding will get worse as there are so many new developments. There is also effect of regional model which will bus hundreds students in wootton as Wootton has the strongest stem magnet.  The current options all assume equal number coming in and leaving which are not realistic. Wootton will be super crowded very soon 
[/quote]

The out year looks much closer to 70 to me (perhaps 80, but this is back-of-the-envelope). How were you getting an overage of 200?

I agree that the current assumptions about the regional magnet programs are not realistic.  I suppose they could shift that STEM magnet to another school, but better would be to alter their approach to regional magnets by a bit to lessen the likelihood of more coming in to one school than leaving it.

In any case, MCPS is likely to try to address lingering HS/MS capacity overages of any appreciable size and duration with next year's ES boundary study.  They really should have done the whole system at once, of course.[/quote]

1897 (Wootton students)+537 (crown+fields road)= 2434
[/quote]

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