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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

I really just want my kids to go to the school closest to us.  I have no desire to put them on a bus for an extended trip across the county 2x per day.  Further, I want my involvement in the school to be easy and I want to be a part of my community.  I'd like to see my neighbor at school, the pool, the local library, the grocery store.  If I need to run over to school for something, it should be a quick drive, not 20-30 min involving major roads.

For the magnets, I'd want to see an all or nothing proposition.  Put a reasonably distanced magnet program in each cluster.  The idea that there are 2 MS magnets is nuts.  Why should kids have to sit on a bus for 39-45 min to get to school?    And the 30-45 min goes both ways---western county kids who would like to attend the TP magnet have to sit in a bus.  If you implement SES bussing, you're putting the TP MS kid on a bus to a western school for 39-45 min.  That's not fair to any child.[/quote]

+1 Well said.      I would only like to see redistricting to relieve overcrowding, and to keep kids at the closest school to their home.       (This also helps with environmental and traffic issues.)   [/quote]

+2.  I went to bus-ed schools as a kid, and I arrived at school every day totally exhausted and nauseated after a 45 minute bus ride. (Plus we had to get to school really early, so that the bus could do another run.)  I then slept through a lot of school.  Also, the schools I attended that were most obviously bus-ed did nothing to increase racial integration or harmony.  One school I went to bused kids from a very UMC neighborhood (where we were basically the poorest family) and then kids from the poorest, minority neighborhood.  The two groups never spoke, and were basically all in different classes.  It was a very bad environment for both, and I think it increased each groups' poor impression of the other group.  I went to another bus-ed school that was sort of the random catch-all school, and it was much more successful.  Most of the kids weren't coming from that far away, and it was a diverse mix of neighborhoods, so it didn't seem so much like a bad re-make of The Outsiders.

I see a couple problems in the County, but one is that they just don't have enough schools in the areas of the County where the population is most dense.  I know there's not a lot of land available to purchase for new schools, but it also doesn't seem like there's any effort to do so.  (A big property came on the market in our neighborhood in a location that would have been perfect for a new E.S., but it went to a developer to build a new subdivision.)  It does seem like the County is making a lot of progress in diversifying the housing stock in certain areas of the County (there's a lot of apartments and other cheaper options going up in North Bethesda, for instance), but then they are just cramming these kids into schools that are already bursting at the seams.  I think that creates a lot of resistance from the current residents -- even the families that are fine with socio-economic diversity are going to be concerned about bringing another 200 kids coming into a school that's already 200 kids over capacity.  [/quote]

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