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][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 families definitely closer to Churchill for the most part. For us, it is 3 miles more to Wootton than to Churchill and an additional 10 minutes (give or take) round trip. Not horrible but doesn't make sense.

The Wayside families that should never been zoned to Wayside in the first place are in the Potomac Glen area. There are three other elementary schools closer to that neighborhood, namely Lakewood, Stone Mill, and Travilah. Why they were ever zoned for Wayside/Churchill is bizarre, but from what I understand the contractor that built that development had some connections with Montgomery County politicians who made it happen. That is the only area that should be rezoned to Wootton and to the appropriate elementary school. The rest of Wayside belongs at Churchill.[/quote]

But they're not changing ES boundaries.  And ES split articulation to different middle schools sounds terrible.  And you're citing a 5 minute increase (one way) for part of the school zone to go to Wootton where another part of the school zone would probably save 2 or 3 times that by going to Wootton.  And MCPS is trying to put together a big jigsaw puzzle in which not every household will benefit, but the overall system is better.  So all in all, adding 5 minuts to a commute for some people isn't going to be a deal-changer in the overall puzzle.

Based on what you said, if we could invent a time machine, people here might push for the school zone to have been created differently 20 years ago.  And it sounds like there are a lot of people here who would favor looking at ES boundaries but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen.  So this is where we are.

[/quote]

Why is ES split articulation so bad? As someone who went to a MS and then split that wasn’t ideal, but at least I gained about 60-70 peers in MS to join my ES cohort to HS. However we were def lopsided as my MS was like 120 strong out of 450-500 total 9th grade.

I feel like if say an ES consists of on average 70 kids per graduating class, if about 30-40 were split to two different middle schools, that’s not the end of the world. At that age ALL of the kids in a MS are coming together from small cohorts. So a MS class of 300-400 could consist of 4-6 groups of 30-100 kids. So the 30-40 split could be very similar to another 40-50 from ES #2 and another 60-70 from ES #3 and another 100 from ES #4 for example.

If those kids do NOT split again for HS that gives 7 years together grades 6-12 which is a year more than time together in ES and often times kids are closest with those from those later years.

Worse would be a tiny split (less than 25 kids for example) from an ES to MS, even worse would be then splitting both ES to MS and MS to HS. Worst of all would be going together to MS but then a subset of an ES splitting as a tiny portion of a MS to HS. For example 100 ES kids go to MS with a total of 400 kids. If 50 of those ES kids by themselves go to HS while the other 350 go to HS thats awful. Peer groups are super formed by HS though def changed for me and others.[/quote]

I bristle at the idea of split articulation for ES students because MS is so damned hard, socially.  Pretty much everyone looks back on MS and views it negatively because it's just a hard and awkward age.   That said, ES kids tend to be pretty resilient with moves and making new friends.  So perhaps creating disruption between 5th and 6th grades would be favorable to creating it between 8th and 9th. Neither is great, but maybe earlier is the lesser evil.  It would also create a motivation for MCPS to redraw ES boundaries-- they could split-articulate now in a way that would allow them to sew things back up in a few years with an ES boundary study (getting rid of the split articulation at that point.). [/quote]

There are options that Lakewood has only 5-10 gets split among 70ish students. That neighborhood is also relatively poorer than the rest of Lakewood. Does MCPS think they can just bully the weak? [/quote]

Options 2 and 4 are absolutely brutal for that small Lakewood neighborhood that has no business being broken apart from the rest of Lakewood and forced to walk 45 minutes to Crown. For those affected, there is a change petition: https://www.change.org/p/don-t-divide-lakewood-keep-all-our-community-together-in-wootton.[/quote]

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