Reply to Second round options for Woodward boundary study

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Please try to keep this thread about the second round options. There are other threads about the regional program plan.[/quote]

The second round options impact families who are being switched schools.  The second round reduces student numbers, which is good but reduces staffing which leads to cuts in courses.  Some schools only have the bare minimum.[/quote]

Is size of Eisntein different in the first round vs the second round?[/quote]

Yes

The concern with the combination of the boundary study and the program analysis is that based on the proposals, Einstein will have fewer students, which is good in that it relieves overcrowding, but has the additional effect of taking teachers and other staff away from the school because staff are allocated based on enrollment.

This concerns people because Einstein currently does not offer a wide variety of coursework, especially in STEM, so fewer teachers would make this worse. There are kids that can't actually fulfill their graduation requirements at Einstein because they came in advanced in math and there aren't enough math classes. In addition, the proposed boundaries increase Einstein's FARMS rate somewhat, which is not necessarily a bad thing by itself but in combination with lower enrollment may decrease the percentage of high resourced students that come to the school prepared for advanced STEM classes.

In addition, the current DCC system brings in kids from throughout the DCC schools that are interested in the arts to participate in Einstein's VAPA program. However, without the DCC, there may be less interest in VAPA from the local population, and that might also lead to reduced offerings at Einstein. MCPS has proposed keeping a visual arts magnet and an interest based education program at Einstein, but the visual arts magnet will become less prestigious since it will be regional and countywide. Einstein does currently have an education program (education as in courses on becoming an educator), but there was limited interest in that and they were actually proposing eliminating it.

On top of all this, they are proposing putting an IB magnet and a humanities magnet at BCC. Einstein currently has an IB program, but it is very small. With the regional IB at BCC, this has a very real risk of drawing too many IB kids away from Einstein to sustain Einstein's local program.

In the meantime, BCC will not just keep but expand its existing IB program, add a criteria based humanities program, and keep its other local programming like its own education program and its engineering program neither of which will be impacted by any of these changes since their boundaries aren't changing and they don't rely on out of boundary students to sustain their existing programming.
 repor[/quote]

Thanks. This is compelling. What is a good fix in your mind? It seems to me that an easy solution would be to place ht regional IB program at Einstein.[/quote]

How about asking families and doing a survey.  I wouldn't keep IB at Einstein.  Few kids graduate with an IB degree and then they don't have enough AP classes which many kids prefer.[/quote]

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