Reply to BOE Memer is proposing to study school boundary in MCPS

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

Which W isn’t crowded?[/quote]

Wootton, if you count Wootton, and maybe Churchill.  There’s a lot of talk about Wootton, which shares a boundary with Gaithersburg, being chronically not overcrowded.  But that is the outlier in the County. [b] I don’t think there’s any other cluster in the same situation.[/b]  And when the BOE proposed re districting between Gaithersburg and Wootton, the Gaithersburg families didn’t want it.  But that doesn’t fit some people’s narrative.[/quote]
Magruder cluster is very underutilized. Mostly smaller single family homes built in the 60s and 70s with a lot of retirees.

I could see a consortium of Gaithersburg, Watkins Mill, Magruder, and possibly Damascus with all of the schools offering different specialties. Expand Gaithersburg's PLTW more like Wheaton, Watkins Mill has IB, Magruder could have business or something similar or put another high school magnet there because this quadrant of the county can't get to Poolesville easily. There's plenty of middle area that would have similar bus rides to all three/four schools where letting people choose could even out utilization.

People are talking like changing fixed boundaries is the only solution. The purpose of hiring a consultant is not only to look at MCPS, but to look at practices of other districts and suggest other methods of populating schools. One possibility would be to give up the "cluster" model and just "zone" every neighborhood to its nearest 2 or 3 schools at each level (ES, MS, HS). When a kid enters a new level they participate in a choice lottery, which allocates on choice AND space available. That method would allow school utilization to remain balanced across the county over time, even as neighborhood demographics change.[/quote]

I mean, yeah, you could do this but there is a real loss of “community” in such a model.  I grew up near a boundary, and I did not know any of the neighborhood kids who didn’t go to my schools.  I like that we know a much larger percentage of the kids that live within walking distance because we see each other at school, school events, bus stop, PTA stuff.  I think community suffers when kids in the neighborhood are going to lots of different schools.[/quote]

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