Reply to B-CC/WJ capacity cluster meeting

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t know much about the new plans for Woodward, but it seems like you could easily fill up a new cluster by siphoning off the excess from the already overcrowded Whitman, BCC, WJ, and possibly Einstein and Richard Montgomery clusters. If you shifted one ES east in each cluster, you could then redistribute the other ES boundaries. It doesn’t seem practical to keep stuffing more kids into the existing elementary schools just to overcrowd the MS and HS. [/quote]

What a good thing that MCPS is doing a boundary analysis to assess the feasibility of ideas just like this one![/quote]

But, it seems like they aren’t really doing this. If you keep looking at adding additions to existing ES buildings and also won’t consider returning the BCC elementary schools to neighborhood K-5 buildings, you are not really focusing on getting each kid into a right-sized, non-overcrowded school with a reasonable commute all the way through HS. [/quote]

Decoupling BCC elementaries does not address capacity at all - you are merely moving kids around.  It’s like re-areanging deck chairs on the Titanic.  The longest commutes are between Chevy Chase East of wisc and RHPS.  Also kids from RHPS get home late because the school starts later - around 9:30.  Some buses have a 20 minute commute time from first pick up to school door. Others are as long as 40 minutes, but these are the buses which have many stops. Lobby to change that rather than use it as your Trojan Horse to re-segregate.  Your family can’t spend 20 minutes in the service of integration? Mine was happy to.  I was happy as a child when the cluster desegregated. I had many friends of all backgrounds and that experience served me well in college and career. 
[/quote]

Your assumption that every person’s biggest focus is segregation is counterproductive. I’m from a part of the country that has a much higher minority population, so the concern between relatively small differences in FARMS rates between these schools needs to be kept in perspective.

My kids are little and are in a Westland-zoned elementary school, so I am also not complaining about the busing from a personal perspective. However, we deliberately avoided house hunting in neighborhoods with split articulation because we have three kids close in age and two different schools would have been a logistical hardship on us. I can personally attest to the benefits to my entire family of a close-by neighborhood school. To flip your argument on its head, I don’t see why only rich white people should be allowed the positive benefits of convenience and community.

Personally, my biggest concern is overcrowding. I have been a high school teacher at a very diverse school with many challenges. All of these challenges are made more difficult by overcrowding and the accompanying class sizes. Returning the Silver Lake elementary schools to neighborhood schools has the dual outcome of giving those neighborhoods local community schools and allowing at least one of them to be moved into the new Woodward district to reduce the size of BCC. [/quote]

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