Reply to B-CC/WJ capacity cluster meeting

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

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 [b]the Silver Lake elementary schools[/b] 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]

What is Silver Lake?[/quote]

Sorry- Silver Creek. Silver Lake is a place near my hometown and I always revert to that in my head. [/quote]

But BCC just got an addition and it's not in urgent need of downsizing. And no one is going to impose a split articulation on Silver Creek - the boundary study was heavily contested and bumping one of the elementaries out of BCC would create a new furor without solving any real problem.

Look, I've had kids at Rosemary Hills and while I liked the school, I'd prefer a single K-5 pattern for simplicity's sake. And I'm not totally sold that the desegregation purpose of Rosemary Hills exists in quite the same way that it did in the 1970s when this arrangement was established. But MCPS has huge capacity & equity issues to address and for the most part the BCC zone is in pretty good shape on both counts. The study of BCC/WJ elementaries actually reinforces the issues raised in the Woodward planning process, which is that WJ and its feeder elementaries are wildly overcrowded. MCPS needs to focus on solving those problems, rather than satisfying some Chevy Chase moms who resent that their kiddos have to go to kindergarten near brown people in Silver Spring.[/quote]

I don’t disagree with you that WJ is in worse shape than BCC in terms of overcrowding. That’s why most of the new feeder pattern for it will come from WJ and the DCC. All the clusters in lower MoCo are overcrowded. However, you have significant new development in downtown Bethesda and Westbard that is going to impact both BCC and Whitman in the next decade.  Since there is no plan to build West of Wisconsin Ave, the logical solution is to shift each district West and create more space in a new (or probably two new) high schools in the East in the next decade. Woodward is just the first one.

You also undermine your own rebuttal by returning to the jab “satisfying some Chevy Chase moms who resent that their kiddos have to go to Kindergarten near brown people in Silver Spring.”  The whole point was to show you that there are reasonable arguments on the side of decoupling that have nothing to do with segregation. There really isn’t that much segregation going on at this point and there are very valid reasons to make a change. You can disagree with how to weight the balance of those reasons, but don’t continue to argue as if the only reason anyone disagrees with you is that they are a raging racist hell-bent on segregation. [/quote]

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