Reply to Initial boundary options for Woodward study area are up

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Initial boundary options for Woodward study area are up "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was expecting a range of options on the demographics/equalizing FARMS dimension.  But options 1, 2 and 4 do basically nothing to improve on that front, or in some cases make things worse.  And option 3 is only a moderate improvement, the kind of thing I would have expected as a middle-ground option between "no improvement on demographics/diversity" and "significant improvement on demographics/diversity."

I feel like all the options other than #3 are non-starters. #3 has plenty of flaws but it feels like we need to focus on iterating off of it to make it better.  It's ridiculous to have some schools with 6% FARMS rates and some schools with over 60% FARMS rates (or up to 75% at some middle schools!) and have 3 of the 4 options not do a thing to try to address that. [/quote]

They said all 4 criteria would be equally important. And many people, including low-income ones, highly value geographic proximity, and consider option #3 to be a non-starter.

Anyway, these are not the final options. There is no way everybody will be happy. [/quote]

Well whatever the board said about their priorities, the contractor doesn't appear to be listening, because 3 of the 4 options don't improve demographics/diversity at all.  We need to make sure the next round of options are better.

Frankly it's honestly not in anyone's interest to only have one option out there that addresses demographic balance and diversity rather than multiple choices that do, because I don't know that the Board is going to be willing to okay something that makes zero progress on that front.  So regardless of your personal opinion on the importance of that, it behooves us all to figure out some better versions of option 3 that we can advocate for and try to get on the final menu of options in the fall.[/quote]

I think it's really difficult to come up with a better plan without having any of the data. How do you imagine having normal boundaries and little busing and still increasing the Whitman FARMS rate meaningfully? The huge disparity is due to the enormous differences in housing affordability across this region (which is not even the whole county). Why don't you go fix that? [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics