Reply to Haters Gonna Hate, but Centers are here to stay (with busing)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Probably all very true. But when the "mean ones" are all kept together year after year AND are told that they are in the academically superior class AND, let's face it, often have parents with the same attitude, it creates the perfect storm. [/quote]
That's a lot of ANDs.  It's fair skies at our center.  Guess we're lucky.  [/quote]

This. We moved, so I ended up with 4 years of LLIV ES and 2 years of Center ES over two kids. Center atmosphere was so much less toxic. I think it's because the LLIV ES had such a small town feel that the PARENT sniping and back biting over who was and was not in AAP was impossible to escape and bled down to the kids.  There were actually a couple of GE parents who essentially told DD (not me, my 3rd grader) that she didn't belong in AAP.  The Center school draws from a much larger area, and is not nearly as close-knit, which can be a negative, but the gossip and back biting just aren't there.  Lots of DDs Center friends come from the AAP pool, but not all, since she is also involved in school wide activates.  FWIW, the academics are much stronger at the Center too.

If I could go back and redo, I would have done Center straight through, based largely on the atmosphere.  At the time I thought it was best to keep the kids within their community and with the kids in our neighborhood. But the sad reality was that once they hit the AAP class, they were treated like outsiders anyway. (And DC1 was in the first LLIV class at our ES, so it took a year or two for these problems to become evident-- adding LLIV completely changed the character and atmosphere of the school.  There was just so much anger and resentment).

I do get why some of the GE parents at the larger Centers have issues-- it must be tough when it looks to your kid with a 125 IQ like half of the class is "smarter" than they are.  This does make me think they should move to Centers with only AAP kids. But I will never understand why GE parents would root for LLIV in all schools. It completely destroys any sense of community. [/quote]

Everything you've described, and more, was an issue at our center.  Parents gossiping about who belongs in AAP and who doesn't, snotty parents who are dismissive of parents with GE kids (and the kids themselves), and kids in the GE classes being treated as the "others" (even when the school is their base school!) and inferior to the AAP kids.  Centers also destroy any sense of community, since there's such a stark divide between AAP and GE homerooms.  Yes, the kids mix during specials, but everyone is well aware of who has what label, and there is a clear sense of superiority from many of the AAP kids.  And yes, the kids who were borderline AAP absolutely feel rotten because they know there's no difference between them and most kids in AAP.

I feel that dividing kids into AAP/non-AAP does no one any good and only serves to perpetuate stereotypes on both sides.  Offering an AAP curriculum to [i]any [/i]child able to do the work would be the common sense solution; not segregating them into two very similar groups and labeling them.  The homerooms themselves should be mixed and the kids just rotate into and out of whichever group is appropriate for them at the time.  It's such a simple solution, I can't believe FCPS has wasted all these years with the current system. [/quote]

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