Reply to Emergency Legal Filing Seeks to Halt MCPS Plan to Close Wootton High School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Imagine paying all your high taxes for decades, only to have your local school closed down and your students bussed miles away to another community.   Like putting away money for a new car, only to have it given to your neighbors on the next block over, who offer to let you come and use it instead of getting your own.  
I hope they prevail.
[/quote]

Did you just figure out you live in a society? Taxes fund public schools, but they are not tuition payments. You pay them even if you don’t have kids. And kids who live in cheap apartments and pay very little taxes still get to go to the same school. You pay taxes to the county, and the county decides how to spend it based on who we all vote for. Just like you don’t get better postal service or trash collection or national defense based on how much you pay in taxes, you also don’t get better schools.[/quote]

I don’t think anyone is confused about how taxes work. No one is saying taxes are tuition or that paying more should get you a better school.

The issue is simpler than that. People expect a public system to plan responsibly and follow through on what it said it was going to do. When that doesn’t happen—and the solution ends up being something much more disruptive—it’s fair to question it.

“You live in a society” doesn’t really answer that.  Of course decisions are collective and resources are shared. But that doesn’t mean every decision is automatically the right one, or that communities shouldn’t push back when something doesn’t make sense to them.

At the end of the day, this isn’t about wanting more than anyone else. It’s about expecting consistency and reasonable planning from the system everyone is paying into.[/quote]

Exactly! Which is why the same people who are bashing Wootton are going to be screaming when their school gets closed in the next round. If it happens to Wootton and you didn’t care, don’t be crying when it happens to you.[/quote]

This isn’t really about “wait until it happens to you.”  It’s about recognizing that decisions like this set a precedent. If a school can be relocated after years of renovation being deferred, with limited options presented late in the process, that’s a model that can be applied elsewhere.[/quote]

I would hope so. Getting a new building is a good outcome for most. You're just salty your kids school will say Gaithersburg, kind of hard to humble drop Potomac when you kids go to school in North North North Potomac [/quote]

Getting a new building several miles away in a high traffic area was never the plan—people asked for Wootton to be renovated where it is.

This only became about relocation after MCPS deferred renovation multiple times and created a situation where moving the school now solves its own poor planning problems.  That may be convenient for MCPS, but it comes at the cost of disrupting an entire established community.

Reducing it to “people just don’t like the label” completely misses that point.[/quote]

It’s a reasonable solution.  Lots of kids commute several mikes away.  Should we not bus any kids and build more neighborhood schools by your logic?  Who pays for that. The school was deferred because other schools needed it more.  You lobbied for a solution and got one.

Most of the community is fine with Crown.  [/quote]

It’s not really about whether kids can or can’t commute a few miles—of course they do all over the county. The question is whether relocating an entire established school is the best solution [b]compared to other options that were originally on the table.[/b]

No one is arguing against shared resources or against prioritization across the CIP. The concern is that Wootton was repeatedly deferred, and then relocation becomes the “solution” that also conveniently resolves a separate capacity issue.

And on “you lobbied for a solution and got one”—that’s exactly the disagreement.  People asked for renovation at Wootton. What’s been decided now is not that request being fulfilled in a delayed way, but a fundamentally different decision that comes with much larger community disruption.

As for support in the community, there are clearly a range of views—but disagreement isn’t the same as opposition to Crown itself. The issue for many isn’t the building, it’s the decision to relocate an existing school to fill it.[/quote]

You're using a lot of words to say you want the county to spend extra money because you don't want your kids to go to school in Gaithersburg.[/quote]

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