Reply to New Budget Recommendations -- eliminate AAP busing and centers

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Reply to "New Budget Recommendations -- eliminate AAP busing and centers"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OK so if I understand correctly there is no Level IV except at centers, which happen to have GenEd kids as well.  When there's space, then I guess the centers sometimes round out the Level IV aka AAP classes with Level III kids.

-- Parent of 2nd grader [/quote]

There's level IV both at centers and at base schools. It's the same curriculum. The idea behind the centers was to provide a larger peer group to AAP kids who would have been few in numbers at their base school. This works well when you have a handful of kids who qualify for AAP at the base schools--they actually get enough of them to form one classroom or more at a center.

In practice it has two perverse effects when the qualifying cohort is larger:

1. If the base school has enough AAP kids to form a classroom absent the center, the fact that kids leave for the center hollows out that group and forces the principal to try to fill the class with kids who didn't formally qualify. That sends some parents into a tizzy and generates the idiotic presumption that the center is somehow better. In truth, AAP is such a broad program and the admissions process is so subjective that there are lots of kids in GenEd who can do the work.

2. Some centers get hopelessly overcrowded with AAP kids. People are fond of throwing around the word "critical mass" as if having tons of AAP kids in one place somehow raises their collective intelligence. What it does result in is lots of kids in trailers, AAP classes over 30 like my kids' in the last two years, and cut-throat competition for academic after-school activities (Science Olympiad, Mathcounts, Quiz Bowl, etc.) and lots of kids who are left out of them due to limited numbers of spaces.

[/quote]

Thanks[/quote]

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