Anonymous wrote:
UMC DCC families need to brace up for some of their neighborhoods to get rezoned into Kennedy. How else would you get more UMC kids into Kennedy? You aren't going to bus kids from Whitman or Churchill all the way up there past all the other DCC schools.

How about the NEC? Where are the UMC kids going to come from when the poorest schools are in the eastern most corner.

The geography and concentration of poverty in the eastern areas makes this endeavor next to impossible.


Olney. Wasn't Sherwood originally supposed to be part of the NEC?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:UMC DCC families need to brace up for some of their neighborhoods to get rezoned into Kennedy. How else would you get more UMC kids into Kennedy? You aren't going to bus kids from Whitman or Churchill all the way up there past all the other DCC schools.

How about the NEC? Where are the UMC kids going to come from when the poorest schools are in the eastern most corner.

The geography and concentration of poverty in the eastern areas makes this endeavor next to impossible.

Indeed, and the way they address that is by putting in magnet programs there, like the IB. There are four new ones, all concentrated in the eastern part, two right next to each other. But who knows how effective it will be.

John F. Kennedy HS
Springbrook HS
Watkins Mill HS

Anonymous wrote:UMC DCC families need to brace up for some of their neighborhoods to get rezoned into Kennedy. How else would you get more UMC kids into Kennedy? You aren't going to bus kids from Whitman or Churchill all the way up there past all the other DCC schools.

How about the NEC? Where are the UMC kids going to come from when the poorest schools are in the eastern most corner.

The geography and concentration of poverty in the eastern areas makes this endeavor next to impossible.

Anonymous wrote:UMC DCC families need to brace up for some of their neighborhoods to get rezoned into Kennedy. How else would you get more UMC kids into Kennedy? You aren't going to bus kids from Whitman or Churchill all the way up there past all the other DCC schools.

How about the NEC? Where are the UMC kids going to come from when the poorest schools are in the eastern most corner.

The geography and concentration of poverty in the eastern areas makes this endeavor next to impossible.

Anonymous wrote:

Just because redrawing those boundaries such that it evens out the FARMs a bit won't raise test scores, it doesn't mean that evening out FARMs is a bad idea.

You something more than evening out is not a bad idea to divide and disrupt communities. No one -poor or wealthy- wants to be the island that gets chosen for forced bussing. Whether the issue is logistics, time, transportation, neighborhood continuity, not wanting to go to a lower performing school or whatever it is never popular for the area that is affected. There has to be a very compelling reason to inflict harm on a community.

I don't disagree with you that there may be other reasons to engage in forced bussing but letting MCPS hide poor performance, raising money for MCCPTA, or spreading out disruptive kids who should be sent to a special schools with much higher security or interventions instead of mainstream classrooms are just not compelling reasons.

Anonymous wrote:

Just because redrawing those boundaries such that it evens out the FARMs a bit won't raise test scores, it doesn't mean that evening out FARMs is a bad idea.

You something more than evening out is not a bad idea to divide and disrupt communities. No one -poor or wealthy- wants to be the island that gets chosen for forced bussing. Whether the issue is logistics, time, transportation, neighborhood continuity, not wanting to go to a lower performing school or whatever it is never popular for the area that is affected. There has to be a very compelling reason to inflict harm on a community.

I don't disagree with you that there may be other reasons to engage in forced bussing but letting MCPS hide poor performance, raising money for MCCPTA, or spreading out disruptive kids who should be sent to a special schools with much higher security or interventions instead of mainstream classrooms are just not compelling reasons.

Anonymous wrote:I hope the consultant considers the private school population in the study. What happens when a whole bunch of private school kids, who won’t go to their current school, get rezoned for something that is now acceptable to their parents? There are a ton of private schools down county and that could throw a wrench in the numbers.

Anonymous wrote:I hope the consultant considers the private school population in the study. What happens when a whole bunch of private school kids, who won’t go to their current school, get rezoned for something that is now acceptable to their parents? There are a ton of private schools down county and that could throw a wrench in the numbers.

Anonymous wrote:I hope the consultant considers the private school population in the study. What happens when a whole bunch of private school kids, who won’t go to their current school, get rezoned for something that is now acceptable to their parents? There are a ton of private schools down county and that could throw a wrench in the numbers.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Rezoning that occurs based on overcrowding and geography usually has less of impact on housing values because its clear to people when buying that they are on the edge of an area likely to be rezoned. The discount is built into the housing market. Areas that have better planning and financial management also forecast ahead and new developments are sold with clear future boundaries disclosed. Its frankly bizarre to me here that new developments pop up with no hard plan as to where kids will go and then it ends up being a crap shoot which one will get rezoned to the lower school.

Property values is a tangible thing to home owners and it should be to the county as well. The type of redistricting that MCPS is pursuing will destabilize the real estate market and at a time when MOCO is not doing very well. Someone in the county needs to be forecasting what this will cost the county in the long run and how they will make up the shortfall.

The other bizarre thing about all this is that the advocates seem to be white people living in lower performing schools and AA MCPS administrators and BOE members. The opposition is white people in high performing schools and asians. The hispanics who make up the largest demographic group in the system are no where to be seen or heard in any of these discussions. If you look at the county demographics, the hispanic residents are overwhelming younger and have more kids while the majority of white and AA residents are aging out of child bearing years so MCPS in the next 5-10 years is likely to reach 60% hispanic. Someone should ask the hispanic community what they want since they will be the primary population in the future.

Very interesting observation about the Hispanic representation at the meetings. I realize that the main issue is language barrier (which is also the issue in the classroom I am sure), however, surely there are fluent Hispanic families who would want to make a statement. Perhaps they don't care, or don't even realize what's happening.

Um. Yes, there are plenty of Hispanic/Latino families who speak English. Including the ones whose native language is English.

Just because redrawing those boundaries such that it evens out the FARMs a bit won't raise test scores, it doesn't mean that evening out FARMs is a bad idea.

Anonymous wrote:

OP's point seems to be that some people who are pro-boundary changes seem to present Einstein as a school that needs additional higher income students. As if somehow adding more higher income students will make Einstein 'better'. Even though, the families who are already there, think Einstein is fine just the way it is.

We're not at Einstein, but another lower income school, and many families in our cluster feel the same way.

Sigh I guess we are going to discuss Einstein yet again. I have seen numerous posts from someone about how you should buy in the Einstein cluster because if it gets rezoned to Woodward or somewhere even better you will get a windfall. It certainly seems like more than a few people are hoping to get zoned out of Einstein. This makes absolutely no sense though as why would MCPS move UMC kids out of Einstein and into a higher performing school filled with other UMC kids? If anyone gets moved out of Einstein it will be the low performing kids.

As for more UMC coming into Einstein, where are these kids going to come from? Do you really think that people who bought into Whitman or BCC will send their kids to Einstein? Those are the wealthiest areas in the entire county and you can't swing a cat in Bethesda or Silver Spring without hitting a private school.

You might succeed in shipping some poor students out of Einstein but this won't be enough to raise Einstein's scores without backfilling them with wealthy students. You will still have a low performing school, its just less crowded. You may succeed in dropping the scores of BCC or Whitman but it won't be by that much. Even if you could move enough low income kids to force the scores to drop, they would still be higher than Einstein. The housing prices in Whitman and BCC would soften making those houses more affordable and fewer people would be pushed into buying in the Einstein cluster so you just made Einstein poorer again.

This is all behavioral economics. Things don't work out they way you personally wish they will work out. They work out based on people's economic behaviors. Someone needs to do some modeling and factor in real economic behaviors.

Anonymous wrote:Just because redrawing boundaries won't raise scores doesn't mean the boundaries don't need to be redrawn. Clearly, some of these schools are severely overcrowded, and boundaries need to be redrawn.

Just because redrawing those boundaries such that it evens out the FARMs a bit won't raise test scores, it doesn't mean that evening out FARMs is a bad idea.

There are four factors in drawing boundaries, and unfortunately, they can't all have equal weight. It just doesn't work. Something's gotta give.