Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 12:53     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Really, people no longer know how to wrk together to achieve a common goal. They just are focused on their own personal goals for their family. At this point the best thing to do would be to close all the schools and just hand the money to parents to homeschool/hire individual teachers to teach your kids. Parents who agree with each other can pool their resources.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 12:49     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Anonymous wrote:I think they’re going to need to start listening to parents a lot more, otherwise families will continue to leave public schools. What it means in practice is that school districts should probably be a lot smaller and separated according to beliefs because in large districts you get all types and some group is always unhappy. In particular, they need to do more to keep white conservatives happy because it’s obvious to everyone that when white people leave the schools, the schools get worse for everyone who stays.


Majority Asian schools usually do pretty well.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 12:38     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Anonymous wrote:Yes. We are the forced consumers (in an area where there are no school vouchers, like MCPS) and payers via our exorbitant property and piggyback taxes.

Yes indeed.

Or give me my cost-per-pupil $$ and I will vote with my feet.



No. Education isn’t a car.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 12:36     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Filtered influence? Yes.

Book banners combing through the library? No.

GFY, moms for liberty types.

Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 11:14     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
They also get great teachers fired for trying to teach without all the political bs. Yea yes we all get that college is a scam but trying to scam a scam and manipulate your kids data is like lying to cover up a lie.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 10:40     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
The issue is the "influence" basically results in the "no" parents dominating everything. They don't want any kid learning science, sex Ed, literature that challenges, hard history. They want to dumb down and kill the curriculum for all the kids and that takes away my choice to have my kid have a full education.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 10:35     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Parents should punish and discipline kids not just tru to sue schools and fire teachers if they don't like us critiquing and teaching their kids right and wrong. Otherwise they should f off and if they are gossiping behind teachers backs to admin they are just bad people.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 08:05     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Elected school boards have been a big negative in VA since they were introduced. bThey have become (de facto) partisan stepping stones for higher office. SB members have not demonstrated a focus on actually educating kids.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 07:59     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
^ meant to say it is not about $. Not aiming to cut funds to poor areas and get more for mine and I am sure they could work out a way to handle fair $ distribution while right sizing the actual control of schools by making districts much smaller.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 07:58     Subject: Re:s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:There should also be opportunities for community involvement — not just parent involvement. My /our taxes pay for the public schools. I /we do this because we want to be a part of an educated community, and value child and family focused services. Having a small segment of the community end up with a disproportionate influence is not appropriate for public education. I like the idea of having smaller districts, but I could see that easily increasing the differences in resources available to many schools and their students and communities.


I think school board elections cover that, though? I know our district also allows non-parent residents to speak at meetings and their input seems taken into consideration equally with that of current parents. That being said, our board shrugs off most feedback altogether unless it comes in the form of a large public petition (which definitely includes residents who don’t have kids) or massive email or phone campaign of some sort.



Yes the SB mostly ignores parents. A big part of this is that the county is too damn large.


This. I prefer the model in some other parts of the country where each town has its own school - and where incorporating a town or city has not been banned state-wide by the legislature for 50+ years. Those smaller school districts spend less per-pupil on overhead and more on actual instruction. Further, the leadership can be held accountable for results and for basic things like using actual paper textbooks.


McLean mom wants a rich school for her own kids and a poor school for brown kids. Tale as old as time.


I’m not PP above but agree with her. I live in Burke so not exactly “high class”. These county wide districts are just not a good set up and are way way too big to be responsive to parent concerns. This is my about $. I’d be happy for the county or state to still distribute funds in a fair way so the poor towns are not SOL. It’s about having a say in anything going on in schools like HW, textbooks, screen time, discipline, etc.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 07:47     Subject: Re:s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:There should also be opportunities for community involvement — not just parent involvement. My /our taxes pay for the public schools. I /we do this because we want to be a part of an educated community, and value child and family focused services. Having a small segment of the community end up with a disproportionate influence is not appropriate for public education. I like the idea of having smaller districts, but I could see that easily increasing the differences in resources available to many schools and their students and communities.


I think school board elections cover that, though? I know our district also allows non-parent residents to speak at meetings and their input seems taken into consideration equally with that of current parents. That being said, our board shrugs off most feedback altogether unless it comes in the form of a large public petition (which definitely includes residents who don’t have kids) or massive email or phone campaign of some sort.



Yes the SB mostly ignores parents. A big part of this is that the county is too damn large.


This. I prefer the model in some other parts of the country where each town has its own school - and where incorporating a town or city has not been banned state-wide by the legislature for 50+ years. Those smaller school districts spend less per-pupil on overhead and more on actual instruction. Further, the leadership can be held accountable for results and for basic things like using actual paper textbooks.


McLean mom wants a rich school for her own kids and a poor school for brown kids. Tale as old as time.
Anonymous
Post 05/10/2025 07:39     Subject: Re:s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:There should also be opportunities for community involvement — not just parent involvement. My /our taxes pay for the public schools. I /we do this because we want to be a part of an educated community, and value child and family focused services. Having a small segment of the community end up with a disproportionate influence is not appropriate for public education. I like the idea of having smaller districts, but I could see that easily increasing the differences in resources available to many schools and their students and communities.


I think school board elections cover that, though? I know our district also allows non-parent residents to speak at meetings and their input seems taken into consideration equally with that of current parents. That being said, our board shrugs off most feedback altogether unless it comes in the form of a large public petition (which definitely includes residents who don’t have kids) or massive email or phone campaign of some sort.



Yes the SB mostly ignores parents. A big part of this is that the county is too damn large.


This. I prefer the model in some other parts of the country where each town has its own school - and where incorporating a town or city has not been banned state-wide by the legislature for 50+ years. Those smaller school districts spend less per-pupil on overhead and more on actual instruction. Further, the leadership can be held accountable for results and for basic things like using actual paper textbooks.
Anonymous
Post 05/09/2025 10:27     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Yes. We are the forced consumers (in an area where there are no school vouchers, like MCPS) and payers via our exorbitant property and piggyback taxes.

Yes indeed.

Or give me my cost-per-pupil $$ and I will vote with my feet.

Anonymous
Post 05/09/2025 10:21     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
I think they’re going to need to start listening to parents a lot more, otherwise families will continue to leave public schools. What it means in practice is that school districts should probably be a lot smaller and separated according to beliefs because in large districts you get all types and some group is always unhappy. In particular, they need to do more to keep white conservatives happy because it’s obvious to everyone that when white people leave the schools, the schools get worse for everyone who stays.
Anonymous
Post 05/09/2025 10:13     Subject: s/o Should parents have any influence in public education?
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Yes they should. The best way would be smaller school districts to make them more responsive to parents. Since that is not happening, more use of actual surveys (real ones designed to get input not the fake ones designed to check a box) where you need to put in your kid’s student ID to reply and the system only allows one reply per student number.

The “moron” parents are not the majority even if sometimes they are the loudest.


School districts would not help. Having classes taught in different learning styles would.


1-learning styles theory has been totally debunked

2-parents are not arguing about learning styles. They are mostly arguing about what books the library should stock, whether the bible should be taught, and who should get to use what bathroom.