MS teacher, thank you for your posts. I really appreciated the reminder about how the experiences we give our kids is important to how they view the world and their ability to be resilient.

OP, I do not think that the BOE will go through with Dr. Martirano's suggested redistricting plan. He did this for political optics to appease the bleeding hearts. People will fight his plan and put pressure on the board to come up with a logical redistricting option that will not destroy the high performing schools in Howard County. However, there are three known school board members who have their hands in the back pockets of county council members who are crazy enough to vote in Dr. Martirano's plan.

There is already backlash and community protests. The next few board meetings in Howard County are going to be quite interesting.

Also, if your child is segregated into all GT courses, then you have nothing to worry about. Physical education will be the only course that your child will have to interact with the lower performing students. Physical education is usually okay because I find that students who are not academically inclined actually do well in physical education. However, if your child is in any of the regular major subject courses (math, science, geography, English, etc.), then your child will encounter some problems. Parents of GT students have nothing to stress about. Parents of non GT students better fight like Hell!

The GT students self segregate themselves from those students. So, there is limited interaction, peer pressure, and excusable social destruction if your child takes all GT courses. Parents of white and Asian students will have nothing to worry about because for the most part white and Asian students self segregate themselves anyway.

Please note that if you are a parent of a high performing or GT African American and Latino child, then, you too better fight like Hell. Lower performing minority students (specifically African American and Latino) are negative influences towards GT AA and Latino students. There is way too much social pressure to not value education and to engage in social destructive behaviors. You want your child to thrive in an environment where being an intellectual is phenomenal and not in an environment will they will be ostracized for "acting white".

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’ve taught in 5 MCPS MS schools by now and student taught in a sixth. I also have two kids who went through a seventh. So from the perspective of seven MS ranging from high income to low income, the similarities were surprising. And while the actual problems differed, the high income schools actually had a wider array of issues and many of the additional ones originated with entitled parents.

The lower income schools tended to have the same small set of issues:
1. Students with an acute poverty-related issue like no winter coat on a freezing day or limping with a bad sprain that hadn’t been seen by a medical professional. Those we can usually address pretty easily, but they do create a distraction in the first class of the day.
2. Students with chronic poverty-related needs. Like a kid who smells bad because his mom can’t afford the laundromat or one who is falling asleep in class because he lives with nine other people in a three bedroom apartment and it is loud until 3 am. Again, these are distracting but we can often work with families to ameliorate things.
3. Students who are suffering trauma. While MC and UNC kids can also face parental substance abuse, DV and CSA, poor kids are more likely to do so and also to deal with other traumas such as parental incarceration, eviction, etc. Traumatized kids are often unavailable for learning and may react strongly to perceived threats that untraunatized kids ignore. This is a problem that needs a whole school approach to handling. I can’t tell you how many times I calmed a kid down and got her back to work, only to have another teacher trigger an explosion the next period by trying to prove a point to the child.
4. Children can overcome poverty-based lags in skill development and we know that IQ is not fixed, but rather can be increased through intensive means. I see that all of my low income kids have gifts, including out of the box problem solving ideas and far more grit/resilience than the wealthier kids I have taught. I make my classroom a place where thinking and effort are rewarded, not just memorization and exposure to arbitrarily-valued cultural experiences. I agree a child should know the word waltz, but I can also use a different term in tandem while asking about the attitude of a character in the passage entering a room. That way, the student can answer the question “He acted like he didn’t care” AND learn that the waltz is a dance that appears effortless, so we use it to mean someone is doing something with a carefree attitude.

This is a very interesting post. Can you speak to your observations of MC and UMC kids in these schools? Also the interactions or no interactions between the groups?

In one of the wealthier schools, there was virtually no meaningful interaction between the high and low SES students outside of PE class. The low income students were bus riders from an apartment complex and nearly all of the higher income students walked or carpooled. Placements were pretty much by student and parent request. The higher income parents always selected the advanced version although the courses were not taught substantively different. Advanced was really just a few additional activities that teachers sometimes often not to do in favor of a beloved movie. The lower income students chose regular. Because there were fewer regular courses, they traveled together all day long as a small group. It was like being in a school within a school.

The other wealthy schools I taught in did a better job of trying to avoid placing all of the lower income kids in de facto segregation. One school saw a lot of tensions rise after Trump was elected, but the other two were generally fine. They switched to all advanced to avoid pooling the kids. One year, the most popular eighth grade boy was Latino. I think lower SES girls had a harder time because middle school is brutal on girls anyway, but before I left there was a major effort to add afterschool clubs they asked for.

Here are my general observations about the UMC students I’ve taught:
1. Most lack resilience and resourcefulness. They are used to adults making the magic happen when the road to their goal gets rocky. One way I tried to address this was by establishing a budget ceiling of $5 for projects. I suggested using recyclables and required students to submit an itemized budget. Some parents thought this was about leveling the playing field for the FARMS students. It was really to push their kids to think outside the box and not rely on parents’ money to solve a problem.
2. Many were actually living surprisingly limited lives. For example, at one school, so many eighth graders had never been on the Metro despite having lived a mile from it their entire lives. These limitations shaped their views about the world and found their way into how they related to characters in texts, but also real life people. A few kids were resistant to new experiences, but the majority just never had the chance. Their parents had curated everything. I liked to mix things up by using culturally diverse texts. So if a character ate pupusas and my students didn’t know what pupusas were, I’d bring them in the next day and then talk about how MoCo came to have so many pupuserias and Salvadorans. It’s the mirror image of the waltzing thing for low SES kids. Both groups need more exposure. IMHO, even a higher income kid will encounter more opportunities to eat pupusas than to waltz. Why are we prizing one term over the other on assessments?
3. Entitled attitudes were the most common problem and led to students declaring a teacher must dislike them just because they were not allowed to do whatever they wanted. At times, it was such a caricature of spoiled kids in a tween tv show that it was hard to take it personally. However, there were moments when students caused big problems for themselves by refusing to accept no.

I dont think an anonymous forum is the best place to get feedback. You can contextualize advice if you know who it’s from- like, the person who said just move might be someone who you see as a precious flower anyway and you could ignore that advice.

One bit of advice- you ask what you have to lose in this situation, but maybe ask what you have to gain. My kids went from a low FARMS ES to high FARMS MS and HS and I was terrified, and felt bad about being terrified. In the end, what I found is that my kids developed an empathy they wouldn’t have otherwise. They will check themselves now when complaining about being bored staying home on a long weekend for example (at our ES everyone flew off somewhere on those weekends) when I ask what their new friends are doing ... working cleaning houses with their mom, at home taking care of a sibling, etc. It really does put the world in perspective going to school with kids from all SES backgrounds.

Good luck, OP.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

This gets proven over and over. MCPS has been trying to do this with the Magnet programs and CES programs in ES being placed in lower-performing schools. It’s been tried in other areas as well and it rarely does anything to close the achievement gap.

I want to push back on this specifically, as a parent who has had kids in CES programs and the TPMS middle school magnet.

At the CES level (my kids were at Pine Crest), I would not expect the presence of the CES to have any benefit to the home school, since the kids never mingle. It is a school within a school. Now, I think Pine Crest is a fine school, but the presence of absence of a CES program does nothing for the kids at that school who are not in the program.

At TPMS, there is more "mingling" between magnet and home school kids in the classes that are not magnet courses, but there is nothing wrong with TPMS without the magnet. My experience has been that the school is well-run, and that the "mixed" classes are just fine. That is, I don't think my magnet child is doing anything to "help" TPMS because it is a great school with or without my magnet kid.

That is because TPMS drew its boundaries to avoid the poorest parts of Takoma Park. Completely accidental I am sure, or maybe another example of hypocrisy

TPMS has a 30 percent FARMS rate, which is not nothing. The point is that PP said the CES and magnet programs were "proof" that economic integration doesn't help poor kids. My argument was that the CES programs wouldn't be expected to "help" kids outside the program, because it isn't integration. It's a school within a school. At the middle school level, TPMS is a perfectly fine school with or without the high SES kids bussed in for the magnet program. These are both terrible examples of "why economic integration doesn't work," which is the point PP was apparently trying to make.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Howard county is currently being redistricted and the latest proposal moves 200 kids from one of the best middle schools( the one we will go in a few years) to the one with the highest FARM rate. The present FARM rate of this school is 52% and the target after redistricting will probably be 40%. The PAARC scores for this school hover in the 20 and 30 percents.

Now the usual cries of not wanting our kids to go t those schools, crime, home values are doing the rounds and I'm not claiming to be above those. But in all honesty, I didn't go to school here and I'm trying to understand what our experience there might be like. We are currently in a < 5% FARMS rate elementary. middle and high school pyramid. I feel some of the hesitancy, including my own, might be people not really knowing what the new school is like.

I am truly trying to have an open mind and trying to understand what my kids would lose by going here. I don't believe 3 years of middle school make or break your life. Does this truly give my otherwise v protected kids a window into the world that's out there or is peer pressure and the price of poor choices too high in middle school. If your kids attended such a middle school coming from an elementary school like described, what was your experience and the pros and cons of this.

I am assuming that you mean "one of the middle schools with the smallest numbers of poor kids."

My personal opinion is that it's positively harmful for affluent kids to go to a school where everyone is affluent and the racial/ethnic demographics are very skewed - "best middle school" notwithstanding. It's not a good bubble to be in.

Using that logic would you move to a crime infested dangerous neighborhood

How on earth did you get from "it's not good for affluent kids to go to school where everyone is affluent" to "in that case you should move to a crime-infested dangerous neighborhood"?

Anonymous wrote:

This gets proven over and over. MCPS has been trying to do this with the Magnet programs and CES programs in ES being placed in lower-performing schools. It’s been tried in other areas as well and it rarely does anything to close the achievement gap.

I want to push back on this specifically, as a parent who has had kids in CES programs and the TPMS middle school magnet.

At the CES level (my kids were at Pine Crest), I would not expect the presence of the CES to have any benefit to the home school, since the kids never mingle. It is a school within a school. Now, I think Pine Crest is a fine school, but the presence of absence of a CES program does nothing for the kids at that school who are not in the program.

At TPMS, there is more "mingling" between magnet and home school kids in the classes that are not magnet courses, but there is nothing wrong with TPMS without the magnet. My experience has been that the school is well-run, and that the "mixed" classes are just fine. That is, I don't think my magnet child is doing anything to "help" TPMS because it is a great school with or without my magnet kid.

That is because TPMS drew its boundaries to avoid the poorest parts of Takoma Park. Completely accidental I am sure, or maybe another example of hypocrisy

This gets proven over and over. MCPS has been trying to do this with the Magnet programs and CES programs in ES being placed in lower-performing schools. It’s been tried in other areas as well and it rarely does anything to close the achievement gap.

I want to push back on this specifically, as a parent who has had kids in CES programs and the TPMS middle school magnet.

At the CES level (my kids were at Pine Crest), I would not expect the presence of the CES to have any benefit to the home school, since the kids never mingle. It is a school within a school. Now, I think Pine Crest is a fine school, but the presence of absence of a CES program does nothing for the kids at that school who are not in the program.

At TPMS, there is more "mingling" between magnet and home school kids in the classes that are not magnet courses, but there is nothing wrong with TPMS without the magnet. My experience has been that the school is well-run, and that the "mixed" classes are just fine. That is, I don't think my magnet child is doing anything to "help" TPMS because it is a great school with or without my magnet kid.

Anonymous wrote:I’ve taught in 5 MCPS MS schools by now and student taught in a sixth. I also have two kids who went through a seventh. So from the perspective of seven MS ranging from high income to low income, the similarities were surprising. And while the actual problems differed, the high income schools actually had a wider array of issues and many of the additional ones originated with entitled parents.

The lower income schools tended to have the same small set of issues:
1. Students with an acute poverty-related issue like no winter coat on a freezing day or limping with a bad sprain that hadn’t been seen by a medical professional. Those we can usually address pretty easily, but they do create a distraction in the first class of the day.
2. Students with chronic poverty-related needs. Like a kid who smells bad because his mom can’t afford the laundromat or one who is falling asleep in class because he lives with nine other people in a three bedroom apartment and it is loud until 3 am. Again, these are distracting but we can often work with families to ameliorate things.
3. Students who are suffering trauma. While MC and UNC kids can also face parental substance abuse, DV and CSA, poor kids are more likely to do so and also to deal with other traumas such as parental incarceration, eviction, etc. Traumatized kids are often unavailable for learning and may react strongly to perceived threats that untraunatized kids ignore. This is a problem that needs a whole school approach to handling. I can’t tell you how many times I calmed a kid down and got her back to work, only to have another teacher trigger an explosion the next period by trying to prove a point to the child.
4. Children can overcome poverty-based lags in skill development and we know that IQ is not fixed, but rather can be increased through intensive means. I see that all of my low income kids have gifts, including out of the box problem solving ideas and far more grit/resilience than the wealthier kids I have taught. I make my classroom a place where thinking and effort are rewarded, not just memorization and exposure to arbitrarily-valued cultural experiences. I agree a child should know the word waltz, but I can also use a different term in tandem while asking about the attitude of a character in the passage entering a room. That way, the student can answer the question “He acted like he didn’t care” AND learn that the waltz is a dance that appears effortless, so we use it to mean someone is doing something with a carefree attitude.

This is a very interesting post. Can you speak to your observations of MC and UMC kids in these schools? Also the interactions or no interactions between the groups?

Anonymous wrote:I’ve taught in 5 MCPS MS schools by now and student taught in a sixth. I also have two kids who went through a seventh. So from the perspective of seven MS ranging from high income to low income, the similarities were surprising. And while the actual problems differed, the high income schools actually had a wider array of issues and many of the additional ones originated with entitled parents.

The lower income schools tended to have the same small set of issues:
1. Students with an acute poverty-related issue like no winter coat on a freezing day or limping with a bad sprain that hadn’t been seen by a medical professional. Those we can usually address pretty easily, but they do create a distraction in the first class of the day.
2. Students with chronic poverty-related needs. Like a kid who smells bad because his mom can’t afford the laundromat or one who is falling asleep in class because he lives with nine other people in a three bedroom apartment and it is loud until 3 am. Again, these are distracting but we can often work with families to ameliorate things.
3. Students who are suffering trauma. While MC and UNC kids can also face parental substance abuse, DV and CSA, poor kids are more likely to do so and also to deal with other traumas such as parental incarceration, eviction, etc. Traumatized kids are often unavailable for learning and may react strongly to perceived threats that untraunatized kids ignore. This is a problem that needs a whole school approach to handling. I can’t tell you how many times I calmed a kid down and got her back to work, only to have another teacher trigger an explosion the next period by trying to prove a point to the child.
4. Children can overcome poverty-based lags in skill development and we know that IQ is not fixed, but rather can be increased through intensive means. I see that all of my low income kids have gifts, including out of the box problem solving ideas and far more grit/resilience than the wealthier kids I have taught. I make my classroom a place where thinking and effort are rewarded, not just memorization and exposure to arbitrarily-valued cultural experiences. I agree a child should know the word waltz, but I can also use a different term in tandem while asking about the attitude of a character in the passage entering a room. That way, the student can answer the question “He acted like he didn’t care” AND learn that the waltz is a dance that appears effortless, so we use it to mean someone is doing something with a carefree attitude.

That's basically the opposite of all research out there, but carry on. There are some interventions that show IQ gains when the kids are young, but these inevitably fade out as the kids get older.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can say this only on an anonymous forum. If you can do anything to not be in this situation - move, go to private school - then do so.

Op here,. That is why I chose to ask this in an anonymous forum as opposed to Facebook - so that I can get an honest opinion. Can you elaborate on why you feel this way?

OP, "honest opinions" are not necessarily a good thing. Especially when they're anonymous "honest opinions".

Op here. PP, we have a buzzing Facebook forum. The only thing I've heard in the last 2 days is either shrill opposition and how this is unfair having to go from a 10 rated school to a 5 rated one or preaching about how all schools in hoco are good and our kids are resilient and will be fine anyway. I have not heard a single nuanced view of what the actual challenges would be for the kids being moved in order to help somebody with an open mind form an opinion.
Fwiw, we are Asians and my son is a v nerdy and somewhat socially clueless kid. I wonder if bullying would be a risk.

Yes, bullying will be a risk - at the middle school you're currently zoned for, as well as at any middle school you might be rezoned to.

It's a risk at every MS. A friend of mine lives in a school cluster that is wealthy, white/asian, and friend's DC in MS was bullied there, and it was the "smart" kids doing the bullying. There's different kinds of bullying - physical and non-physical. Wealthy schools may not have a lot of physical bullying, but they have a lot of non physical bullying, which can be equally harmful. Another friend's DC goes to a higher FARMs rate school but is in the magnet program and doesn't get bullied probably because of the peer cohort.

We are zoned for a "balanced" MS, and my nerdy DC was never bullied. Now that doesn't mean there is no bullying at our MS, but that there is bullying everywhere, and having a higher FARMs population doesn't necessarily mean your kid will be bullied.

FWIW, I'm Asian American, too. While I understand OP's concern, I would not say this is the end of the world in terms of MS. As long as there is a good cohort there, your kid might be fine. I would also say that this experience might open up his world a bit more and build some resilience. I would say try it, and if worse comes to worse, then pull him out. There could be some truly fantastic teachers at this school, and your DC might just have a pretty good experience. The fact that you might be well off enough to pull him out and go private means you are in a very fortunate position than majority of people in this country.

I’ve taught in 5 MCPS MS schools by now and student taught in a sixth. I also have two kids who went through a seventh. So from the perspective of seven MS ranging from high income to low income, the similarities were surprising. And while the actual problems differed, the high income schools actually had a wider array of issues and many of the additional ones originated with entitled parents.

The lower income schools tended to have the same small set of issues:
1. Students with an acute poverty-related issue like no winter coat on a freezing day or limping with a bad sprain that hadn’t been seen by a medical professional. Those we can usually address pretty easily, but they do create a distraction in the first class of the day.
2. Students with chronic poverty-related needs. Like a kid who smells bad because his mom can’t afford the laundromat or one who is falling asleep in class because he lives with nine other people in a three bedroom apartment and it is loud until 3 am. Again, these are distracting but we can often work with families to ameliorate things.
3. Students who are suffering trauma. While MC and UNC kids can also face parental substance abuse, DV and CSA, poor kids are more likely to do so and also to deal with other traumas such as parental incarceration, eviction, etc. Traumatized kids are often unavailable for learning and may react strongly to perceived threats that untraunatized kids ignore. This is a problem that needs a whole school approach to handling. I can’t tell you how many times I calmed a kid down and got her back to work, only to have another teacher trigger an explosion the next period by trying to prove a point to the child.
4. Children can overcome poverty-based lags in skill development and we know that IQ is not fixed, but rather can be increased through intensive means. I see that all of my low income kids have gifts, including out of the box problem solving ideas and far more grit/resilience than the wealthier kids I have taught. I make my classroom a place where thinking and effort are rewarded, not just memorization and exposure to arbitrarily-valued cultural experiences. I agree a child should know the word waltz, but I can also use a different term in tandem while asking about the attitude of a character in the passage entering a room. That way, the student can answer the question “He acted like he didn’t care” AND learn that the waltz is a dance that appears effortless, so we use it to mean someone is doing something with a carefree attitude.

My kids go to a high FARMs MS in MoCo. I found that there are a lot more resources and that the principal and staff are very generous with the resources. Every kid who struggles gets help even if they dont qualify for an IEP. They are good at dealing with problems and tend to be proactive. So for example, if a kid is at risk for being picked on i the locker room, locker room cleaning will be scheduled for that kids PE time so there are always staff there.

I also found that they are good beyond academics and behavior. Kids who are hungry have a tough time learning so they know how to refer them to outside resources for help. All kids get school breakfast every day.

I recently had to make decisions about a school for one of my kids who is now in HS. One of the people I turned to for help was the MS principal because she was so resourceful.

Lots of people were concerned about our MS for the reasons mentioned here. But I don’t know any dissatisfied parents of kids who actually went there.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can say this only on an anonymous forum. If you can do anything to not be in this situation - move, go to private school - then do so.

Op here,. That is why I chose to ask this in an anonymous forum as opposed to Facebook - so that I can get an honest opinion. Can you elaborate on why you feel this way?

OP, "honest opinions" are not necessarily a good thing. Especially when they're anonymous "honest opinions".

Op here. PP, we have a buzzing Facebook forum. The only thing I've heard in the last 2 days is either shrill opposition and how this is unfair having to go from a 10 rated school to a 5 rated one or preaching about how all schools in hoco are good and our kids are resilient and will be fine anyway. I have not heard a single nuanced view of what the actual challenges would be for the kids being moved in order to help somebody with an open mind form an opinion.
Fwiw, we are Asians and my son is a v nerdy and somewhat socially clueless kid. I wonder if bullying would be a risk.

IMO, you won’t get nuanced responses because there isn’t much nuance about it. It will not be beneficial to your kids to have them attending a school with more lower-income kids. And, really, the lower income kids aren’t going to magically perform better in the new environment.

This gets proven over and over. MCPS has been trying to do this with the Magnet programs and CES programs in ES being placed in lower-performing schools. It’s been tried in other areas as well and it rarely does anything to close the achievement gap.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Howard county is currently being redistricted and the latest proposal moves 200 kids from one of the best middle schools( the one we will go in a few years) to the one with the highest FARM rate. The present FARM rate of this school is 52% and the target after redistricting will probably be 40%. The PAARC scores for this school hover in the 20 and 30 percents.

Now the usual cries of not wanting our kids to go t those schools, crime, home values are doing the rounds and I'm not claiming to be above those. But in all honesty, I didn't go to school here and I'm trying to understand what our experience there might be like. We are currently in a < 5% FARMS rate elementary. middle and high school pyramid. I feel some of the hesitancy, including my own, might be people not really knowing what the new school is like.

I am truly trying to have an open mind and trying to understand what my kids would lose by going here. I don't believe 3 years of middle school make or break your life. Does this truly give my otherwise v protected kids a window into the world that's out there or is peer pressure and the price of poor choices too high in middle school. If your kids attended such a middle school coming from an elementary school like described, what was your experience and the pros and cons of this.

Ask for a tour and get a feel for the place. Attend a pta meeting and chat with the parents.

This isn’t really going to help. The school environment is going to change at both schools.

Your suggestion might be an option if the OP were moving into a new area. OP is not moving into a new area. She already owns a home.