Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they would only slow it down until they at least have the fully certified teachers to staff all these new centers.

I've seen this sentiment a lot in recent threads on this topic. DH is an AAP teacher in Fairfax County. When he first started the job, he wasn't a certified AAP teacher. He had a certain amount of years (maybe it was 5, I forget) to complete the training and earn the special certification. Right now at the center where he teaches, each year existing teachers are reassigned to fill needs for more AAP teachers (and the shrinking need for general education teachers) - many of them do not have the certification and are given the usual amount of time to get the certification. What I'm telling you all is that this is not a new thing and should not be a major concern for parents of AAP students. Hopefully this eases some concerns.

Anonymous wrote:If they would only slow it down until they at least have the fully certified teachers to staff all these new centers.

Anonymous wrote:

Thoreau is a very nice school which would greatly benefit from Level IV AAP. There are plenty of students there in Honors who could easily qualify for AAP, or already have.

Quite a few students from Archer AAP declined the Jackson offer. AAP Archer to Jackson= 1/2 of the sixth grade: 4 classes.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The draft FPAC proposal to be discussed on 12/4 and presented to the School Board recommends the AAP county wide changes be postponed until more review has been done. There is a link on the FPAC meeting calendar on the fcps.edu website.

Thanks so much!

Can you please post a link? I can't find this information on the fcps site.

Anonymous wrote:The draft FPAC proposal to be discussed on 12/4 and presented to the School Board recommends the AAP county wide changes be postponed until more review has been done. There is a link on the FPAC meeting calendar on the fcps.edu website.

Anonymous wrote:The draft FPAC proposal to be discussed on 12/4 and presented to the School Board recommends the AAP county wide changes be postponed until more review has been done. There is a link on the FPAC meeting calendar on the fcps.edu website.

Anonymous wrote:The draft FPAC proposal to be discussed on 12/4 and presented to the School Board recommends the AAP county wide changes be postponed until more review has been done. There is a link on the FPAC meeting calendar on the fcps.edu website.

Anonymous wrote:One School Board member (Ryan McElveen) called the Cluster meetings An Agonizing Success:

http://www.ryanforschoolboard.com/1/post/2012/12/aap-meetings-an-agonizing-success.html

Some might wonder how I could consider this week’s Advanced Academic Placement (AAP) meetings to be anything resembling a success—after all, many people were disappointed with the meeting format and probably left feeling that answers to their questions were far from complete.

But if there was one good news story to emerge from the sometimes-heated AAP meetings, it was this: staff and the School Board heard, loudly and clearly, from AAP parents who, on the whole, are pleased with the education their children receive in Fairfax County Public Schools, and they don’t want to see any drastic changes to the opportunities the county provides. Most important, the high turnout at the meetings proved that many of our parents are fully committed to ensuring that their children receive a high-quality education, no matter what school they attend.

For those not aware, the county staff is proposing an expansion of AAP Level IV centers at elementary and middle schools in pyramids that do not already have them, including Annandale, Edison, Falls Church, Marshall, South County and Robinson. At the same time, they are working to address overcrowding at several AAP centers in Clusters 1, 2 and 8. The School Board has not yet decided how to proceed, as we have yet to even sit down together to consider the AAP task force proposal.

For me, the key take away from the community meetings was that the School Board first needs to focus on addressing the extreme overcrowding at Haycock, Louise Archer, and Hunters Woods Elementary Schools and slow down the system-wide expansion to new AAP centers. As we look to potentially create new centers around the county, we will need to ensure that they have matriculating AAP student cohorts large enough to sustain vibrant centers, are staffed with highly-qualified teachers and can support the extra-curricular activities to which students at our established AAP centers have become accustomed. A one-size-fits-all approach has never, and will never, be successful in a county as geographically and demographically diverse as Fairfax County.

. . .

Thoreau is a very nice school which would greatly benefit from Level IV AAP. There are plenty of students there in Honors who could easily qualify for AAP, or already have.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Science Olympiad is not just for AAP though, so that argument makes no sense.

The big AAP centers have the most successful team.

They have large numbers of kids interested in programs like Science Olympiad, Odyssey of the Mind, Robotics, Video Game Programing club, etc.

Take 11 kids, move them to a new middle school that up to this point has not had enough interest in those types of programs, and see how successful they are at implementing the same level of program the students at the larger centers currently have. It is not going to happen, and those students in the tiny centers are going to be shortchanged vs what the kids in larger centers are getting.

Another thing to consider, is that by having such a small group of kids in middle school is opening those kids up to all sorts of social issues. I don't know if you have been around many AAP classes, but those classes tend to be dominated by quirky, geeky, nerdy kids who in other situation are the type of kids who tend to be singled out as bully victims. At a center with 2-3 classes, those kids have a peer group where they can just be one of the crowd, or in some cases, have the opportunity to become a social leader. In a regular classroom setting, many of these kids are the ones who are isolated, made fun of and have trouble fitting in. Having such a tiny group of AAP students at the middle school level drastically increases the odds that these kids are going to have a less than positive school experience than they would have in a larger AAP program, and increases the odds of isolation and bullying.

My child's AAP teacher last year said that one of the things she likes best about the peer group in AAP is that it brings together many kids from different schools, who are they type of kids who usually end up bullied, and gives them a place where they fit in and where their differences are seen as something to be accepted, not something to be teased. I think she hit it on the head. Although this sentiment has gone unstated on this board, I think this is one of the many reasons why AAP parents are so emotional about the proposed changes.

This post must set some sort of record for small-minded bigotry, unfounded assumptions, and sterotypes, even for DCUM.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thoreau is a very nice school which would greatly benefit from Level IV AAP. There are plenty of students there in Honors who could easily qualify for AAP, or already have.

Yep. Of the big current AAP programs, Rocky Run and Kilmer seem like they may be gutted the most, with kids leaving Kilmer for Thoreau and Cooper.

Amazing how if the MS realignment is somehow supposed to respond in some way to this civil rights complaint, the biggest AAP center in the fall of 2013 could be at Cooper.