The "More" Child

Pity the parents at Eastern. At last night’s meeting you could feel the anger and bewilderment as the realization sank in that this move to a 7 period schedule is a done deal as far as MCPS is concerned.

Made clear last night, no, this was not a result of budget cuts, except perhaps indirectly.  Seventy-seven percent of teachers on staff requested that the scheduling issue be reopened, as is their contractual right, even after a thorough stakeholder consultative process the previous year.  The PTA president actually stood up and apologized to the gathered body of parents and student for heeding advice to have them hold off on their e-mails to the Community Superintendent, School Board members, and other MCPS staff.  The Community Superintendent, for his part, said those e-mails and calls to him wouldn’t have mattered actually, because his role was to see that the contractual process between the teachers and MCPS happened the way it was supposed to…not to influence the outcome.  MCPS leadership acted on the recommendation of the principal, following the process.   Evidently the principal was not able to persuade or muster resources or do whatever it would take for her staff to stick to a schedule that was conducive to the magnet.

With that realization sinking in, that this is a done deal, the conversation shifted to the “what next?”  The principal and Mr. Creel ( who once taught at the magnet), trying to be positive, stated that the program had originally been designed for a 7 period schedule, that it had worked 10 years ago.  It was hinted that things like the music program could possibly be offered after school, which evidently was also done 10 years ago. I guess that was before our area’s killer traffic took hold–a parent protested that her child has a bus ride of 45 minutes to an hour and would get home at 6 p.m.  A student noted that in a straw poll of her music class, only 3 students would remain if the choice of electives came down to music and a language.  The response was a kind of shrug and a statement that parents were going to have to make some hard choices….

[Completely lost:  the irony of *humanities* students losing an elective and possibly having to choose between studying a foreign language and taking an art or music class.]

This attitude, this “well, if you don’t like it, leave or don’t come” attitude angers me.  Why?  Because it abandons any notion that programs like this are meeting a legitimate educational need, that they are programmatic service.  To assume that these kids can just as easily be accommodated in their home middle schools is to assume wrong, (although that’s what MCPS is selling these days).  Especially when students don’t necessarily have the luxury of returning to a high performing school that might possibly provide an appropriate peer group.  It goes to the point of why we have these programs.  If MCPS officials shrug and say, “well leave,” they are as much as saying the whole thing was a crap shoot / lottery ticket in the first place.

MCPS is saying they want to move in the direction of “not labels, but services.”  And yet they are potentially allowing the magnet–a “service” for highly gifted students…highly verbally gifted students (the math magnet’s integrity remains)–to for all intents be dismantled.  Not to be paranoid, but.  MPCS can allow the magnet to wither and die (something some oponents have wished for for a long time) by parents voting with their feet,  and yet come away with clean hands.  It’s rather brilliant, actually.