Dear Dr. Blackburn,
Thank you for your work regarding the school facilities situation in Montgomery County. The process has not been easy, but I feel confident that you made the best decision for all MCPS students when you voted to build schools in Blacksburg and Auburn, and to renovate the AHS facility for the middleschoolers.
I am the parent of a 7th grader at BMS and a 4th grader at Margaret Beeks. The issue that I have with the current BMS situation is the reduced instruction time for BMS students. They have a 12min shorter day than all other Montgomery Co. students, in order to accommodate the lengthened bus trip to Christiansburg. At the beginning of this school year, the relocation of BMS to OCMS was presented as a temporary solution that would last for 1 school year. In that context, a 12min per day decrease was an unpleasant but understandable sacrifice in a challenging situation. In the 2010-11 school year BMS students will receive 36 fewer hours of instruction time than the rest of Montgomery Co (180dayx12min/60min). As a parent, I was not happy about the lost instruction time, but I accepted it as a temporary solution to an emergency situation. Now the district is looking at somewhere between 2013-2018 as a timeline for opening a new BHS. That increases lost instruction time to 108-288hrs. That is not acceptable. Montgomery Co.'s school day is longer than the 5hrs 30min required by the state. The extra time given to students in Mont. Co. is noticeable in the accomplishment of its students and schools, particularly in the Blacksburg strand. BMS students feed into BHS which is consistently ranked by Newsweek as one of the top high schools in the country. It is not sufficient to consider BMS's loss of instruction time acceptable simply because it is still within the state requirements. The extra time allows students to excel, and BMS students are now deprived of that opportunity. The education of BMS students cannot be shorted any longer; to do so places their education quality below that of all other MCPS students. The BMS population has borne the highest burden of the BHS collapse, and the staff, students, and parents stoically rose to the occasion by first sharing then relinquishing our school facility for an overcrowed replacement, then giving up our instruction time. Now that the middle school student's quality of education is at risk for the foreseeable future, a solution needs to be found that will return BMS to an equal instruction status with the rest of MCPS. There are 2 possible solutions that I can see.
1. Reverse only 1 segment (am or pm) of the daily bus ride. That means either dropping BHS off last in the am or picking them up first in the pm. Since BHS currently has a lengthened school day and BMS has a shortened school day, this would equalize them.
2. Move BMS into the new Price' Fork Elem building when it is finished until BHS is completed. My understanding is that the capacity of the new Price's Fork will be 800, which is closer to the enrollment of BMS (881 students) than the OCMS facility. This would shorten the distance that BMS kids would need to be bussed and enable them to have a full school day. Since there is not currently a population enrolled at the new Price's Fork, no students would be displaced by this solution. This solution would also free up the OCMS facility for use by the school district to potentially house the Auburn MS student body (266 students) while their facility is being renovated.
Sincerely,
Phyllis Garnett-Deakin
