Blair featured in The Washington Post for overcrowding

This is not original reporting. All information has been compiled from The Washington Post article Relief is Absent at Crowded Maryland School by Rebecca Dana.

The Washington Post featured Blair's overcrowding problem in Sunday's Metro section on Sept. 19. Relief is Absent at Crowded Maryland School, written by Rebecca Dana, focused on the cause of Blair's overcrowding, student and parent reactions and proposed solutions.

According to The Washington Post, Blair is 500 students over its capacity of 2,800. This overcrowding causes problems for students in getting to class on time, scheduling meetings with their counselors and having enough time to buy and eat lunch.

Erick Lang, director of the Downcounty Consortium (DCC), said that Blair was not expected to be this crowded this year. The creation of the new DCC, in which students can choose which high school they attend from those in the consortium: Blair, Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Wheaton and Northwood, was predicted to relieve some overcrowding at Blair.

The DCC was intended to even out the high school population over five schools. However, according to Bruce Crispell, senior planner for county schools, Blair's freshman class is 87 students bigger than officials expected in March 2004. Einstein is 35 students above expected plans, while the other three schools in the DCC had fewer students than originally predicted.

According to the article, miscalculations were made by DCC administrators in regard to how many students would be enrolling at Blair. Blair's Math, Science and Computer Science Magnet Program and the Communications Arts Program both contributed to the confusion. Together the two programs admit 175 new students each year, who were selected after the regular acceptance was completed. Administrators expected that many students accepted in the Magnet and CAP would overlap with Blair's regular freshman class, according to Lang. They expected to see a decrease in Blair's non-Magnet freshman class when these students got accepted in CAP or Magnet and withdrew from the regular freshman class. However, many students whose base school was not Blair were accepted in the CAP and Magnet, thus raising the total freshman population.

Fortunately, administrators saw the trend in May which was enough time to allocate Blair more teachers and support staff, said Crispell.

Despite administrators' attempts at relieving overcrowding, many Blair parents and students have expressed their concern and confusing with overcrowding problems at Blair.

Beth Py-Lieberman, mother of a Blair sophomore, called Blair's overcrowding problem "a glaring example of the negligence [school officials] have demonstrated to this community," according to The Washington Post.

Lang said many parents, like Py-Lieberman, do not understand that county officials expect Blair's enrollment to drop significantly after the start of choosing which high school students attend.

According to The Washington Post, Principal Phillip Gainous has been trying to think positively when it comes to Blair's total population. "I told them: 'The good news is, everybody wants to come to Blair. The bad news is, everybody's coming to Blair,' " Gainous told The Washington Post.

For the original Washington Post article click here.

For a Silver Chips Online story about the opening of Northwood click here.