Redistricting Blair's wealth

Under five proposed plans for school redistricting in the Downcounty Consortium, scheduled to take effect in fall 2004, several of Blair's wealthiest districts could move to the Northwood High School cluster, leaving Blair among the consortium's lowest-income schools.

"We're going back 20 years. We're going back to the ghetto school configuration," said PTSA President Marylin Shoenfeld, who called the discrepancies in the demographics projections among consortium schools "outrageous."

Carol Valoris, a Blair parent, agrees with Shoenfeld. "We specifically agreed not to do this so that it didn't set up a class situation where Blair became the 'poor' school," said Valoris. You can just chalk Blair up as a poor inner city school that will end up with nothing. We have to fight for everything currently compared to up-county [schools]. Now it will be worse," said Valoris.

In four of the five plans, Forest Knolls Elementary School, Blair's wealthiest, would move to the Northwood cluster. In addition, three of these four plans call for relocating to the Northwood cluster either Sligo Creek Elementary School, Blair's second most affluent district, or Montgomery Knolls/Pine Crest Elementary School, which includes the moderate- to upper-income Woodmoor neighborhood.

However, the advisory Base Area Committee, which helped develop the five proposals, asked that five more proposals be developed to better balance demographics among the consortium schools.

The redistricting plan concerns "base areas" for each of the five consortium high schools: Blair, Einstein, Kennedy, Northwood and Wheaton. When the consortium begins, students who reside in a school's base area will be guaranteed admittance to the school's signature programs, according to MCPS guidelines.

Bruce Crispell, a senior planner for MCPS who created the base area proposals, said that although the schools are not extremely different in demographic makeup, the redistricting will benefit some schools more than others. "I'm not discounting that there could be a real change in the demographics at Blair," he said.

Located at the northern end of Blair's current boundary, the Forest Knolls district is Blair's wealthiest. Twenty-two percent of Forest Knolls' students are on the Free and Reduced Meals program (FARMS) while 49 percent of the Blair cluster as a whole are on FARMS, according to MCPS demographic figures. Sligo Creek, which would move to Northwood under two of the five base area proposals, is the only other Blair feeder school with a FARMS rate below 35 percent.

In all the plans, Blair's FARMS enrollment would increase to above 50.6 percent, the average for the consortium as a whole.

At a Mar 5 meeting of the Base Area Committee, many committee members expressed dissatisfaction that the demographics for the consortium schools were less balanced than they had hoped.

Sally Taber, a Blair cluster coordinator and one of Blair's representatives on the committee, does not believe that any of the five proposals fits the needs of the Blair community. "They either leave a high school overcrowded or there will be little pockets all over our area that are going to Northwood," said Taber.

However, she feels that the relocation of Forest Knolls is inevitable. "I think the Forest Knolls community pretty well understands that they're going to Northwood, she said.

Will Rabinovich, a member of the committee and a parent of a student at Kemp Mill Elementary School, agrees with Valoris that a large demographic variation within the consortium would be cause for concern, but he said the real discrepancy lies between schools in the consortium and those in higher-income areas. "The problem is not that Blair has 50 percent FARMS and Wheaton has 60 percent but that Walt Whitman High School has 1 percent FARMS," said Rabinovich. "If MCPS' principal goal in the [consortium] were better balancing demographics then the consortium would include many schools to the west of its current boundaries."

Shoenfeld also expressed concern about possible future overcrowding at Blair even after the consortium starts because, she claimed, Crispell believed that Blair's enrollment would stay steady for the next five years. "Maybe I'm old and crazy, but I don't think Blair enrollment has ever stayed flat for five years," said Shoenfeld. "I think that the enrollment will creep back up and we will be back at 3000 within two years."