Boundary Analysis

By Sonya Rashkovan

MCR held the General Assembly on December 19th, 2020 where students could research boundaries in Montgomery County with the WXY Boundary Study explorer. During the general assembly, students were broken into 18 separate zoom meetings where student facilitators, MCR executive board members, guided the exploration of the tool as well as a discussion on it. More than 200 students attended and learned about the online explorer tool.

Originally the county-wide boundary analysis was introduced by the former Student Member of the Board (SMOB) Ananya Tadikonda in 2019 since, over the twenty years, student enrollment at Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) has increased by more than 30,000 students. This growth has helped MCPS become one of the largest and most diverse districts in the nation. The overcapacity of many schools, paired with our continued focus on equity and excellence, prompted the Board of Education to initiate an assessment of current school boundaries to ensure that MCPS can continue to provide high-quality facilities that support the educational programming needed to reinforce MCPS’s core values of Learning, Relationships, Respect, Excellence, and Equity.

BoE hired a private consulting firm, WXY, to conduct the research and provide recommendations to the Board of Education. Later, BoE decided that the WXY research would conclude without the recommendations. The interactive boundary explorer (Phase #1) was launched at the beginning of fall 2020. Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, administrative buildings (especially schools) in Mongomery County have remained closed. The community feedback is crucial for BoE and WXY, so they have been managing to reach the community in on-line ways through grassroots organizations, webinars, and much more. MCR and MCJC (MCR’s middle school counterpart) joined the General Assembly as a way for WXY to reach middle and high school students and get their perspective on the interactive tool.

We interviewed a couple of student facilitators about the General Assembly and student engagement. While student facilitators didn’t express their thoughts and opinions on the Boundary Study and didn't discuss the policy issues, they were there to guide the discussion and answer any questions students had.

Facilitators dedicated the first part of the break-out rooms to the boundary analysis explorer tool to explore the map and data on students’ schools, their cluster, and anything else they wanted to see. Students had an opportunity to discover data points on their own after student facilitators did a short guide through the tool and showed different ways of exploring the data.

Maahe Kunvar, sophomore at Northwest High School and MCR’S mental health advocacy coordinator said that she saw a wide interest in students wanting to explore the interactive tool, and a lot of them came out to events hosted by multiple student advocacy groups across the county in efforts to learn how to work the tool. During a lot of those sessions, the students seemed engaged and intrigued by what different data points they found through the tool.

Luca Utterwulghe, senior at Einstein High School and MCR’s Ed Policy deputy said, “it was interesting to watch people find out how their schools compared to their clusters and the county as a whole.”

Following that student facilitators guided a discussion based on what students’ have learned while discovering the tool on their own.

Felipe De Bolle, junior at Whitman High School MCR’s Ed Policy deputy said, “The most surprising thing that a lot of the students mentioned was how certain school boundaries, especially for Elementary Schools, are broken up or connected by a single road instead of being more compact. Students also talked about how this might lead kids to sometimes go to different middle and high schools than their friends.”

The tool made it easy for students to track the boundaries from elementary school through high school to see how data changes.

Luca Utterwulghe continued saying, “One of the most surprising things my group noticed is the number of schools that are at least 10% overcapacity and the number of schools slightly under-capacity.”

Overall one of the most popular data points to look at among many rooms was utilization rates and some students found it very interesting to see how their schools were utilized. Especially freshmen who have never been inside their high school building found it intriguing to feel the scale and capacity of their high schools through data and compare it with their previous middle schools. Some students have brought up that it’s crucial for BoE to pay attention to the capacity of different schools when deciding to transition to in-person or hybrid learning because some schools don’t have space for students to social distance due to severe overcapacity.

Maahe Kunvar said, “A lot of the data pointed to drastic differences across schools with utilization rates. Many of the schools students once thought were over-utilized, were actually not in comparison to others. A lot of students also found major differences in racial dissimilarity and diversity in schools, especially schools in specific areas on the map versus other schools in other areas of the map. Something most of the students found interesting was the existence of island schools/cluster areas on the map, where a lot of those areas had schools over-utilized right next to schools underutilized. On the map, those school clusters were divided oddly (their division creates island school areas). These island areas were something a lot of students did not understand the necessity for in MCPS.”

In the past, it’s been very hard to find and compare data of MCPS schools because they were buried in countless different PdF documents on the website. Now that the data has become available to anyone in an easy and interactive format, student facilitators hope that MCPS students and other stakeholders will use this tool.

Luca hopes that after this General Assembly students will be able to confidently navigate this tool for research and will know that their preconceptions about different parts of a county and schools can be challenged by simple research into the WXY data.

Felipe hopes that students can see how their school compares to the rest of the county in the various metrics and reflect on how the education in the county and their specific area within the county can become more equitable.

Maahe emphasized that this tool will help educate our county since often students believe what they hear about schools, such as the diversity rates, the utilization rates, and things like that at other schools that they do not attend. That leads to many misconceptions about the schools, and she wishes people will use this tool to understand the differences in the schools based on facts. She hopes, “students took back a lot of information, especially information that surprised them using the WXY tool, and learned a lot of factual information about MCPS boundaries that can later be used in their activism, and serve to work to fill the knowledge gap between students and the Board of Education.”

Even though 2020 has brought many challenges for the community discussions and in-person meetings, student facilitators and other stakeholders have seen a lot of engagement and interest in continuing the fight for equality in our school system. Hopefully, the WXY explorer tool will make the resources easier to access for everyone in our community, so we can have fact-based discourse when we all see each other again at community townhalls.

Finally, even if families can’t make different webinars and discussions about the online explorer tool, they can fill out the feedback survey about their experience at the SURVEY button on the MCPS Interactive Boundary Explorer website.