Recently, Montgomery County Public Schools has announced a new policy that the Board of Education will be working on: the Bus In Bus Out Policy. This new policy randomly chooses students from various areas of our county to transfer to other schools in order to “keep pace with [the] significant growth [of students] and the overcapacity of many schools, paired with our continued focus on equity and excellence” (MCPS).
It is a policy that they have created in order to balance out the significant number of students based on criteria such as race, gender, and how educated the average students in each school are. Therefore, the Board has offered this idea to maintain both equality and diversity in all of the schools in Maryland’s most populated county.
As soon as this project was announced to the Montgomery County residents, controversy sparked. Some students and parents agreed to this new idea because keeping equality and diversity is very important and they saw the efforts the Board was making in order to achieve this goal.
Some Montgomery County residents noticed that this Bus In Bus Out policy improved equality and diversity because less-funded schools would receive more well-rounded students from better quality schools to boost the school rating. Additionally, to address the issue of disproportionate demographics, the Board would try to make a balance between them by bussing in students of other races while bussing out some members of the large majority.
However, many others, including students from Herbert Hoover Middle School, disagree with this sentiment. Although diversity and equality is a significant thing to keep in mind, it has a greater toll on students if they are bussed out of the school that they have gotten used to, away from the friends that they always spent time at school with, and the community that they were originally a part of. The Board of Education may think that they are helping numerous students, but at the same time, they are hurting even more students that are negatively impacted by this policy.
Bojie Li, who attends Herbert Hoover Middle School, is strongly against this policy because she treasures her friends and the sacrifices her parents made for her. Those sacrifices would not be found significant anymore if she were bussed out she would be taken away from the environment her parents worked hard to earn for her. Not only that, she mentions that she would lose the friends who helped her “pull through the most stressful times.”
On the other hand, there are also students and parents who support this new idea for multiple reasons of their own. For example, one family would be delighted to have their child(ren) have an opportunity for a better education that they were not able to provide. Another would be glad to hear that their child felt more inclusion in the new school due to the equality that would result from the actions of the policy. Although some argue that the Bus In Bus Out policy would only hurt students, it could actually improve their lives.
All in all, there is an intense controversy between the differently affected groups of residents of the Bus In Bus Out policy. It would not be a good idea to finalize the policy if many students’ mental health and overall academic motivation decreased due to the drastic changes. Yet, a big step in achieving the Board’s original mission of maintaining an excellent school system with equality and diversity would be made if a great number of the residents agreed to the changes and saw positive results. Both outcomes are similarly possible; the Board of Education will make the final decision in June 2020.
Article by Joelle Lee of Herbert Hoover Middle School
Photo by Avantika Selvajaran of Cabin John Middle School