Every year, the Maryland State Department of Education releases a Maryland School Report Card, which assigns each school a grade depending on several factors. Some are attendance, graduation rate, student surveys, and other qualifiers. The entire breakdown of each school score is on the MSDE website. The report card system started in 2018, but schools were given a reprieve during the pandemic. However, the scores of many schools in MCPS have been declining, many of them by at least one full star.
Currently, there are only three schools—Poolesville High School, Thomas S Wooton High School, and Walt Whitman High School—that have kept their five-star grade from the previous school year. In the 2022-2023 school year, 24% of MCPS high schools earned a four-star rating, and 64% earned a three-star rating. However, in the 2021-2022 school year, 24% of schools had five stars, 52% had four stars, and 24% earned three-star ratings. MCPS is not the only county in Maryland that is seeing these trends, a statewide decrease in scores and the number of schools with a five-star rating.
There are many explanations for these newer scores. One of them is chronic absenteeism, which has been a massive problem since the pandemic. The Chronic Absenteeism Action Plan was put into place last summer as a way to regulate student absenteeism. Luckily, this plan has been gathering good results. According to Channel7 News, in the first marking period of the 2023-2024 school year, chronic absenteeism was around 21.4% throughout the district. In the previous school year, chronic absenteeism was 26.2%.
Andrew DelPonte, a senior at Richard Montgomery, shares his thoughts on the current issues faced by the county.
“Right now, we have one of the widest wealth out of any county in MD, and of course, we are going to see it at the school. Our school system is ill equipped to handle those issues. I think that in a county like MoCo where there is such a divide I mean there is a sense of unity in Howard or Carol county and MoCo there is not that unity,” Delponte said.
A junior at Richard Montgomery, Kalel Bonilla, adds to the issue of an unfortunate drop in grades when school resumed after the COVID period. “We are still coming back from quarantine, so they have to get back to the usual even after a couple years,” Bonilla said.
While we may not know the long-term effect of the pandemic on the larger student body, MCPS administrators and board members continuously work hard to better students’ lives. With the influx of programs, there is a bright future for MCPS.
Written By Margaret (Maggie) McLaughlin of Richard Montgomery High School
Photo Courtesy of The Tide