By Paige Whipple
Parents plan to show up in force this week as school officials hold four public forums to discuss the magnet school status of Lutherville Laboratory and Cromwell Valley elementaries.
Jamie Papas, the PTA president of Lutherville, said she expects at least 100 parents from her school to attend the forums, which began at 7 p.m. today at Sollers Point Technical High School and will continue Wednesday and Thursday.
The meetings are being hosted by school officials and are designed to gather public input for the Magnet Task Force that was set up in December 2013 to define the role and value of magnet programs throughout the county. The task force is expected to make recommendations to the Board of Education this spring.
Papas said parents fear that school officials may be planning to remove the magnet status from Lutherville Lab and Cromwell Valley. She said parents became concerned when they learned that the two schools were not taking magnet applications for the upcoming school year at this years’ Back to School Night. Parents have pushed Superintendent Dallas Dance for information, Papas said, but have not received any satisfactory answers.
“We had the magnet teacher of the year last year, so we thought it was odd that we would be losing our magnet status after winning multiple awards,” Papas said.
Bryan Stoll, the magnet program supervisor, said the task force has not made any recommendations regarding the magnet status of either school, but that the issue is “certainly on their radar.” He said that magnet status has not been revoked from the schools, adding that school officials are only limiting future enrollment in the schools due to technicalities after redistricting.
“At this point there are no decisions, recommendations, or suggestions that anything in particular should happen with any particular program or school,” Stoll said.
Stoll attributed the halt in outside applications to the redistricting of Lutherville Lab last year. Any students brought into school through the magnet application process had to have special permissions.
“We are not allowed to accept applications for new special transfers for a certain time period after redistricting,” he said. “After that time, we will see if they have the capacity for more, but we’re trying to reduce the population in that school.”
Papas, however, is hesitant to believe the school system.
“You have to read in between the lines,” she said. “They’ll say nothing has changed, but they’ll say, ‘Nothing has changed for this year.’ Yes, we are still a magnet for this year. But for next year, it’s undetermined.”
Julie Schwarzkopf, a Lutherville Lab parent involved in the magnet debate, said parents are more upset by the “how” than the “what” of the task force’s actions.
“The biggest concern is that we’re not getting the truth,” she said. “Or at least that’s how it feels. I want to know why [Dance] feels the need to take away the magnet program. If he comes back with a decent reason, I would accept it. But we haven’t gotten that yet.”
Dance could not be reached for comment.
Schwarzkopf said that it was not until parents started eliciting the help of two state senators that the superintendent said he would welcome parent feedback.
“These forums are just to appease us,” Schwarzkopf said. “I think the idea is that people have their voices heard, but he doesn’t have to have one-on-one conversations.”
Papas said she agrees that the forums are a formality.
“Their minds are made up,” she said. “The forums are just a pacifier.”
The community forums will address program and information access, admissions, and instructional standards in the magnet program, all three of which have been hot topics in the magnet discussion.
“We don’t even know how these forums are going to take place,” Papas said. “We don’t know if they’re going to talk for 45 minutes and then just allow us to talk for 15. Or they might have us fill out questions and answer the questions that they want to answer online somewhere.”
Stoll said the forums are designed to get feedback from parents.
“We encourage all parents to participate in the forums,” he said. “We also have an online survey that parents can fill out if they can’t make it to the forums.”
Stoll said Magnet Schools of America, a non-profit organization that supports magnet programs across the country, is providing consultants to run the forums. He said school officials expect the task force to make recommendations in early April.
The issue has been simmering for months. In October, the assistant superintendent of elementary schools, Jane Lister, visited Lutherville Lab to address the parents’ concerns.
During that meeting, Papas said, state Sen. James Brochin, D-Baltimore County, an advocate for keeping the schools’ magnet status, submitted a written question asking why school officials had not held a forum to discuss the concerns and suggestions of parents.
She said school officials only agreed to the forums when Brochin and state Sen. Robert Zirkin, D-Baltimore County, got involved in the issue.
In early January, Brochin and Zirkin, drafted a bill that would change the criteria for revoking magnet status of public schools. Brochin told The Baltimore Sun that the bill “takes away the superintendent’s authority to [demagnetize the schools] unilaterally.”
The new law, which will take effect in July, states that revocation of magnet status will only become effective if held up by majority vote of the Baltimore County Senate and House delegations to the General Assembly.
One of the big problems Papas has with the possibility of losing magnet status is fixing something that she says is not broken.
“We have parents who want their kids to stay at Lutherville, even if it means driving them to school every day,” Papas said. “It’s a sought after school. We have something that’s working, so why would we want to mess that up?”
Papas’ ideal outcome would be if the school was allowed to keep the magnet status, funding and teachers they have so that the school can continue to meet the demands of a growing community.
“We have what works, and I’d love to keep it that way,” Papas said. “Let’s grow with the community, but taking away does not make sense because that’s not what the demand is showing.”
Two forums are scheduled for Wednesday: one from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. at Baltimore County Public Library in Catonsville and the other from 7 to 9 p.m. at the George Washington Career Center for the Arts and Technology. The last forum is scheduled for Thursday from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Cockeysville Public Library.
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