Opinion: "address and change the culture within Montgomery County Public Schools"

The writer of the opinion piece below is repeating what has been said for decades by families of students needing special education services. The families that were bullied, stalked, harassed and sued. 

The writer is repeating what the families of children who have been victims of sexual abuse by MCPS staff IN schools have said in courtrooms at sentencing hearings when it has been revealed that MCPS kept KNOWN sexual abusers IN classrooms for DECADES. The writer is another voice speaking to the culture of MCPS that does not value children.

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...The first incident happened in eighth grade where we had to take the Measures of Academic Progress-Reading, or MAP-R, test. MAP-R was used to determine one’s reading level.

The first time I took it, my score came back saying that my reading level was the equivalent of a senior in high school. That should’ve been the end of it. However, two weeks later I was called into the office and in there were my folks, the principal, my English teacher and someone from the school system. They had called me in there not to congratulate but to accuse me of cheating on the test.

Mind you, my English teacher had told them that I was very well-read, and my folks always took me to libraries and bookstores so it wasn’t a shock to see that I could read.

The person from the school system said, “There’s no way that this kid, from this side of the county could’ve scored that well. He had to have cheated.”

Needless to say, I was forced to take the test again in a room with a teacher, a security guard and two police officers. Each time I looked up those officers would leer at me like a wolf at its prey. I finished, and this time my score showed my reading level was the equivalent of a college freshman.

In other words, I scored higher, and I went off on everybody in the room. I told the officers that while they were busy looking at a nerd, they could’ve been chasing real criminals. I told the security officer that this time I did nothing wrong, and I pointed out that the teacher had just wasted time...

https://www.marylandmatters.org/2020/01/14/opinion-is-montgomery-as-progressive-as-everyone-thinks-it-is/?fbclid=IwAR3f_ZW9CQ1KCYWljSY6lcdu29bo_WKOgy43BQ6LQmF49GU1rlBh67Pz_rQ

Black Students More Likely to Be Arrested at School

In 43 states and the District of Columbia, black students are arrested at school at disproportionately high levels, an analysis of federal data by the Education Week Research Center finds.
And one reason may be that black students are more likely than students in any other racial or ethnic group to attend schools with police, according to the analysis of 2013-14 civil rights data, the most recent collected by the U.S. Department of Education.
In most of the jurisdictions with disproportionate arrests of black students, the disparities are significant. In 28 states, the share of arrested students who are black is at least 10 percentage points higher than their share of enrollment in schools with at least one arrest. In 10 of those states, that gap is at least 20 percentage points.
No other student racial or ethnic groups face such disparities in as many states...

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/01/25/black-students-more-likely-to-be-arrested.html

African-American students’ scores up; Hispanic scores drop

Gazette:  Montgomery SAT scores show rises and falls