Montgomery County Transcript

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MR. FERGUSON: It's about 1:30 and we've got a packedagenda this afternoon, so in the interest of staying ontime, we want to get started.The first session is Montgomery County,they have five presenters who come from the district,representing different roles that they play. They aregoing to go for about 45 minutes, as a group, and thenwe'll have the discussants and the discussion.So, I guess Frieda Lacey, are you going togo first? You can introduce the others.MS. LACEY: All right, thank you.Good afternoon. I'm Frieda Lacey, DeputySuperintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools andwe are just delighted to be here with you thisafternoon. You are going to hear from me first, thenyou are going to hear from Dr. Heath Morrison, aCommunity Superintendent. Dr. Morrison has 36 schoolsthat he is charged with oversight for. After that, youare going to hear from Mr. Adrian Talley, he has 39schools in our district.You are going to hear from Mr. Jamie Virga. We were talwe think it's critical, as was stated this morning, thatwe have that in place in any school district. And thenyou are going to hear from Mrs. Carole Working, one ofour stellar principals, high school principals, inMontgomery County Public Schools.

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I'm going to rush through this because Ihave a lot of say and a short period of time.Montgomery County has 200 schools, we have approximately138,000 students and it's the sixth largest district inthe country, the sixth largest. Now, a lot of peoplethink that we are a wealthy school district, and yes, weare, but we also have a lot of poverty and a lot ofdiversity. I came to Montgomery County in 1971, so youlook up there, you can see what it looked like in 1971and you can see how it's changed over a period of time.So what do you do when you have somethingthat looks like this and it's changing rapidly? Whenyou see that the poverty is increasing? That you areseeing that you are getting more African American andHispanic students? You can't do the status quo, youhave to do something drastically different, and so whatwe did was to divide up our district into the red andgreen zones. Take a look at that, that's reflective ofour elementary schools. In the red zone you seeapproximately 29,000 kids, 80 percent minority, 50percent FARMs, 28 percent ESL. The green zone, you cansee what's on the chart.So we knew we had to do somethingdifferently, if we were going to make a difference, itwas like we had two districts in one.FROM THE FLOOR: Can you tell us what theFARLs is?

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MS. LACEY: Free and reduced lunch, sorryabout that. You can see, from 1990 to 2007, what thefree and reduced price meals program looked like, whatit looked like then and what it looks like now. Whenyou look at our ESL enrollment, when you look at whereit was in 1990 and where it is today, looking at ourelementary schools because we have a lot of youngsterscoming into Montgomery County that don't speak Englishor English isn't spoken in their homes, so you can seehow that has changed over a period of time.One of the things in any school district,you want to have a very tight strategic plan and we havejust that. We have a strategic plan, we haveinitiatives, we have data points, we have milestones.We have so much data that you have to have some type ofcoherence as it relates to the data because we give itto our principals, they get the strategic plan, what dothey know to really concentrate on? So oursuperintendent, I'm sorry he isn't here because he isquite a unique individual.(Laughter)MS. LACEY: If you haven't met him, you arein for an experience. He said we have to, we owe ourschools some way of letting them know what's important.How we are college ready, how we shoot for the NorthStar, so he started with seven key data points andyou'll see them reflected here. I'm going to rush

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Parents Coalition of MC

Pages 5, 9 & 34 for "cream of the crap"

reply02 / 17 / 2010