Oak View Elementary School families will be joined by school board members and local elected officials at a meeting Friday night to discuss the impact that an impending loss of federal funding will have on the Silver Spring school.
The event is being held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Long Branch Recreation Center, 8700 Piney Branch Road, Silver Spring.
A local nonprofit advocacy organization, Community Health and Engagement through Education and Research, also known as CHEER, will host the meeting alongside the joint PTA for New Hampshire Estates and Oak View elementary schools. New Hampshire Estates, which serves kindergarten through second grade, is the feeder school for Oak View, which serves third through fifth grades.
Local elected officials, Montgomery County Public School administrators and school board members were invited to the event to discuss Oak View’s loss of Title 1 status, according to organizers. County Council Vice President Kate Stewart (D-Dist. 4) and councilmember Kristin Mink (D-Dist. 5) as well as school board President Karla Silvestre and Vice President Lynne Harris are expected to attend.
Title I is a federal aid program under the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 that provides grants to schools with high economic needs and student poverty rates, according to the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) website. Losing Title I status means possibly losing summer school programs, instructional specialists, paraeducators and other support programs for students and their families.
Mink said in a statement to MoCo360 that she was “extremely alarmed” about the loss of Title I status for the next school year for “highly impacted schools like Oak View” and looked forward to speaking with families at Friday’s meeting and “to hear MCPS’ plans to address the urgent needs this loss could create.”
School board member Harris told MoCo360 Friday that she also looks forward to speaking with families to understand the potential impact of the funding loss. She said families learned about Oak View losing Title I status in a way that “was more notification than conversation.
“From the get-go families were surprised, they were not happy. They didn’t understand why things had changed and so that is something that we definitely need to do better,” she said, noting that the board wants to do a deep dive into how the school system calculates Title I eligibility as well as other programs serving low-income students and whether changes can be made to better serve them.
According to Annie Tulkin, a parent advocate for New Hampshire Estates, the goal of Friday evening’s event is to bring the two school communities together and “draw attention to the significant impact the loss of funds has on Oak View and the students.”
She also said Oak View Principal Jeffrey Cline told families at a PTA meeting this week that MCPS is working on grants that can support summer school programming for the upcoming summer and an after-school tutoring program for students next school year.
Cline and Cram did not respond to MoCo360’s inquiries to confirm what steps MCPS is taking.
Harris also shared a new FAQ page that contains information about how schools are identified for Title I status as well as other information about the way MCPS approaches how it serves lower-income students and families.
Mink, who sits on the County Council’s Education and Culture Committee, also shared that the committee would “discuss the Title I issue with MCPS leadership during operating budget sessions later this spring.”
In February, Oak View was one of four MCPS elementary schools that lost Title 1 status due to a change in the way the district calculates poverty rates and Title I eligibility. According to MCPS officials, rankings are not fixed and are subject to change each year. Next school year, six schools will be added to the Title I group.
“While the new method MCPS used to determine Title I status resulted in a net gain of Title I schools, it is unacceptable that it dropped schools with clear and growing needs,” Mink said.
Oak View Elementary has been a Title I school for the last six years, starting in the 2017-2018 school year, according to MCPS data.
The other schools that lost funding include Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville and Viers Mill and Strathmore elementary schools in Silver Spring. Families and school staff from those schools have also been vocal at board meetings and on social media about the impact of losing the federal aid and Viers Mill Elementary School students staged a walkout to protest the loss of status in March.
According to data provided by MCPS, in the current school year Oak View Elementary received $397,800 in Title I funds, Strathmore got $462,800, Viers Mill received $517,400 and Brookhaven was allotted $356,200.
MCPS spokesperson Chris Cram wrote in a March 22 email to MoCo360 that under the direction of interim Superintendent Monique Felder, the district is “looking how to support schools losing these resources” and confirmed that MCPS has committed to adding back one full teacher position to each of the four schools losing status next school year.
In addition, Felder has reached out via email to families of students at Oak View in March to assure them the district is “actively looking for alternative ways to preserve” some of the school’s programs and supports after the loss of Title I status and funding. Parents in the Oak View school community conducted a letter-writing campaign to urge MCPS to restore summer school and rethink the way it calculates Title I status.
Tulkin, whose second-grade student attends New Hampshire Estates and will be heading to Oak View next school year, said she and other families are “cautiously optimistic.”
“I think the community is excited and happy that our advocacy has worked but we really want to hear directly from MCPS to ensure that these things are actually going to happen,” she said.