What can you tell me about Hunt Valley?

[trickymost]

Originally Posted by rudy_d

Oh my god! People who rent would even think of sending their children to the same school as yours'? The horror!

Certainly your opinion is of one who has never seen some of the problems the unfortunate children suffer and then bring from the inner city to the suburbs.

These children are unfortunately the victims of all Baltimore's woes in terms of poverty, drugs, disease, and neglect. And more often than not, they bring these problems to the county. I could write a marathon about all the incidents of these kids in K-grade 3 bringing guns to school, stabbing other kids, incidents of sexual assault (yes, in the K-3rd grades), theft (of other students belongings, teachers' belongings, school property) and on and on.

I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you that once the problems these students bring to the county start to become problematic, people simply move away or put their kids in private school, and that neighborhood over time goes down in flames.

Good examples (in the elementary grades) are Warren Elementary and Padonia International Elementary in Cockeysville. They get worse every year, and are looking more and more like city schools, and test scores reflect this. They've gone steadily downhill over the last 5 years. Looking at Warren's testing scores, the minority demographics in grade 3, their test scores are abysmal compared to all the schools surrounding. In some grades you have up to 25% only scoring BASIC on the MSA, which means they're not where they should be for their grade/age.

At the individual level, can you fault anyone who is going to spend about 500k on a house for making a decision to live in a place where they won't need to worry about their kids getting a quality education because there are handfuls of problem students who command almost 100% of the teacher's time? Or to have your 1st grader come home and tell you that a male student told you he wanted oral sex?

As far as I know, Baltimore suffers this worse than any other counties in the state, and certainly doesn't have many peers in this respect throughout the country.

[amelluz]

i think it is unfair to suggest that all the kids living in those apartments are going to be bad students and bring guns to school at the age of 6. not all of those kids are from the city and are bad students. not all kids from the city are bad either. just because someone rents an apartment doesn't automatically make them bad parents of misbehaved children.

[pamptrecy]

I don't think ALL the kids in the apartments are bad students etc... Unfortunately, as trickymost implied some are victims of the poverty, drugs, disease and neglect. It is very, very sad. At Warren Elementary they had two children suspended from kindergarten and one expelled! These are 5 year olds we're talking about! I know one child is afraid to even play rec sports with one of the kids. That's also not fair. The whole situation is unfortunate. We're probably going to move. The area is getting too expensive for us to afford to send our kids to private school and we feel it's the only choice we have now. Our kids aren't at all street smart. It's sad that so many kids these days are...and not just renters or kids living in apartments. I wish I could change the world and help all these people. I just don't know how! I don't think anyone really does! I blame drugs more than anything. People get on drugs and everything and everyone around them suffers...and the children suffer the most.