By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One introduced the topic of whether MCPS students and staff feel safe at school. Part Two looked at racial data of students and staff. Part Three examined individual middle and high schools from the perspective of students. This part will examine individual schools from the perspective of staff.
Staff were asked, “How safe do you feel in your school?” Allowable answers were extremely, quite, somewhat or not at all.
Let’s start by looking at individual middle schools. 36% of middle school staff said “not at all” or “somewhat” when asked how safe they felt in school. The chart below shows those middle schools that were below average on that response. In other words, these are the middle schools where staff were most likely to feel safe.
Virtual academy staff overwhelmingly felt safe because they teach virtually. (Virtual academy has since been closed.) Among physical schools, staff gave the best ratings to Rosa Parks MS (Olney), John Poole MS (Poolesville), Herbert Hoover MS (Potomac) and North Bethesda MS.
Now let’s look at those middle schools with above average unsafe responses.
MCPS had twelve middle schools in which a majority of staff felt not at all safe or only somewhat safe. The chart above shows both responses combined. The middle schools in which the highest percentages of staff answered “not at all safe” were:
Montgomery Village MS: 39%
Martin Luther King MS (Germantown): 37%
Benjamin Banneker MS (Burtonsville): 30%
Lakelands Park MS (Gaithersburg): 29%
Rocky Hill MS (Clarksburg): 22%
The chart below shows the percentage of staff who said they feel “not at all” or “somewhat” safe in individual high schools.
Other than the virtual academy, the schools that did best on this measure were Winston Churchill HS (Potomac), Poolesville HS, Damascus HS and Walt Whitman HS (Bethesda). On the other hand, MCPS had nine high schools in which a majority of staff felt not at all or somewhat safe. The high schools in which the highest percentages of staff answered “not at all safe” were:
John F. Kennedy HS (Silver Spring): 32%
Paint Branch HS (Burtonsville): 27%
Watkins Mill HS (Gaithersburg): 22%
Clarksburg HS: 21%
James Hubert Blake HS (Silver Spring): 20%
As with student responses, close MCPS observers no doubt notice patterns in these school lists. We will start looking at them in Part Five.