Operational Excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools is demonstrated in several different ways. It is shown through our direct service to schools and students; our adherence to sound financial practices; our commitment to environmental stewardship; and how we hire, retain, and develop the best staff in public education. Measuring our success in these key areas is an important part of our ongoing effort to support the success of our students and demonstrates our dedication to continuous improvement. The path to continuous improvement requires us to use data to evaluate programs and services, use data to guide improvement efforts, and to use data to be able to develop a needs-driven budget. These MCPS Data Dashboards are an effort to share with the community the measures, trends, and various data points we use to examine, guide, and improve operations in Montgomery County Public Schools.
More than 100,000 of our students rely on MCPS buses to get to school and back home, and to travel for athletic games and enriching field trips. A system of buses, operators, trainers, and maintenance personnel ensure we can do that each and every day.
Montgomery County school buses provide student transportation to more than 200 schools in Montgomery County and special schools in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, DC. Buses are parked strategically throughout the county at six transportation depots. Each depot has a fueling system, maintenance repair shop, and houses depot administrative offices. Buses also provide transportation for summer school, field trips and other community activities year-round. Our on-time arrival data monitors a very important objective to ensure students are at school in time for the start of their instructional day.
All school bus accidents are determined preventable/non-preventable by the MCPS Accident Review Board and State of Maryland guidelines. The Department of Transportation set a target of not more than 45 preventable accidents per year to gauge efforts around safety training, review, and accident mitigation. For all preventable accidents, it is mandatory that the bus operator involved attend an MCPS accident refresher/training class. These training classes are held monthly through the school year.
School buses are fitted with camera technology that records motorists passing a stopped school bus in violation of traffic laws. The data represent police citations issued to motorists based on footage captured by the school bus camera. Beginning in October 2016, new and expanded technology was implemented that is able to record more violations.
MCPS Division of Food and Nutrition Services serves more than 16 million meals to students each year. Preparing, delivering, and serving this many meals requires attention to detail, fiscal planning, and detail-oriented staff.
The various Child Nutrition Programs offered to our students exceed the requirements as established by the United States Department of Agriculture. MCPS is committed to providing high-quality, nutritious meals and snacks to all students as we recognize that a hungry child cannot learn.
The number of students eligible for Free and Reduced-price Meals System (FARMS) services is higher than it has ever been. There continues to be a large number of our students that come to us from economically disadvantaged households and facing food insecurity. The school meals program and the Summer Food Service Program provide the nourishment needed to keep our students healthy.
The Weekend Backpack program services elementary students and their families experiencing food insecurity. There are three non-profit partners that provide the program. These partners have set the common goal of making weekend food assistance available to all elementary schools with more than 50 percent of their students eligible for FARMS services.
Supportive learning environments and efficient work spaces are the responsibility of the Division of Facilities Management. The many millions of square footage in our nearly 300 buildings is designed, maintained, and cleaned by a team of dedicated professionals.
The data show the number of repairs requested by schools as well as some preventive maintenance initiated by central services. The data are tracked in order to monitor work requested and completed, the number of requests, the gap between work needed and work completed, and the time taken to complete requests.
The data are used to prepare budget requests that support maintenance to maximize and extend the life of buildings. The data are also used to analyze the need to maintain older facilities after deferral of capital renewal, or the need to increase proactive preventative maintenance.
The data represent the actual number of building inspections completed vs the targeted number. These building inspections assess the cleanliness and operations of buildings and the work of building service workers. Schools should receive two inspections a year, other facilities should receive one inspection. Productivity in terms of the number completed is impacted by weather, other emergency responses that arise, and staff shortages.
The building service area supervisors conduct local regular inspections and give a letter grade of quality. The target is for all inspections to receive a grade of "B" or above.
MCPS monitors its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through a variety of sustainability programs and investments. The data track these reductions in six categories: energy retrofits, wind energy purchases, recycling, solid waste reductions, School Energy and Recycling (SERT) Program reductions, and energy efficiency improvements implemented through the construction program. In FY16, the decrease in SERT reduction is due to the implementation of a new energy avoidance baseline calculation for schools. Since 2003, MCPS has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by over 70,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent or MTCO2e. This represents a 30 percent reduction in the MCPS carbon footprint since 2003.
MCPS has been decreasing its trash generation even with increasing enrollment. MCPS has made a major commitment to recycling and to tracking the performance of these efforts. Montgomery County requires the recycling of four categories of material: paper/cardboard, bottles/cans, yard waste, and scrap metal.
Whether it is books, furniture, or cleaning supplies the Department of Materials Management stocks, delivers, and supplies our schools, facilities, and staff with all they need to support teaching and learning in our classrooms and offices.
The Department of Materials Management (DMM) manages a warehouse and distribution network that provides the necessary textbooks, instructional materials, classroom and office supplies, science kits, furniture, equipment, and test materials to schools and offices. DMM recognizes that these requests are time sensitive and strives to meet the goal of completing the request within five working days.
One of our major goals to support schools needing instructional materials is to provide all teachers with dependable copier machines readily available during every school day. While we monitor our response time for repairs to ensure we are complying with our service agreement with principals (which targets repair within 48 hours), our primary performance measure for this goal is to reduce repairs and increase preventive maintenance.