APS: New High School forum tonight 7-9 pm at Yorktown

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Please make sure you listen closely to what these board members have said and are saying. Politicians are good at leading you down a path you want o go. I remember talking to Kannanhan about an issue and she tried to make me feel good and believe she felt similarly. I pressed her several times, and only then was obvious she and I were on opposite sides.
Did any of them commit or seem to lean towards Kenmore site?

No. Barbara said whatever they wound up doing, they would make it great, a la Trump! And Reid said a fourth comprehensive was the ultimate goal, but maybe not in this round, maybe down the road in the next planning cycle. He specifically declined to support Kenmore after 40 parents at the meeting stood up in support of it, and said go talk to your southern neighbors.

I'm not faulting him. I like Reid. I'm just answering the question: No, they would not say they were in favor of Kenmore.

[Anonymous]

I wasn't there last night and don't know who this Lois person is - but I don't believe it would be possible to keep a football field (and team) from the 32 acre Kenmore site. The site can handle it. Most folks in Arlington would see that as unfair.
Is this Lois person an elected official? She is not the decision maker. How would Lois know what the people of the county will and won't accept? And will and wont be willing to pay for? Sounds like a red herring to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wasn't there last night and don't know who this Lois person is - but I don't believe it would be possible to keep a football field (and team) from the 32 acre Kenmore site. The site can handle it. Most folks in Arlington would see that as unfair.
Is this Lois person an elected official? She is not the decision maker. How would Lois know what the people of the county will and won't accept? And will and wont be willing to pay for? Sounds like a red herring to me.

Lois Koontz is a very active citizen who sits on the Facilities Advisory Committee which is a staff-citizen committee that does the studies and offers reports to the SB on facilities issues. Someone asked about how field space and parking were factored into decisions, and Reid and Barbara asked Lois to speak on how those factors weighted in. The list of locations for potential high schools was first put forth by the FAC, and from it the staff has narrowed it to three. She's not an elected official, but is very knowledgeable about those kinds of issues surrounding the school sites which is why the asked her to respond.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wasn't there last night and don't know who this Lois person is - but I don't believe it would be possible to keep a football field (and team) from the 32 acre Kenmore site. The site can handle it. Most folks in Arlington would see that as unfair.
Is this Lois person an elected official? She is not the decision maker. How would Lois know what the people of the county will and won't accept? And will and wont be willing to pay for? Sounds like a red herring to me.

Sorry -- Lois is on the FAC or the JFAC or both. She is "one of the good ones" who volunteers her time helping out APS, and she worked to help APS consider other options for land use besides just dumping the 1300 at the Ed Center when the Ed Center seemed like a done deal. She goes to a lot of meetings and is very aware of what land is available in general in Arlington and specifically at all the different sites. If she is saying there might not be a stadium or a pool, I listen to her.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Nobody in North Arlington seems to know why people in South Arlington hate the Kenmore idea. I'm sorry, but North Arlington people on my team, doesn't that give you pause a bit?

Did you hear Lois at the meeting last night saying a 4th Comprehensive probably wouldn't get a full football field or a pool? If we were putting a school like that in North Arlington, you think parents would sit for that?

The School Board came up with these 3 options of Kenmore, the Ed Center, and Arlington Tech space, but apparently there had been two others that were nixed because a high school would have been located too close to an elementary school. But that's essentially what Kenmore will be left with EVEN IF the middle school is eventually moved out of that space, which there is no immediate plan to do, meaning that there will be 3 schools basically on top of one another. Don't we care about that issue just as much if it's in the south?

It's all good and well of you to say to take the parking spaces out so high schoolers won't drive, but I don't see you rushing to take them out of W-L or Yorktown. So there is more inequity.

Is it true that there are no/few bike racks at Kenmore because traffic is so nuts that they don't want to encourage bike riding since it will result in accidents?

It is rich for people in the North to keep talking about "the greater good" when they are not being asked to sacrifice their parks and their amenities. I am one of those people in the North who is pro-Kenmore as a fourth site! But we can't keep dismissing the actual concerns of the people who live in the affected area! Did any of us go to the Glen Carlyn meeting to hear what those concerns were? No! WTF is wrong with us?

I am the PP talking about parking and I explicitly said no parking for ANY high school students.

And we talked about the pool and stadium -- and the idea was to consolidate all high schools into one stadium, not just kenmore. It is a large central site, maybe it would get the only stadium. Don't see why they can't have pool, it's a huge plot.

What other two sites were rejected as too close to elem -- why is that not being raised at all???

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wasn't there last night and don't know who this Lois person is - but I don't believe it would be possible to keep a football field (and team) from the 32 acre Kenmore site. The site can handle it. Most folks in Arlington would see that as unfair.
Is this Lois person an elected official? She is not the decision maker. How would Lois know what the people of the county will and won't accept? And will and wont be willing to pay for? Sounds like a red herring to me.

She's a member of FAC, and she co-wrote the report that got these options on the table in the first place, so slow your roll. I wasn't there but I suspect she was pointing out that they can't get all those things at Kenmore now, because there's an ES and MS on the land that they can't just tear down. So a comprehensive zoned school at Kenmore would be, at least temporarily, less than. It just would be. Also, she's done a lot of work on the schools committee of CivFed. Another member (or former member) of the school committee of CivFed said on AEM that there's just not enough bonding capacity for all of these things. Underground parking is $$$$$$, and the more complicated a site it, the more difficult it is to build for reasonable cost. We don't have an unlimited pot of money and we are very far behind the curve. In order to build as many seats as possible as quickly as possible, we may have to accept that we can't have high schools each with their own pools and stadiums any longer. If that's the case, then I think the school board needs to make that message plain and we need to have a community conversation about how we're going to deal with our new reality in an equitable way.

[Anonymous]

If this is the Lois I am thinking of, she is a smart and objective thinker trying to solve a problem without letting her personal situation get in the way. I wish we had more school board members like that.

I don't live in Glen Carlyn, but my kid goes to Campbell so I am regularly in the area. Yes, there is open land there, because there are already schools there using the space. In fact, there are over 1500 students currently there. So, rather than have 4k students at WL, lets have 3800 at Kenmore. Let's back traffic up on to route 50, the already gridlocked major commuting route that will take most of the 66 traffic once it is a hot lane. And let's crowd K-12 literally on to one block, take away access to outdoor activities and let the poorest families in the county live through a construction zone. Look at the boundaries of where a Kenmore HS would likely be. The new school would take families from the area of the county with THE HIGHEST CONCENTRATION OF POVERTY IN THE COUNTY (thank you county board and developers for that). And, guess what, the county has an official policy to add thousands of more affordable housing units in that area! It would take from the central and west end of columbia pike, which is almost entirely committed affordable housing and market rate affordable housing. All of those kids currently go to kemore and WL. Don't think for a second all those north arlington parents currently on the western boundary of WL and YT won't fight tooth and nail to keep their kids out of that new HS. And, thanks to the school board's latest WL boundary change, that would leave almost zero diversity at WL. The result, WL and YT are rich white schools. New school and Wakefield are title I schools.

Hello resegregation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:With regard to stadiums and pools generally, both Barbara and Reid acknowledged that longer term we would need to think about things differently. Any comprehensive HS would need practice fields, but perhaps as a county the larger resources like pools or stadiums are shared resources among the school. That being said, the Kenmore site is big enough for all of those things.

The Glen Carlyn resident there last night was very loud and vocal about how against Kenmore they are. How it would have over 3,000 kids grades K-12 on the same campus, traffic is bad, etc. Reid did point out that any decision anywhere wasn't just a one-and-done thing. It would absolutely also require roadwork, changing the ES start time to stagger the three schools, and a host of other things.

Some parents last night also still were concerned about the likelihood of making Key only a choice school and what would happen to ASFS absorbing all those kids. It seemed to surprise some people that it would involve redistricting among ASFS, Taylor, and probably Jamestown and Discovery in 2019 to re-balance.

At the HS level, there aren't any great options because we're out of land. To me it seems like a waste to build 1,300 seats at the Ed Center when they already are pretty certain that by 2025 they'll need another 2,200 seats on top of that. Go with Kenmore now, put your resources in the place where you can grow otherwise you'll still be playing catchup in 2025.

That lady is a nutter. She's the NIMBY of all NIMBY's. She's been busy for YEARS trying to block schools being built in that area. Her own reasons for objecting to a school are purely selfish, but there are some legitimate concerns (not hers) that other neighbors have about student safety with so many walkers in that area. It would take a lot to make this area safe enough for the current walking students as well new HS students who would be walkers. Frankly, I wish they'd address some of these issues now, and not wait for an accident to happen or another school to be built.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wasn't there last night and don't know who this Lois person is - but I don't believe it would be possible to keep a football field (and team) from the 32 acre Kenmore site. The site can handle it. Most folks in Arlington would see that as unfair.
Is this Lois person an elected official? She is not the decision maker. How would Lois know what the people of the county will and won't accept? And will and wont be willing to pay for? Sounds like a red herring to me.

"This Lois person" is on the Joint Facilities Advisory Committee, so while she may not be the decisionmaker, she does understand how much space various items require.

She is very calm and well-informed. If you want to have your voice heard, it would be helpful if you would not refer to people as "this X person" and asked questions about how people know what they know rather than deciding that information you don't like can't be true.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
The Glen Carlyn resident there last night was very loud and vocal about how against Kenmore they are. .

That lady is a nutter. She's the NIMBY of all NIMBY's. She's been busy for YEARS trying to block schools being built in that area. Her own reasons for objecting to a school are purely selfish, but there are some legitimate concerns (not hers) that other neighbors have about student safety with so many walkers in that area. It would take a lot to make this area safe enough for the current walking students as well new HS students who would be walkers. Frankly, I wish they'd address some of these issues now, and not wait for an accident to happen or another school to be built.

The nutter lady posted above, I think (I hope -- please let there not be two of them). The loud person at last night's meeting was a man.

And I see how the new Kenmore HS could end up with an unbalanced demographic mix, but maybe this time the School Board will have grown a spine to deal with Arlington Forest parents.

[Anonymous]

The NIMBY last night was a man not woman but he was very upset and yelling over people.

I don't at all want to dismiss the neighborhood's concerns. But let's get the math straight. 1500 + 1300 = 2800, not 3800. It's still a lot of kids, yes, but not as many as are being proposed for WL. More like the same number that will be at WL in a couple of years just with the overcrowding.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The NIMBY last night was a man not woman but he was very upset and yelling over people.

I don't at all want to dismiss the neighborhood's concerns. But let's get the math straight. 1500 + 1300 = 2800, not 3800. It's still a lot of kids, yes, but not as many as are being proposed for WL. More like the same number that will be at WL in a couple of years just with the overcrowding.

Is that the one who specifically doesn't want his daughter to have to go to a large school?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Nobody in North Arlington seems to know why people in South Arlington hate the Kenmore idea. I'm sorry, but North Arlington people on my team, doesn't that give you pause a bit?

Did you hear Lois at the meeting last night saying a 4th Comprehensive probably wouldn't get a full football field or a pool? If we were putting a school like that in North Arlington, you think parents would sit for that?

The School Board came up with these 3 options of Kenmore, the Ed Center, and Arlington Tech space, but apparently there had been two others that were nixed because a high school would have been located too close to an elementary school. But that's essentially what Kenmore will be left with EVEN IF the middle school is eventually moved out of that space, which there is no immediate plan to do, meaning that there will be 3 schools basically on top of one another. Don't we care about that issue just as much if it's in the south?

It's all good and well of you to say to take the parking spaces out so high schoolers won't drive, but I don't see you rushing to take them out of W-L or Yorktown. So there is more inequity.

Is it true that there are no/few bike racks at Kenmore because traffic is so nuts that they don't want to encourage bike riding since it will result in accidents?

It is rich for people in the North to keep talking about "the greater good" when they are not being asked to sacrifice their parks and their amenities. I am one of those people in the North who is pro-Kenmore as a fourth site! But we can't keep dismissing the actual concerns of the people who live in the affected area! Did any of us go to the Glen Carlyn meeting to hear what those concerns were? No! WTF is wrong with us?

I don't know whether they have bike racks, but I believe they would discourage this mode of transport because it's definitely not safe to bike in this area. Even walkers face a safety challenge. The sidewalks are narrow and right up against the road. In most places there's not even a grassy strip separating cars whizzing past from the sidewalk. Just a curb. You are a foot or two from passing cars. People also drive like maniacs on this road, and I think we need more traffic calming measures now (lights, or something). I'd encourage everyone to drive down here and notice how close many of the homes are to the road. That could be an issue with being able to widen the road and/or improve sidewalks. Notice how many homes have boulders in front of their houses. This is because these homes have repeatedly had cars smash into them, or drive through their yards. Independent of the high school conversation, I think the county needs to make this area safer for the students who are walkers now.

[Anonymous]

For pete's sake, stop calling these people nutters. WTF is wrong with you? They are citizens who disagree with your opinion of what to do with the land where they live. Have some respect and argue the issues. Do you think name calling improves the quality of discourse here?

And for the record, there were two people arguing the Glen Carlyn POV, a man and a woman, both of whom are perfectly nice people with reasons for what they argued.

[Anonymous]

Just to elaborate on what someone above said, Reid mentioned at least twice that a new CIP process will start in December/January with a new 10 year CIP to be voted out next June. He said that he fully expected the proposed CIP to include a plan for a 4th comprehensive high school.

While he wouldn't say it outright, I got the distinct impression that he was saying the likely plan in the next CIP would be for a 4th high school at Kenmore to open in 2025, and that these 1300 seats would likely go elsewhere.

Kanninen then hinted that maybe an interim plan could float us for a few years and hold over some of the budget for the big new school (e.g., for now just use the Ed Center building as is with minor modifications).

Reid was pretty clear that he believes some future increased use of the Kenmore site is a given, based on where the population is going and our limited land availability.