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Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)
Mythical Western HS
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Anonymous
No idea what you’re talking about and it’s getting stale for local School Board officials who wield authority over huge annual capital and operating budgets but manage to do an extremely poor job constantly looking to blame state and federal officials for their own failures. |
Anonymous
Barring full economic collapse of the DC area, top schools in FCPS the likes of Langley, McLean, Oakton, Chantilly, Madison, etc will never, ever have poor reputations. You can stick a few low-income housing developments in each one of those schools, but the number of neighborhoods with $MM+ homes and educated families will still far outweigh the damage done by low-SES student test scores. If Langley needs to "fall" to the level of Lake Braddock so that Mount Vernon can rise to the level of South Lakes, then that is a fair compromise in my mind. Believe me, Langley and Mcean will still be FCPS's most desirable treasures due to the housing stock. Ideally every FCPS school is one that is desirable to attend. How is that too much to ask of a public school system? |
Anonymous
I completely agree with you but people in the richer areas freak out and call it social engineering/unfair equity/etc. Even though some kids in say, Langley HS, already travel several miles to their home school. You need a SB who has balls and won't cave to pressure. The truth is, any decision involving boundary changes will piss off some folks. They need to do what is best for the whole county. But they keep pushing it off and asking for more and more stupid studies. |
Anonymous
So then what is fair? FCPS will not break up into smaller districts. No one likes rezoning but it needs to happen. No where does it state that when you buy a house, you are guaranteed to stay with the same schools. And if you (general you) are rezoned, so are all of your close neighbors. |
Anonymous
People vote in ways to concentrate “poors” in certain areas and to make them poorer, yet they believe they are helping the poor. They do those things in the name of the poor. then they make things worse by refusing to realign school zones. |
Anonymous
Yes. Parents are more into their HS pyramid and not FCPS. |
Anonymous
They aren't going to change the boundaries in ways that would bring about these changes in school demographics. Hell, when they were given a golden opportunity a couple of years ago to add some housing diversity to Langley, they punted and kept it free of any rental apartments or condos to keep Elaine Tholen's neighbors in Great Falls happy. If they weren't prepared to do that, even though Tysons is close to Langley, they aren't going to create checkerboard attendance areas elsewhere throughout the county. What FCPS could do is stop with the self-inflicted wounds. Expanding West Potomac to 3000 seats when nearby Mount Vernon has hundreds of vacant seats reinforces the message that Mount Vernon is so bad that FCPS is ready to waste money on West Potomac to keeps kids in Karen Corbett Sanders' district out of Mount Vernon. Repeatedly moving single-family neighborhoods out of Annandale without realizing that was "death by a thousand paper cuts" was another self-inflicted wound. And there are other examples, such as not revisiting whether IB remains suitable for Lewis. In any case, to stay on topic, what most needs to happen in the short term is a public discussion as to why they now plan to expand Centreville to 3000 seats, and whether that's being planned to accommodate the preferences of the CHS community or to serve the interests of those who may be looking for additional ways to kill off a new HS in western Fairfax. |
Anonymous
| Aside from building a new HS ten years from now, it's either expand Centreville HS or do a boundary adjustment to send some parts to Westfield/Robinson/Fairfax/Woodson. That whole area is a mess with convoluted boundaries. The hard part is convincing the Robinson/Woodson community to accept new apartments into their boundaries. McLaughlin would fight that in the name of community schools. |
Anonymous
The only reason why a new HS only appears to be an option "ten years from now" is because they've kicked the can down the road so many times. They could accelerate the schedule for a new HS if they wanted. It would just mean adjusting the CIP and deferring some other projects to reflect the fact that the capacity crisis in FCPS is more of an issue at the HS level than at the MS or ES level. Yes, there currently is a "renovation queue," but it's not written in stone. They adjusted it about 5 years ago to build in funding for additions to Justice, Madison, and West Potomac outside the queue. When it comes to boundaries, Westfield and Robinson have some space so they could be a short to medium-term option. Woodson is already over capacity and FCPS probably couldn't get the City of Fairfax to agree to move more county kids to Fairfax, which is owned by the City of Fairfax. Woodson is overcrowded now because, shortly after FCPS had reassigned part of Annandale to Fairfax in 2011, the City of Fairfax surprised FCPS and demanded that FCPS move some county kids out of Fairfax (which is why the Fairfax Villa ES area got moved to Woodson). It wasn't that long ago that FCPS was telling people that high schools should have no more than 2100 kids, that Westfield was too big, and that moving kids from Westfield to South Lakes would solve a "problem" at Westfield. If they are going to build Centreville out to 3000, the least they should do is discuss their reasons openly with families and make sure they understand the preferences of the community. Some may be fine with a 3000-student school but others may have serious reservations. |
Anonymous
| No one in Centreville wants a 3000 kid school. No one anywhere in FCPS wants a 3000 kid school. |
Anonymous
Sadly they do if it means avoiding schools like Mt. Vernon, Lewis, Herndon, Justice, Falls Church, and Annandale. That is why they are expanding schools to such large sizes. As has been said, many people fear a new new high school would cause cascading boundary changes. So they will take a larger school over boundary changes. Two of the real consequences of refusal to adjust boundaries is 1) poor use of existing resources and 2) the expanding socioeconomic gap between schools. Boundary changes have never been pleasant, but today if you try to move students from Woodson to Annandale, Langley to Herndon, or West Springfield to Lewis the PARENTS will run you out of town. |
Anonymous
So much the bolded. |
Anonymous
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Have you seen current enrollment at particular schools as of November? Essentially at 3,000 for 9-12 at two schools already.
https://schoolprofiles.fcps.edu/schlprfl/f?p=108:42:976831543758::NO:  42_SCHOOL_YEAR,P42_CLUSTER_ID,P42_DIVISION_ID,P42_SCHOOL_ID:202223,1,DIVISION,
Chantilly: 2,921 LB: 2,897 WP: 2,714 Oakton: 2,682 WF: 2,665 WS: 2,652 CV: 2,603 Rob: 2,512 SL: 2,501 |
Anonymous
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This is just as much an argument for building a new school as for expanding Centreville to 3000.
Loudoun would never let a high school get that big. |
Anonymous
Eye-opening numbers when comparing these schools to Lewis with 1686 students and to a lesser extent Mt. Vernon with 1943. Regardless of the politics involving those two schools, it is a significant display of resource mismanagement. FCPS should have acted long before the gap grew to such lengths where now any reasonable fix is construed as social engineering. |