Churchill AAP Vs Haycock AAP : Which one is better?
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Anonymous
The school board almost moved the Langley AAP student to Cooper, from Longfellow, for the 2013-2014 year. It was tabled for more information/time. It is highly likely to happen for the 2014-2015 or 2015-2016 school year. Longfellow is slated to be over crowded and Cooper is slated to be under-enrolled- so it is a no brainer. There are enough AAP students for both Longfellow and Cooper to have viable AAP programs. |
Please share your experience about both HS. It would be helpful to most of the parents.
Anonymous
I think you are projecting when you say it is "highly likely" Cooper will have an AAP center in another year or two. There are several hurdles. First, most Cooper AAP parents seem not to want to move their kids out of the established AAP programs at Longfellow and Kilmer. Second, those parents claim the FCPS enrollment projections are off and that Cooper won't have space for an AAP program, particularly since Cooper is slated to be renovated in a few years. Third, adding AAP centers at Cooper and Thoreau will underscore that there are more AAP-eligible kids in the wealthy parts of the county, which is an inconvenient truth for FCPS. Of course, the numbers will ultimately drive what happens, just as was the case recently with Haycock/Lemon Road. If Kilmer is at 135% capacity in a few years, and Cooper is at 63% in a few years, the in-boundary Kilmer parents will agitate to move Langley kids to Cooper. Longfellow is not projected to be nearly as overcrowded, since it was expanded during a recent renovation, so it's really the numbers at Cooper and Kilmer that will dictate the outcome. |
Anonymous
| Not sure I agree, PP. The Cooper kids at Kilmer are higher SES than the base population, so I don't see the Kilmer parents making a move to get them out because they are probably increasing the test scores, etc. At Haycock, the Cluster 2 parents were lower SES. I think that was part of the reason the base parents were happy to see them go. |
Anonymous
A thousand times this. Some School Board members are bantering around the idea of implementing Local Level IV Centers in certain parts of the county that (a) the teachers have already received AAP training and (b) there are enough students at the base school that Level IV Centers are no longer required and (in turn) transportation is no longer required. I would not be surprised to see elimination of Level IV Centers in higher SES parts of the county, particularly in Cluster 1. |
Anonymous
Huh? The Cluster 2 kids were AAP students, so they also probably increased the test scores at Haycock. The base parents favored moving them to Lemon Road because Haycock was overcrowded and Lemon Road had room. The same thing will happen at Kilmer if the FCPS projections tutn out to be accurate, which admittedly is a big assumption. Base parents at Kilmer don't go around thanking their lucky stars that kids from Great Falls get bussed there now, and they certainly won't do so in the future if Kilmer ends up 35% above capacity, which is what FCPS is projecting by 2017. |
Anonymous
+100 Anyone who thinks Cluster 2 parents care about higher SES doesn't understand the demographics in the area or the temperament of Cluster II parents who are already frustrated with overcrowding at Kilmer. It's not overall test scores of a school that matter to most parents I know, but how well their kids are being educated -- are their classes bursting at the seams, etc. Those Langley kids will not be there much longer, trust me. |
Anonymous
Wrong. The low SES kids at Haycock AAP/Longfellow/McLean are from Timber Lane (which will likely end up redistricted to Luther Jackson/Falls Church in the coming years.) |
Anonymous
I haven't seen any suggestion from FCPS that it plans to move the 1/2 of Timber Lane at Haycock AAP/Longfellow/McLean to Jackson/Falls Church. The latest Capital Improvement Plan is full of hints as to future redistrictings that FCPS might decide to undertake, including: - moving kids from Marshall/Kilmer and/or McLean/Longfellow (at Westbriar, Colvin Run and/or Spring Hill ES) to Cooper/Langley, - moving kids from Jackson and/or Kilmer to Thoreau, and - moving kids from Stuart to Falls Church. But there's nothing about moving the Longfellow/McLean part of Timber Lane to Jackson/Falls Church. Jackson is projected to be seriously overcrowded like Kilmer, and Falls Church may end up with a bunch of kids from Stuart if the enrollment in the Bailey's Crossroads area continues to grow at its current rate. Not to mention that, if you take the 1/2 of Timber Lane out of Longfellow/McLean, there's not much SES diversity left. The current boundaries, while odd-looking, are aligned with what many educators suggest works best - sending lower SES students to schools that are otherwise high SES (and, to be clear, it's just the apartment complexes off Lee Highway that are low SES; the rest of the Timber Lane area assigned to McLean consists of nice SFH homes in the $550-850K range). I'm not sure why FCPS would mess with that. |
Anonymous
| Agree with PP. Who in their right mind would want a school that was all high SES? |
Anonymous
School Board members (such as Pat Hynes) that want all children at their neighborhood school. |
Anonymous
Not sure if this was serious or snarky. There are plenty of elementary schools that are all high SES, and people seem to be fine with that. Sending your kid to the closest, neighborhood school or AAP center seems to be what's most important. But, there is just one middle school (Cooper) and one high school (Langley) that is all high SES, and people do seem to have mixed reactions about the demographics at those schools. Some view them as the best non-magnet schools in FCPS, and actively seek them out, and others deliberately avoid them because they think the environment may be too one-size or materialistic. The irony right now is that FCPS may move more kids to Cooper and Langley in the next five years, not to make the schools more diverse, but simply because the enrollments in western McLean and Great Falls are expected to decline, while the enrollments in eastern McLean and West Falls Church are expected to keep growing. And if more kids to do get moved to Cooper/Langley, they'll probably come from very nice SFH neighborhoods that currently feed into Marshall and McLean, so it will be - like everything else in FCPS - controversial. |
Anonymous
| The western parts of Langley and McLean could be shifted to Herndon. Why are there these strange islands in the McLean high school boundary? |
Anonymous
| The McLean part of the Timber Lane is an island. FCPS has a strong history of eliminating islands the first opportunity they get. |
Anonymous
This time last year, people were saying there was no way in hell FCPS would uproot 90 kids from Haycock because they had always grandfathered in the past. It also wasn't included in the CIP, or anywhere else for that matter. Things change, and the school board does what they want. Falls Church is underenrolled, McLean will grow rapidly with the Tyson's construction. Making assumptions is never a good idea. |
Anonymous
If you moved the western parts of McLean to Herndon, you'd just be creating a new "island" assigned to Herndon rather than McLean. The current McLean island was created in two steps. First, in 1984, FCPS Staff proposed to move Shouse Village and nearby areas from over-crowded Langley to under-enrolled Marshall. These areas did not want to go to Marshall, so they persuaded the School Board to reject the Staff recommendation and move the neighborhoods to McLean, which was also under-enrolled at the time, although not to the same degree as Marshall. Subsequently, when Marshall remained under-enrolled, the School Board administratively redistricted part of Tysons in the McLean district to Marshall, which remained under-enrolled, so that students in new apartments off Spring Gate Rd. would go to Marshall rather than McLean. That resulted in the current "island" configuration. |