Where should the county move the Kent Gardens kids?
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Anonymous
The decision to retain the French immersion program has already been made. |
Anonymous
Busing is the issue for that neighborhood. They would fit better with the Langley bus routes. |
Anonymous
Yeah, no thanks. The neighborhood is closer to both Franklin Sherman and McLean than it is to Churchill Road and Langley. It’s an easy commute down Old Dominion to Chain Bridge. |
Anonymous
They wanted to avoid touching the HS boundaries, and that little parcel of land is zoned to McLean. If they'd swapped it to Churchill Road, it would have created something like a 3% split feeder at Churchill Road for that small sliver of Longfellow/McLean kids. I'm inclined to agree they should swap it to Churchill Road and the Langley pyramid, but it's such a small area anyway I doubt it really matters. They'd also have to split the SPA (3003) because it straddles Dolley Madison. Again, I think they were trying to avoid doing things like that, though I don't exactly know why if it otherwise makes sense to do why they wouldn't just include it in this process. |
Anonymous
It has nothing to do with the overcrowding at Kent Gardens and should be left alone. I don’t see them proposing to move that much weirder Churchill Road attendance island within the Spring Hill area to Spring Hill. |
Anonymous
| Why do they want to make Haycock 99% full while leaving other schools in the 80s, especially given the development and infill building in Haycock bounds? Why are so many schools involved for one school’s overcrowding that could easily be fixed by program changes? |
Anonymous
They are projecting Haycock at 92-96% under Option B. If the LLIV program at Franklin Sherman gets stronger with more kids and a new principal, there will be fewer FS AAP kids at Haycock. If the new WFC development gets built and overcrowd Haycock they can move some kids to Lemon Road. |
Anonymous
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The full recommendation for Scenario B has now been posted on Board Docs.
Main additional information is that there would be generous phasing (consistent with the generous phasing when FCPS approved boundary changes for Glen Forest ES in 2021). Only K and 1st graders would be required to attend the new schools in the fall of 2024; other students (2nd through 6th grade) would have the option to attend their existing elementary school or the new school from the fall of 2024 through the time they start middle school. |
Anonymous
| It does seem like many schools are affected for one school whose immersion program is causing the overcrowding. |
Anonymous
The projections for Haycock have always been way off and the new development is not taken into consideration in the projections. If there was no phasing, option B would make Haycock 99% full, even by their projections. It’s unclear why phasing makes it 96%. Either way, 96 or 99 are too full, especially considering the development around west falls Church. And it’s not good to blindly guess at what might happen with FS LLIV. Why does KG program overcrowding justify all these changes to so many other schools? |
Anonymous
I think the bottom line is that they aren’t just trying to relieve the overcrowding at Kent Gardens. They are also trying to add kids to Chesterbrook, which otherwise is facing a big enrollment decline, but they can’t just move kids from Kent Gardens to Chesterbrook because most of the Kent Gardens areas nearest to Chesterbrook are walkable to Kent Gardens. And then Elaine Tholen is trying to make her Langley friends happy by using this as an opportunity to move the relatively small number of Langley kids at Franklin Sherman (about 12% of FS) to Churchill Road. So they’ve ended up with a proposal to move a lot of kids to try and achieve these multiple objectives. You’re undoubtedly right that Haycock is looking at more overcrowding down the road with the additional kids from Kent Gardens and the new development planned near the WFC Metro. But the WFC development is still a few years away and, if needed, moving part of Haycock to Lemon Road would make it a more balanced McLean/Marshall feeder (Lemon Road physically sits within the McLean attendance area but probably 75% or so goes to Marshall). |
Anonymous
Lemon Road is an AAP center too, so they could potentially just adjust the AAP boundaries without touching the base schools. |
Anonymous
That is highly unlikely. |
Anonymous
FS isn't taking on any significant number more kids than it has currently, and there's no reason to think there will be less AAP transfers to Haycock unless centers are wound down county-wide or something. As for the bolded, 1/ there's no "if", it's happening, and 2/ the most logical SPA to shift to Lemon Road would be 4022 as it sits on Idyllwood/Kirby Road already (same as the school)... but that's the one they're shifting now from KG -> Haycock. Can't imagine the uproar if they just "whoops" and reallocate it again to Lemon Road in a few years. |
Anonymous
Scenario B projects Franklin Sherman would pick up an additional 38 kids. In addition, FS sends a lot of kids to Haycock for AAP - more than Chesterbrook, which has more students. If the new FS principal is more committed to LLIV services than Quigley, then it stands to reason the number of LLIV kids from FS at Haycock may decline. In terms of WFC development, it certainly appears to be coming, but it hasn’t happened yet. If it generates a lot more kids, they could move SPA 4011 or 4018 to Lemon Road, and that would still leave SPA 4022 at Haycock. To be clear, I’m not super-invested in Scenario B. I get the impression you want to kill the immersion program at KG and then move no one from KG to Haycock. If that’s what you’re angling for, it seems you’re out of luck. |