Elementary Schools zoned in Old Town

[Anonymous]

Any input on Jefferson Houston or Lyles Crouch? thinking of leaving the district and getting a row house in old town. Our DD would be in school in 2 years.

[Anonymous]

You are *not* guaranteed admittance to Lyles-Crouch even if it's the school you are zoned for. You need to keep on top of when K registration is - it is poorly advertised and poorly organized. The Alexandria City school system is pretty bad.

Jefferson Houston is a poor performing school and has been for years. They tried to make it some kind of focus on arts school but that failed. Now they are tyring the whole IB thing. I would not send my child there.

[Anonymous]

Lyles Crouch is a terrific school, and Jefferson Houston continues to be deeply troubled despite the efforts of some motivated parent groups. As a result, homes zoned for Lyles Crouch will be significantly more than those zoned for Jefferson Houston. And, assuming you do purchase in the Lyles Crouch zone- be sure to follow PPs advice about K registration, don't take anything for granted. Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Some parts of northern Old Town are zoned for Maury as well, which is better than Jefferson Houston by far. See:
http://www.acps.k12.va.us/enroll/zonelocator.php

J-H is becoming a K-8 school as well.

Also, because J-H has been failing for so long, you can opt out of that school (but your options of where to opt into are somewhat limited).

But there's a ton of new building going on in Alexandria right now, so it seems like some of the zoning lines are going to have to change sooner or later.

[Anonymous]

You'd think with the #'s of middle class parents going to ACPS (at least for elementary) they might try and re-draw the lines so the poor folks aren't all concentrated in one school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You'd think with the #'s of middle class parents going to ACPS (at least for elementary) they might try and re-draw the lines so the poor folks aren't all concentrated in one school.

Unforunately, the City concentrates the low income housing in huge blocks so I think it makes to redraw boundaries to do that.

[Anonymous]

they already do some re-drawing of the boundaries. That's why there's that block of "North Old Town" that is jerrymandered into the Maury attendance zone. It was drawn to relocate most of the kids from the James Bland projects into Maury instead of Jefferson-Houston.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:they already do some re-drawing of the boundaries. That's why there's that block of "North Old Town" that is jerrymandered into the Maury attendance zone. It was drawn to relocate most of the kids from the James Bland projects into Maury instead of Jefferson-Houston.

I wondered how that happened. Too bad, Maury could have ended up being another good school.

There are a handful of good elementary schools but it all falls apart in middle school because there are only two of them.

[Anonymous]

Actually, in the late 90's, they purposefully re-drew the boundaries to concentrate most of the public housing kids into Jefferson-Houston. They did it to bring up the scores of the other schools. Furthermore, the general consensus is that they are expanding it to k-8 to keep the public housing kids out of the middle school, thereby bringing up that school's test scores. If anyone ever wanted to expend the effort, there is a wonderful law suit here.

The principal at J-H, who was well-regarded, and the first one to stay more than about 9 months in recent memory, has been transferred to an administrative job, and the school is going to be run by a "Committee" of administrators. I'm not sure about the whole story, but it sounds like an attempt to avoid having any one person be accountable, and an absolute recipe for disaster. However, no one is every going to get that school to make AYP with the demographics it has.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Actually, in the late 90's, they purposefully re-drew the boundaries to concentrate most of the public housing kids into Jefferson-Houston. They did it to bring up the scores of the other schools. Furthermore, the general consensus is that they are expanding it to k-8 to keep the public housing kids out of the middle school, thereby bringing up that school's test scores. If anyone ever wanted to expend the effort, there is a wonderful law suit here.

The principal at J-H, who was well-regarded, and the first one to stay more than about 9 months in recent memory, has been transferred to an administrative job, and the school is going to be run by a "Committee" of administrators. I'm not sure about the whole story, but it sounds like an attempt to avoid having any one person be accountable, and an absolute recipe for disaster. However, no one is every going to get that school to make AYP with the demographics it has.

I thought they did hire a new principal. They were advertising "meet the principal" night.

I agree that the school will never make AYP with the demographic but if it fails enough times won't they have to close? They have already tried reorganizing a couple times and it hasn't worked.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:they already do some re-drawing of the boundaries. That's why there's that block of "North Old Town" that is jerrymandered into the Maury attendance zone. It was drawn to relocate most of the kids from the James Bland projects into Maury instead of Jefferson-Houston.

I wondered how that happened. Too bad, Maury could have ended up being another good school.

There are a handful of good elementary schools but it all falls apart in middle school because there are only two of them.

Maury IS a good school. SOL scores are strong. Enrollment grows every year as more neighborhood families opt in. Sure the kids from the PJ's struggle (just missed AYP last year b/c of English scores of black students). But it's still a great school. Both Lyles-Crouch and Maury are great schools-and each gets 20--35% of their kids from Old Town housing projects. That's not a problem with strong leadership, good teachers, and parents who aren't afraid of diversity. If the kids from all the Old Town projects were dispersed among 4 elementary schools, each having no more than 35% of the population from the projects, great progress could be made. ACPS shoud have built a new school in Potomac Yards and zoned half of the Jeff-Houston kids there. Then I think you'd wind up with 4 schools, all similar in quality to Lyles-Crouch/Maury. Instead, we're spending $30 million to raze and rebuild Jeff-Houston--a perfectly fine school building--without trying to solve the demographic problem. It's the typical ACPS thinking--spend millions on upgrading facilities and assume that things will just magically get better. See, e.g. the new TC Williams.

[Anonymous]

Actually both Bland and Adkins public housing are zoned to Maury--but Bland is currently being knocked down and redeveloped into condos and townhouses (though there will still be some public housing in the new development).

I've worked with a number of kids who lived in Adkins through a mentoring program and they all went to J-H despite Adkins being within the Maury zoning.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Maury IS a good school. SOL scores are strong. Enrollment grows every year as more neighborhood families opt in. Sure the kids from the PJ's struggle (just missed AYP last year b/c of English scores of black students). But it's still a great school. Both Lyles-Crouch and Maury are great schools-and each gets 20--35% of their kids from Old Town housing projects. That's not a problem with strong leadership, good teachers, and parents who aren't afraid of diversity. If the kids from all the Old Town projects were dispersed among 4 elementary schools, each having no more than 35% of the population from the projects, great progress could be made. ACPS shoud have built a new school in Potomac Yards and zoned half of the Jeff-Houston kids there. Then I think you'd wind up with 4 schools, all similar in quality to Lyles-Crouch/Maury. Instead, we're spending $30 million to raze and rebuild Jeff-Houston--a perfectly fine school building--without trying to solve the demographic problem. It's the typical ACPS thinking--spend millions on upgrading facilities and assume that things will just magically get better. See, e.g. the new TC Williams.

I'm confused. The parents who "aren't afraid of diversity" actually want to have their own neighborhood schools, but bus the in-boundary kids from the projects in the area to other schools? Is that legal or ethical? Would the kids from the projects do better or worse under that scenario? They can't exactly afford Episcopal as a fall-back.

[Anonymous]

They are building a new elementary school for Potomac Yards, I beleive. Don't know how they'll zone it, however.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Maury IS a good school. SOL scores are strong. Enrollment grows every year as more neighborhood families opt in. Sure the kids from the PJ's struggle (just missed AYP last year b/c of English scores of black students). But it's still a great school. Both Lyles-Crouch and Maury are great schools-and each gets 20--35% of their kids from Old Town housing projects. That's not a problem with strong leadership, good teachers, and parents who aren't afraid of diversity. If the kids from all the Old Town projects were dispersed among 4 elementary schools, each having no more than 35% of the population from the projects, great progress could be made. ACPS shoud have built a new school in Potomac Yards and zoned half of the Jeff-Houston kids there. Then I think you'd wind up with 4 schools, all similar in quality to Lyles-Crouch/Maury. Instead, we're spending $30 million to raze and rebuild Jeff-Houston--a perfectly fine school building--without trying to solve the demographic problem. It's the typical ACPS thinking--spend millions on upgrading facilities and assume that things will just magically get better. See, e.g. the new TC Williams.

I'm confused. The parents who "aren't afraid of diversity" actually want to have their own neighborhood schools, but bus the in-boundary kids from the projects in the area to other schools? Is that legal or ethical? Would the kids from the projects do better or worse under that scenario? They can't exactly afford Episcopal as a fall-back.

No, you draw the boundaries such that no one school is saddled with too high a porportion of kids from the various housing projects. Some (in South Old Town) go to Lyles-Crouch, some (in Parker-Gray) go to Maury, some go to Jeff-Houston, and some (in the far north end of Old Town) go to the new school in Potomac Yards. None of the kids from the projects would be bussed across town--they would all still be attending schools that are still just a few blocks from their homes. Concentrating the poor into one area (or one school) never helps the poor. The City Council doesn't seem to understand this as they keep building/renovating housing projects in Old Town. But ACPS should do its best to correct the City Council's errors by not funneling too many of the kids from the PJ's into one elementary school.