Fall 2022 Over/Under-Enrollment at FCPS High Schools
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Anonymous
Ok. The point is the same. Nothing magically changes at 49.5% white vs. 50.5% white. Woodson is right around 50% white. |
Anonymous
This is spot on. Lots of heads in the sand in this thread. |
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Anonymous
It really does only take a boundary change to drastically change the composition and overall course rigor of a school. Imagine Lewis absorbs 400 WSHS and 100 Edison students through boundary changes which would increase Lewis' population to 2185 students. On average, those 500 new students are of much higher SES and much lower FARMs rate than the current Lewis population. On average, well over 50% of those 500 students would take AP/IB courses according to average AP/IB participation at WSHS and Edison. That's an influx of 250 students to Lewis that now requires the school to expand their advanced course selection. Meanwhile, in this fairy tale, WSHS and Edison still remain with 2250 and 2150 students, respectively, and their average SES and FARMs would stay effectively the same. Nothing changes at their schools, and all the kids at Lewis get brought up to have similar opportunity. This can be applied to MVHS as well. |
Anonymous
Redistricting shouldn’t be a fairy tale. The problem is that we have an elected vs an appointed school board, with members who want to keep their “power” base and stay in office. Maybe they view it as a stepping stone to higher office, but as it is nothing will change. The Board of Supervisors needs to withhold FCPS funding until the school board gets its act together and stops wasting taxpayer money on unnecessary school expansions when plenty of space is available in other schools. If a countywide redistricting were held, the system could reboot and eliminate the “bad school vs good school” dynamic that currently exists. Schools would be of a similar size, offering the same programs, and with a similar FARMS rate. It won’t succeed on a piecemeal basis, but could be successful if politicians had the guts to do the right thing vs preserve their petty fiefdoms. |
Anonymous
I'm confused by what you're saying. In 2007, South Lakes was viewed similarly to the three or four schools you mention. In response, FCPS changed the boundaries in 2008, the enrollment at South Lakes increased more than expected, and FCPS responded by later building an addition to South Lakes outside the renovation queue. But here you seem to be saying that the "solution is not build capacity at over crowded schools" and FCPS shouldn't do boundary changes. So it's OK to have addressed issues at South Lakes by changing the boundaries and then expanding the school, but others should just accept their schools are well over-capacity or under-enrolled until (1) FCPS "fixes" the under-enrolled schools and (2) people gradually move over to those schools? Also, changes in enrollment result from many things other than whether a school is viewed as "good" or "bad." The enrollment at Lewis and Mount Vernon has been relatively flat, but the enrollment at Justice has increased substantially in recent years (leading to FCPS's plan to expand its capacity to 2500 seats). Langley, McLean, and Marshall are all viewed as "good," but McLean and Marshall are the schools that have seen the huge jumps in enrollment because their neighborhoods are more affordable and centrally located. |
Anonymous
I think they still have to add permanent seats at some schools, particularly Centreville and McLean (each of which currently has fewer than 2000 permanent seats, when the majority of schools now have or will have at least 2300 seats), to make that scenario feasible. Otherwise if you do a county-wide redistricting so that, say, every school has 2300 kids, you are leaving some schools 15% over-enrolled while other schools like Lake Braddock and West Potomac would be almost 25% under capacity. |
Anonymous
That doesn't make any sense at all. Wealth is not evenly distributed throughout Fairfax Co and the school locations are fixed. |
Anonymous
Nope, that's why you end up with programs that propose bussing kids to different schools around the county to make up a more equitable student body. And that suggestion is an excellent way to lose your school board seat. |
Anonymous
So you're going to add a little over 100 per class (probably much less because parents would choose private over lewis) and think that's enough to create a cohort large enough to transform the school? |
Anonymous
South Lakes Boundary was barely changed, there were schools that were supposed to be shifted that were not because of parent push back. The Parents from Fox Mill had to actively petition for classes to be added at South Lakes to meet their kids needs and SLHS still doesn't have the same classes available in the same number as the kids at Oakton HS. In the end, a small change was made so that it looked like something was done but the re-balancing wasn't what was really needed. The Fox Mill kids are a small percentage of the kids at Carson and then they have no one from Carson who moves to SLHS with them. It is not exactly ideal. Most of the kids from Fox Mill are in that school within a school scenario where most of them are taking Honors and IB classes and don't interact with a lot of the other kids. So it is pretty much one cohort of kids from Fox Mill with a few Floris kids tossed in that are together from K-12. Not exactly a shining example of change. I guess the scores improved and the school is going to be over crowded in a few years because of the recent addition. Oh, and people don't put in to move for AP because no one wants to go to Herndon. If you think that this is a boundary adjustment that worked then what we are looking for is small changes to make it look like something is being done and effecting a small population who don't have the same clout as the larger schools that were able to resist the change. So yeah, I don't see the SLHS example as the best example of a change. I see a school within a school that people seem to be ok with excepting because test scores went up. Do you want to really effect SLHS? Move everyone from Floris and Crossfield to SLHS but that is not going to happen. Those are bigger schools with more money and clout. |
Anonymous
You can add capacity to bring every high school up to a minimum number of permanent seats. You can also do more to align the courses or programs available (the most obvious being to offer AP, not IB, at every school, or having just one IB magnet). You can't achieve similar FARMS rates across the county without getting rid of contiguous school boundaries. In some instances, you could mitigate some of the current disparities between or among nearby schools and still have contiguous or largely contiguous boundaries. |
Anonymous
You cannot balance the FARMs population because the FARMs population tends to be located in specific areas due to property prices and the like. You cannot bus kids from that area to HS across the county to help balance the FARMs rate. Bussing didn't work in the past and isn't going to work now. You can draw boundaries starting with those pockets so that you decrease the amount of FARMs kids at those schools but the numbers there are always going to be higher, probably by a good amount, then the rates at McLean and Langley. Maybe we could make some progress if people kept pushing for a equivalent FARMs rate, that isn't happening. Start the redistricting process in the pockets of poverty and build districts that make sense but balance the FARMs population with the MC/UMC families in those areas. Ideally the initial draft is done based on numbers alone and are not revealed into the entire County has been redrawn. This would allow the boundaries to be developed across the County and people can see how things have been re-balanced every where, it feels less like it is directed at specific schools and everyone can see how the changes affect everyone in the County. But doing it school by school is going to cause huge problems since people will see that as more of a direct change to just them and less a County wide issue. |
Anonymous
The South Lakes boundary change in 2007 was a major change that moved kids from Oakton, Westfield, and Madison to South Lakes, which at the time had an enrollment of under 1400 (vs. its current enrollment of over 2500). Yes, Janie Strauss made sure that Herndon and Langley stayed out of the boundary study entirely, but many other neighborhoods were moved. Then, when the enrollment went up more than expected, they built an addition at South Lakes, even when it wasn't scheduled for a full renovation. Now, South Lakes gets a large number of pupil placements for IB, including over 150 kids from Herndon. Had FCPS not done the boundary change, the enrollment would not have increased so much as to require the addition, and had the boundary change not happened and the addition not been built, it wouldn't be getting all the pupil placements now. It was probably the last purposeful boundary change undertaken with the specific intent of increasing a school's enrollment and aligning its demographic profile more closely with neighboring schools. A lot of people didn't like it, and indeed the backlash may have intimidated School Board members from pursuing similar changes elsewhere, but had they done nothing South Lakes would now be closer to Lewis, both in enrollment and perceived standing, than it is now to other schools like Westfield and Fairfax. |
Anonymous
So the plan is to take the high performing schools near farms schools and redistrict to create a ton of mediocre schools all the while leaving schools like Langley untouched? |
Anonymous
It won't. This is not about anything but sour grapes over buying a bigger cheaper house in a lower performing school zone. |