LAST APS meeting on new high school and countywide rezoning (4/4, 7 pm Yorktown)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I cannot stress enough how important it is to send a quick email to the School Board at [e-mail]

Something along the lines of:

Dear APS School Board members:

I live in Arlington and I vote. I am concerned about overall school capacity countywide and flexibility to meet future demand. Please ensure any new high school seats are neighborhood seats, which offer the most flexibility in the future and do not use the 1300 seats for a choice program. Please also plan for the 1300 seats as the beginning of a fourth comprehensive high school.

I simply disagree. Choice seats are more flexible than neighborhood seats.
If they build a 'neighborhood' school with the 1300 seats it will not be equal to the existing schools, and that strikes me as extremely unfair. I don't mind choosing to go to a school that lacks a swimming pool and a football team b/c it has something else I want. However- to be forced by zoning to go to a school without those things, when my neighbor .5 mile a way gets a full extracurricular highschool is fundamentally unfair.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I attended the last meeting at Yorktown. Still smh at half the stuff I heard. One guy literally yelled out, "I don't care about any of this! The only thing that matters is that my daughter doesn't have to go to Washington-Lee with 4,000 kids!!" Another lady says, with a straight face, "You cannot open up Key to the entire county! We go to Science Focus, and we NEED that school to relieve our overcrowding! Have you seen what's happening at Taylor and SFS? We have to have 3 neighborhood schools!!"

"We have to have 3 neighborhood schools." Basically, I don't care about immersion. I don't really care about any of the children at Key. They only exist to relieve overcrowding at my kid's school. And the W-L guy? Basically told us if thousands of other kids in the county have to get stuffed into trailers and closets for his daughter to experience a pristine high school experience ...well, it is what it is.

Is anyone paying attention to the demographic trends? We live in Arlington. Outside of Discovery and maybe a couple others, every school is on track to be overcrowded. We all chose to live in a geographically small, fairly urban suburb that's continuing to grow. There won't be anywhere to ship all these "other" kids so "your" school is untouched by these facts.

Uh...you actually think a 4000 HS is a good idea?

And she probably didn't explain it well, but the team schools were formed to alleviate overcrowding 25+ years ago. If you remove one of the schools (Key) from the team, then the rest of the team needs to absorb those extra kids. Actually, not the rest of the team, just ASFS. And I'm sure the families who bought into the Key zone to go to Key will be unhappy if that changes. It affects all of the families in the community. IMO you are incorrectly reading between the words of what she said.

Sounds like we need more schools, not just more seats. Let's focus on that.

I never said a 4,000 seat high school was a good idea. But I understand completely what the woman said, and meant. "Don't mess with Key - even though my kids don't go there, I need it to keep my school from getting bigger." And you make a good point: the team schools were formed to alleviate overcrowding 25+ years ago. Arlington probably has 60,000+ more people living here now. So why are we beholden to concepts designed to fix problems from 2-3 decades ago?

[Anonymous]

The Kenmore HS can be equal to the other 2. There is enough room.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Kenmore HS can be equal to the other 2. There is enough room.

only if they move Kenmore middle school. This is not currently on the table.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Where are these extra students coming from?

Since we are able to count them I assume these are kids who already live in the county but are not yet school-aged.

At DS's ES we have seen the growth. The 4th and 5th grades each have 4 classes. 3rd grade has 5 classes. 2nd, 1st, and K all have 6 classes.
Babies as far as they eye can see in Arlington and they will all be in school before we know it.

Some are already in middle school. The 7thgrade at Swanson is in trailers and so is the 8th grade at Williamsburg,

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
The Kenmore HS can be equal to the other 2. There is enough room.

only if they move Kenmore middle school. This is not currently on the table.

Why not? It should be.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
The Kenmore HS can be equal to the other 2. There is enough room.

only if they move Kenmore middle school. This is not currently on the table.

Why not? It should be.

+1. Desperate times call for desperate measures. APS has totally f'ed up and needs to fix this now.

[Anonymous]

The option to move Kenmore MS is listed as a pro on their info sheets.

[Anonymous]

move to where?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:move to where?

It is likely we can get the Virginia Hospital Center urgent care land just down the street.

[Anonymous]

They can start the HS process at Kenmore now. Once APS gets more land (and they will), they can start the Kenmore MS plan. It's the ONLY idea that is forward thinking. It's so good, I'm scared it won't get any traction.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:move to where?

It is likely we can get the Virginia Hospital Center urgent care land just down the street.

Likely?? I would disagree with that assessment. It's a long shot at best. There are many many legitimate county needs competing for that land, and the community is lamentably (and in my view, stupidly) opposed to a school there. For whatever reason the civic association is more okay with bus parking than a school.
see the slides from the JFAC subcommittee on the VHC site for a discussion of the uses being considered- https://arlingtonva.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/03/JFAC_SubComm_CarlinSprings_MasterSlide_023117.pdf

I can't see the county giving APS this land when the current need is for 1300 HS seats, and that can be accommodated in three different APS owned sites.
While the option of relocating Kenmore is attractive from a ability to build a new 2500 seat HS- that is not what is currently needed.

[Anonymous]

Currently needed?

Are we close to 4000 seats short?


When's that supposed to hit?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They can start the HS process at Kenmore now. Once APS gets more land (and they will), they can start the Kenmore MS plan. It's the ONLY idea that is forward thinking. It's so good, I'm scared it won't get any traction.

will the orange shirts agree to be rezoned to this new HS? what about those zone for YT? it's good to you not neccessarily to the others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They can start the HS process at Kenmore now. Once APS gets more land (and they will), they can start the Kenmore MS plan. It's the ONLY idea that is forward thinking. It's so good, I'm scared it won't get any traction.

will the orange shirts agree to be rezoned to this new HS? what about those zone for YT? it's good to you not neccessarily to the others.

Omg. Shut up about the stupid orange shirts already. We need to lock in Kenmore or a lot more people than just orange shirts will be impacted.