Court: TJ's New Admission Policy Does Not Discriminate

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:It was sheer idiocy to encourage high achieving kids to attend AAP centers and then have the same 1.5% quota for Carson and a bottom-feeder like Poe or Whitman. Even if it wasn’t illegal it was sure as hell stupid.

Why? The kids at Carson, Rocky Run, and Longfellow had plenty of other spaces to compete for after the quotas were filled and ended up doing very well. They're still getting 30-50 kids into TJ every year while the Whitmans of the world are getting 5. Is that really so awful in exchange for every student in the catchment area feeling like they have a shot at TJ?

If your answer is yes, you're engaging in a behavior called "resource hoarding".

If you’re concerned about resource hoarding, you should be more concerned about TJ not serving its community. Kids handed an increasingly arbitrary golden ticket attend a state of the art school while kids living within walking distance to TJ attend run down Annandale or have to cross 395 and 495 to get to Edison. You have no problem with resource hoarding or elitism as long as the seats are doled out under the spoils system you prefer.

Terrible point you tried to make there. First of all, TJ wouldn't be an elite, state of the art school if it were NOT supported by Governor's School funds and private capital to do exactly what it is doing...

and second, the new system has greatly INCREASED the number of students from the area surrounding TJ who actually get to attend it instead of going to Annandale or Edison.

It's also the opposite of resource hoarding when the students benefiting from a system that you refer to as "increasingly arbitrary" don't have resources to begin with.

Just failed embarrassingly on all fronts here.

I don’t see any thoughtful response there. You are iso enamored of the geographical tokenism promoted under the new policy that you’re blind to the ongoing second-class experience afforded the vast majority of kids who live in the areas closest to TJ.

1) Edison and Annandale both got renovated maybe 8-12 years ago. Their physical plant is no more "second-class" than TJ's is, and calling their experience "second-class" is a needless insult to two hard-working administrations and staffs.

2) What makes the TJ experience different is the priorities of the students who attend and the unique facilities afforded by TJ's status as a Governor's School and the private investment that's been inspired by its existence in this form. That goes away if TJ becomes a neighborhood school - something its physical plant is unprepared to handle.

Annandale’s last renovation was cheap and more than a dozen years ago and the students in parts of North Springfield required to cross both 395 and 495 to get to Edison. The Edison renovation was more recent but nothing like TJ’s.

TJ absolutely could become a community school again. You just don’t want that to ever happen because you enjoy privileges for a small number of kids at the expense of others, so long as it’s on your terms. You certainly have no basis to imply others are “privilege hoarders.”

TJ’s building could not host a community school without extensive renovations and retrofitting. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the differences between TJ and a community school.

I understand your desire to claim TJ would be wasted on the unwashed masses. It’s just not persuasive. There are also ongoing costs associated with not using it to benefit those living closest to the school.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m telling you that the building is inadequate to host a community school. The cafeteria would have to be massively expanded, the research wing and science labs would have to be demolished and retrofitted to improve capacity or else exist as wasted space, and that’s just the beginning of it.

They retrofitted an office building in Baileys Crossroads to make it an ES so I’m sure they could make whatever adjustments were needed to a magnet HS to make it suitable for a neighborhood HS. It would also be fine for Jefferson to continue to have nice labs. You sound like you’d want them to torch the place if it weren’t being used exactly the way you want.

TJ has become an unnecessary distraction from FCPS meeting its key mission. It chews up far, far too much of the system’s existing bandwidth, and it’s not even educating the region’s most talented kids any longer. Meanwhile the kids living closest to the school get screwed. Giant fail.

Let's pretend for a moment that FCPS turned TJ into a community school for next year, with a capacity of ~2000 kids. And remember that at present, only about 65% of TJ students are from Fairfax County.

How are you going to fill that school? You have to develop boundaries for where the new TJ is going to draw from, and based on geography, it's a fair guess that about 1200 of those kids are probably going to come from Annandale, let's say 600 from Justice, and 200 from Edison.

Now Annandale is left with a shell of its former population, so they're going to have to draw from somewhere. The obvious solution is to redraw the boundaries such that they grab a good chunk of those back from Woodson, and probably a chunk from Falls Church as well. But wait - Justice has to close the gap too! So they're probably going to need some kids from Falls Church as well in order to fill their building.

Falls Church is currently under renovation to expand their capacity. But how will they fill it? Probably by snagging some kids from Marshall, is my best guess. Now Marshall will have to reach into Madison (even more than it already does) and McLean, and maybe even Oakton.

Can you even imagine what would happen to the folks in, say, eastern Mantua if they all of a sudden woke up one day and they were zoned to Annandale instead of Woodson? Their property values would plummet and you'd start to see folks moving all over the place. You're talking about people losing $50-100K of equity in their house overnight.

If there's no TJ for their kids to angle towards, the property values in the Carson area would plummet as well. Not as much value in sending them to Nysmith either.

You'd probably have a stemming of the tide in terms of immigrant families moving to this area in search of tech jobs, which would have an impact on that sector as well.

You're just not thinking this through when you talk about returning TJ to the community. TJ in its current form is entirely too important to the fabric of Northern Virginia.

Depriving the areas near TJ of a neighborhood school had a long-term negative effect on those areas and also on Annandale. This injury occurred over decades and wouldn’t be undone overnight, but the community would benefit over time from a neighborhood school.

And, yes, other boundaries would change, but in the process FCPS might address a whole range of other current problems in the system that apparently don’t bother you, but weigh heavily on the minds of others (such as the prospect of Centreville soon having 3000 kids).

In any event, there’s a glaring contradiction between asserting that TJ admissions had to be revamped because families at three middle schools were “privilege hoarders” but then claiming we could never return TJ to use as a community school because it might adversely impact the property values of someone in, say, Mantua.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was sheer idiocy to encourage high achieving kids to attend AAP centers and then have the same 1.5% quota for Carson and a bottom-feeder like Poe or Whitman. Even if it wasn’t illegal it was sure as hell stupid.

Why? The kids at Carson, Rocky Run, and Longfellow had plenty of other spaces to compete for after the quotas were filled and ended up doing very well. They're still getting 30-50 kids into TJ every year while the Whitmans of the world are getting 5. Is that really so awful in exchange for every student in the catchment area feeling like they have a shot at TJ?

If your answer is yes, you're engaging in a behavior called "resource hoarding".

If you’re concerned about resource hoarding, you should be more concerned about TJ not serving its community. Kids handed an increasingly arbitrary golden ticket attend a state of the art school while kids living within walking distance to TJ attend run down Annandale or have to cross 395 and 495 to get to Edison. You have no problem with resource hoarding or elitism as long as the seats are doled out under the spoils system you prefer.

Terrible point you tried to make there. First of all, TJ wouldn't be an elite, state of the art school if it were NOT supported by Governor's School funds and private capital to do exactly what it is doing...

and second, the new system has greatly INCREASED the number of students from the area surrounding TJ who actually get to attend it instead of going to Annandale or Edison.

It's also the opposite of resource hoarding when the students benefiting from a system that you refer to as "increasingly arbitrary" don't have resources to begin with.

Just failed embarrassingly on all fronts here.

I don’t see any thoughtful response there. You are iso enamored of the geographical tokenism promoted under the new policy that you’re blind to the ongoing second-class experience afforded the vast majority of kids who live in the areas closest to TJ.

1) Edison and Annandale both got renovated maybe 8-12 years ago. Their physical plant is no more "second-class" than TJ's is, and calling their experience "second-class" is a needless insult to two hard-working administrations and staffs.

2) What makes the TJ experience different is the priorities of the students who attend and the unique facilities afforded by TJ's status as a Governor's School and the private investment that's been inspired by its existence in this form. That goes away if TJ becomes a neighborhood school - something its physical plant is unprepared to handle.

Annandale’s last renovation was cheap and more than a dozen years ago and the students in parts of North Springfield required to cross both 395 and 495 to get to Edison. The Edison renovation was more recent but nothing like TJ’s.

TJ absolutely could become a community school again. You just don’t want that to ever happen because you enjoy privileges for a small number of kids at the expense of others, so long as it’s on your terms. You certainly have no basis to imply others are “privilege hoarders.”

TJ’s building could not host a community school without extensive renovations and retrofitting. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the differences between TJ and a community school.

I understand your desire to claim TJ would be wasted on the unwashed masses. It’s just not persuasive. There are also ongoing costs associated with not using it to benefit those living closest to the school.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m telling you that the building is inadequate to host a community school. The cafeteria would have to be massively expanded, the research wing and science labs would have to be demolished and retrofitted to improve capacity or else exist as wasted space, and that’s just the beginning of it.

They retrofitted an office building in Baileys Crossroads to make it an ES so I’m sure they could make whatever adjustments were needed to a magnet HS to make it suitable for a neighborhood HS. It would also be fine for Jefferson to continue to have nice labs. You sound like you’d want them to torch the place if it weren’t being used exactly the way you want.

TJ has become an unnecessary distraction from FCPS meeting its key mission. It chews up far, far too much of the system’s existing bandwidth, and it’s not even educating the region’s most talented kids any longer. Meanwhile the kids living closest to the school get screwed. Giant fail.

Let's pretend for a moment that FCPS turned TJ into a community school for next year, with a capacity of ~2000 kids. And remember that at present, only about 65% of TJ students are from Fairfax County.

How are you going to fill that school? You have to develop boundaries for where the new TJ is going to draw from, and based on geography, it's a fair guess that about 1200 of those kids are probably going to come from Annandale, let's say 600 from Justice, and 200 from Edison.

Now Annandale is left with a shell of its former population, so they're going to have to draw from somewhere. The obvious solution is to redraw the boundaries such that they grab a good chunk of those back from Woodson, and probably a chunk from Falls Church as well. But wait - Justice has to close the gap too! So they're probably going to need some kids from Falls Church as well in order to fill their building.

Falls Church is currently under renovation to expand their capacity. But how will they fill it? Probably by snagging some kids from Marshall, is my best guess. Now Marshall will have to reach into Madison (even more than it already does) and McLean, and maybe even Oakton.

Can you even imagine what would happen to the folks in, say, eastern Mantua if they all of a sudden woke up one day and they were zoned to Annandale instead of Woodson? Their property values would plummet and you'd start to see folks moving all over the place. You're talking about people losing $50-100K of equity in their house overnight.

If there's no TJ for their kids to angle towards, the property values in the Carson area would plummet as well. Not as much value in sending them to Nysmith either.

You'd probably have a stemming of the tide in terms of immigrant families moving to this area in search of tech jobs, which would have an impact on that sector as well.

You're just not thinking this through when you talk about returning TJ to the community. TJ in its current form is entirely too important to the fabric of Northern Virginia.

Honestly, the more I think through this, the more it would almost just make sense to close either Falls Church or Annandale as a high school altogether if you did this. You could make the same argument for TJ, I guess, but the building is nicer so it'd make more sense for the community to just close Annandale given the amount of work they've already put into Falls Church.

If that’s an honest assessment, it stems from profound ignorance of the need for another neighborhood school in FCPS and the opportunities available if Jefferson were returned to such use.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was sheer idiocy to encourage high achieving kids to attend AAP centers and then have the same 1.5% quota for Carson and a bottom-feeder like Poe or Whitman. Even if it wasn’t illegal it was sure as hell stupid.

Why? The kids at Carson, Rocky Run, and Longfellow had plenty of other spaces to compete for after the quotas were filled and ended up doing very well. They're still getting 30-50 kids into TJ every year while the Whitmans of the world are getting 5. Is that really so awful in exchange for every student in the catchment area feeling like they have a shot at TJ?

If your answer is yes, you're engaging in a behavior called "resource hoarding".

If you’re concerned about resource hoarding, you should be more concerned about TJ not serving its community. Kids handed an increasingly arbitrary golden ticket attend a state of the art school while kids living within walking distance to TJ attend run down Annandale or have to cross 395 and 495 to get to Edison. You have no problem with resource hoarding or elitism as long as the seats are doled out under the spoils system you prefer.

Terrible point you tried to make there. First of all, TJ wouldn't be an elite, state of the art school if it were NOT supported by Governor's School funds and private capital to do exactly what it is doing...

and second, the new system has greatly INCREASED the number of students from the area surrounding TJ who actually get to attend it instead of going to Annandale or Edison.

It's also the opposite of resource hoarding when the students benefiting from a system that you refer to as "increasingly arbitrary" don't have resources to begin with.

Just failed embarrassingly on all fronts here.

I don’t see any thoughtful response there. You are iso enamored of the geographical tokenism promoted under the new policy that you’re blind to the ongoing second-class experience afforded the vast majority of kids who live in the areas closest to TJ.

1) Edison and Annandale both got renovated maybe 8-12 years ago. Their physical plant is no more "second-class" than TJ's is, and calling their experience "second-class" is a needless insult to two hard-working administrations and staffs.

2) What makes the TJ experience different is the priorities of the students who attend and the unique facilities afforded by TJ's status as a Governor's School and the private investment that's been inspired by its existence in this form. That goes away if TJ becomes a neighborhood school - something its physical plant is unprepared to handle.

Annandale’s last renovation was cheap and more than a dozen years ago and the students in parts of North Springfield required to cross both 395 and 495 to get to Edison. The Edison renovation was more recent but nothing like TJ’s.

TJ absolutely could become a community school again. You just don’t want that to ever happen because you enjoy privileges for a small number of kids at the expense of others, so long as it’s on your terms. You certainly have no basis to imply others are “privilege hoarders.”

TJ’s building could not host a community school without extensive renovations and retrofitting. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the differences between TJ and a community school.

I understand your desire to claim TJ would be wasted on the unwashed masses. It’s just not persuasive. There are also ongoing costs associated with not using it to benefit those living closest to the school.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m telling you that the building is inadequate to host a community school. The cafeteria would have to be massively expanded, the research wing and science labs would have to be demolished and retrofitted to improve capacity or else exist as wasted space, and that’s just the beginning of it.

They retrofitted an office building in Baileys Crossroads to make it an ES so I’m sure they could make whatever adjustments were needed to a magnet HS to make it suitable for a neighborhood HS. It would also be fine for Jefferson to continue to have nice labs. You sound like you’d want them to torch the place if it weren’t being used exactly the way you want.

TJ has become an unnecessary distraction from FCPS meeting its key mission. It chews up far, far too much of the system’s existing bandwidth, and it’s not even educating the region’s most talented kids any longer. Meanwhile the kids living closest to the school get screwed. Giant fail.

Yeah, they retrofitted that building to great expense because they had major overcrowding problems. That is simply not the case here. Turning Jefferson into a neighborhood school, in addition to the expense of changing the building’s physical plant, would require a redrawing of boundaries all over Fairfax County and would throw entire pyramids into turmoil.

The huge amounts of private investment in the school would dry up immediately if TJ were returned to the neighborhoods - so you’d have large, expansive research labs with nothing in them. And what of the Design and Tech classrooms? TJ has the second smallest footprint in FCPS after Justice, so it’s not like there’s a ton of room to make changes.

Finally, it has been a VERY long time, if at all, since FCPS was selecting the most talented students for TJ year over year. What they have done is selected the most advanced, and in many cases the children of the most motivated, well-connected, and well-resourced parents in the area. And many of those students are still getting into the school, for better or for worse. They are now selecting a different crop of talented students, a significant minority of whom are less advanced in math than TJ kids have been historically. It doesn’t mean those other kids are necessarily more talented.

You accuse me of wanting to torch the place if it’s not filled the way I want…. but that’s exactly what you’re advocating for, whether you realize it or not.

You’re nuts. Super-sized and/or overcrowded high schools are common within FCPS. Just because TJ has a capped enrollment doesn’t mean the restoration of a neighborhood school that could quickly serve more county students than a regional school that’s admitting kids from other jurisdictions wouldn’t be a great opportunity to address some of these longstanding problems. And precisely because boundaries would have to change there would be an opportunity to redress some of the biggest snafus of past decades, such as the gradual, careless concentration of poverty at Annandale.

Moreover, if you really want to argue that FCPS has long failed at admitting the most talented students to TJ (and they certainly aren’t doing it now), that only underscores that the county’s ambitions have outstripped its competence. What we now unfortunately have is a politically driven spoils system, intended to buy off some School Board members who otherwise would be taking a harder look at TJ’s continued utility by doling out a limited number seats on an almost random basis to kids in their districts who in many cases had demonstrated no particular aptitude for a specialized curriculum.

Of course, we pay a heavy price for this between the direct costs spent over the years on fending off investigations and litigation and the indirect costs that result from the disproportionate amount of attention that one school receives relative to others in a system with roughly 200 schools.

We would be well served at this point to wind down the magnet program.

So, essentially, again - because you disagree with who is receiving the benefit, you want to burn it down. Got it.

That's a lot of words and co-opting of issues that I'm betting you don't really care about (what have you done to address them that's realistic?) for what's essentially sour grapes. Cool.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was sheer idiocy to encourage high achieving kids to attend AAP centers and then have the same 1.5% quota for Carson and a bottom-feeder like Poe or Whitman. Even if it wasn’t illegal it was sure as hell stupid.

Why? The kids at Carson, Rocky Run, and Longfellow had plenty of other spaces to compete for after the quotas were filled and ended up doing very well. They're still getting 30-50 kids into TJ every year while the Whitmans of the world are getting 5. Is that really so awful in exchange for every student in the catchment area feeling like they have a shot at TJ?

If your answer is yes, you're engaging in a behavior called "resource hoarding".

If you’re concerned about resource hoarding, you should be more concerned about TJ not serving its community. Kids handed an increasingly arbitrary golden ticket attend a state of the art school while kids living within walking distance to TJ attend run down Annandale or have to cross 395 and 495 to get to Edison. You have no problem with resource hoarding or elitism as long as the seats are doled out under the spoils system you prefer.

Terrible point you tried to make there. First of all, TJ wouldn't be an elite, state of the art school if it were NOT supported by Governor's School funds and private capital to do exactly what it is doing...

and second, the new system has greatly INCREASED the number of students from the area surrounding TJ who actually get to attend it instead of going to Annandale or Edison.

It's also the opposite of resource hoarding when the students benefiting from a system that you refer to as "increasingly arbitrary" don't have resources to begin with.

Just failed embarrassingly on all fronts here.

I don’t see any thoughtful response there. You are iso enamored of the geographical tokenism promoted under the new policy that you’re blind to the ongoing second-class experience afforded the vast majority of kids who live in the areas closest to TJ.

1) Edison and Annandale both got renovated maybe 8-12 years ago. Their physical plant is no more "second-class" than TJ's is, and calling their experience "second-class" is a needless insult to two hard-working administrations and staffs.

2) What makes the TJ experience different is the priorities of the students who attend and the unique facilities afforded by TJ's status as a Governor's School and the private investment that's been inspired by its existence in this form. That goes away if TJ becomes a neighborhood school - something its physical plant is unprepared to handle.

Annandale’s last renovation was cheap and more than a dozen years ago and the students in parts of North Springfield required to cross both 395 and 495 to get to Edison. The Edison renovation was more recent but nothing like TJ’s.

TJ absolutely could become a community school again. You just don’t want that to ever happen because you enjoy privileges for a small number of kids at the expense of others, so long as it’s on your terms. You certainly have no basis to imply others are “privilege hoarders.”

TJ’s building could not host a community school without extensive renovations and retrofitting. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the differences between TJ and a community school.

I understand your desire to claim TJ would be wasted on the unwashed masses. It’s just not persuasive. There are also ongoing costs associated with not using it to benefit those living closest to the school.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m telling you that the building is inadequate to host a community school. The cafeteria would have to be massively expanded, the research wing and science labs would have to be demolished and retrofitted to improve capacity or else exist as wasted space, and that’s just the beginning of it.

They retrofitted an office building in Baileys Crossroads to make it an ES so I’m sure they could make whatever adjustments were needed to a magnet HS to make it suitable for a neighborhood HS. It would also be fine for Jefferson to continue to have nice labs. You sound like you’d want them to torch the place if it weren’t being used exactly the way you want.

TJ has become an unnecessary distraction from FCPS meeting its key mission. It chews up far, far too much of the system’s existing bandwidth, and it’s not even educating the region’s most talented kids any longer. Meanwhile the kids living closest to the school get screwed. Giant fail.

Let's pretend for a moment that FCPS turned TJ into a community school for next year, with a capacity of ~2000 kids. And remember that at present, only about 65% of TJ students are from Fairfax County.

How are you going to fill that school? You have to develop boundaries for where the new TJ is going to draw from, and based on geography, it's a fair guess that about 1200 of those kids are probably going to come from Annandale, let's say 600 from Justice, and 200 from Edison.

Now Annandale is left with a shell of its former population, so they're going to have to draw from somewhere. The obvious solution is to redraw the boundaries such that they grab a good chunk of those back from Woodson, and probably a chunk from Falls Church as well. But wait - Justice has to close the gap too! So they're probably going to need some kids from Falls Church as well in order to fill their building.

Falls Church is currently under renovation to expand their capacity. But how will they fill it? Probably by snagging some kids from Marshall, is my best guess. Now Marshall will have to reach into Madison (even more than it already does) and McLean, and maybe even Oakton.

Can you even imagine what would happen to the folks in, say, eastern Mantua if they all of a sudden woke up one day and they were zoned to Annandale instead of Woodson? Their property values would plummet and you'd start to see folks moving all over the place. You're talking about people losing $50-100K of equity in their house overnight.

If there's no TJ for their kids to angle towards, the property values in the Carson area would plummet as well. Not as much value in sending them to Nysmith either.

You'd probably have a stemming of the tide in terms of immigrant families moving to this area in search of tech jobs, which would have an impact on that sector as well.

You're just not thinking this through when you talk about returning TJ to the community. TJ in its current form is entirely too important to the fabric of Northern Virginia.

Honestly, the more I think through this, the more it would almost just make sense to close either Falls Church or Annandale as a high school altogether if you did this. You could make the same argument for TJ, I guess, but the building is nicer so it'd make more sense for the community to just close Annandale given the amount of work they've already put into Falls Church.

If that’s an honest assessment, it stems from profound ignorance of the need for another neighborhood school in FCPS and the opportunities available if Jefferson were returned to such use.

You would create far more problems than you would solve, at an enormous cost to the taxpayer. Full stop. That's why this is not an idea that merits serious discussion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was sheer idiocy to encourage high achieving kids to attend AAP centers and then have the same 1.5% quota for Carson and a bottom-feeder like Poe or Whitman. Even if it wasn’t illegal it was sure as hell stupid.

Why? The kids at Carson, Rocky Run, and Longfellow had plenty of other spaces to compete for after the quotas were filled and ended up doing very well. They're still getting 30-50 kids into TJ every year while the Whitmans of the world are getting 5. Is that really so awful in exchange for every student in the catchment area feeling like they have a shot at TJ?

If your answer is yes, you're engaging in a behavior called "resource hoarding".

If you’re concerned about resource hoarding, you should be more concerned about TJ not serving its community. Kids handed an increasingly arbitrary golden ticket attend a state of the art school while kids living within walking distance to TJ attend run down Annandale or have to cross 395 and 495 to get to Edison. You have no problem with resource hoarding or elitism as long as the seats are doled out under the spoils system you prefer.

Terrible point you tried to make there. First of all, TJ wouldn't be an elite, state of the art school if it were NOT supported by Governor's School funds and private capital to do exactly what it is doing...

and second, the new system has greatly INCREASED the number of students from the area surrounding TJ who actually get to attend it instead of going to Annandale or Edison.

It's also the opposite of resource hoarding when the students benefiting from a system that you refer to as "increasingly arbitrary" don't have resources to begin with.

Just failed embarrassingly on all fronts here.

I don’t see any thoughtful response there. You are iso enamored of the geographical tokenism promoted under the new policy that you’re blind to the ongoing second-class experience afforded the vast majority of kids who live in the areas closest to TJ.

1) Edison and Annandale both got renovated maybe 8-12 years ago. Their physical plant is no more "second-class" than TJ's is, and calling their experience "second-class" is a needless insult to two hard-working administrations and staffs.

2) What makes the TJ experience different is the priorities of the students who attend and the unique facilities afforded by TJ's status as a Governor's School and the private investment that's been inspired by its existence in this form. That goes away if TJ becomes a neighborhood school - something its physical plant is unprepared to handle.

Annandale’s last renovation was cheap and more than a dozen years ago and the students in parts of North Springfield required to cross both 395 and 495 to get to Edison. The Edison renovation was more recent but nothing like TJ’s.

TJ absolutely could become a community school again. You just don’t want that to ever happen because you enjoy privileges for a small number of kids at the expense of others, so long as it’s on your terms. You certainly have no basis to imply others are “privilege hoarders.”

TJ’s building could not host a community school without extensive renovations and retrofitting. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the differences between TJ and a community school.

I understand your desire to claim TJ would be wasted on the unwashed masses. It’s just not persuasive. There are also ongoing costs associated with not using it to benefit those living closest to the school.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m telling you that the building is inadequate to host a community school. The cafeteria would have to be massively expanded, the research wing and science labs would have to be demolished and retrofitted to improve capacity or else exist as wasted space, and that’s just the beginning of it.

They retrofitted an office building in Baileys Crossroads to make it an ES so I’m sure they could make whatever adjustments were needed to a magnet HS to make it suitable for a neighborhood HS. It would also be fine for Jefferson to continue to have nice labs. You sound like you’d want them to torch the place if it weren’t being used exactly the way you want.

TJ has become an unnecessary distraction from FCPS meeting its key mission. It chews up far, far too much of the system’s existing bandwidth, and it’s not even educating the region’s most talented kids any longer. Meanwhile the kids living closest to the school get screwed. Giant fail.

Yeah, they retrofitted that building to great expense because they had major overcrowding problems. That is simply not the case here. Turning Jefferson into a neighborhood school, in addition to the expense of changing the building’s physical plant, would require a redrawing of boundaries all over Fairfax County and would throw entire pyramids into turmoil.

The huge amounts of private investment in the school would dry up immediately if TJ were returned to the neighborhoods - so you’d have large, expansive research labs with nothing in them. And what of the Design and Tech classrooms? TJ has the second smallest footprint in FCPS after Justice, so it’s not like there’s a ton of room to make changes.

Finally, it has been a VERY long time, if at all, since FCPS was selecting the most talented students for TJ year over year. What they have done is selected the most advanced, and in many cases the children of the most motivated, well-connected, and well-resourced parents in the area. And many of those students are still getting into the school, for better or for worse. They are now selecting a different crop of talented students, a significant minority of whom are less advanced in math than TJ kids have been historically. It doesn’t mean those other kids are necessarily more talented.

You accuse me of wanting to torch the place if it’s not filled the way I want…. but that’s exactly what you’re advocating for, whether you realize it or not.

You’re nuts. Super-sized and/or overcrowded high schools are common within FCPS. Just because TJ has a capped enrollment doesn’t mean the restoration of a neighborhood school that could quickly serve more county students than a regional school that’s admitting kids from other jurisdictions wouldn’t be a great opportunity to address some of these longstanding problems. And precisely because boundaries would have to change there would be an opportunity to redress some of the biggest snafus of past decades, such as the gradual, careless concentration of poverty at Annandale.

Moreover, if you really want to argue that FCPS has long failed at admitting the most talented students to TJ (and they certainly aren’t doing it now), that only underscores that the county’s ambitions have outstripped its competence. What we now unfortunately have is a politically driven spoils system, intended to buy off some School Board members who otherwise would be taking a harder look at TJ’s continued utility by doling out a limited number seats on an almost random basis to kids in their districts who in many cases had demonstrated no particular aptitude for a specialized curriculum.

Of course, we pay a heavy price for this between the direct costs spent over the years on fending off investigations and litigation and the indirect costs that result from the disproportionate amount of attention that one school receives relative to others in a system with roughly 200 schools.

We would be well served at this point to wind down the magnet program.

So, essentially, again - because you disagree with who is receiving the benefit, you want to burn it down. Got it.

That's a lot of words and co-opting of issues that I'm betting you don't really care about (what have you done to address them that's realistic?) for what's essentially sour grapes. Cool.

There is nothing destructive about concluding a building may have a higher and better use for county students than its current use, so shelve your misleading “burning it down” analogies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:It was sheer idiocy to encourage high achieving kids to attend AAP centers and then have the same 1.5% quota for Carson and a bottom-feeder like Poe or Whitman. Even if it wasn’t illegal it was sure as hell stupid.

Why? The kids at Carson, Rocky Run, and Longfellow had plenty of other spaces to compete for after the quotas were filled and ended up doing very well. They're still getting 30-50 kids into TJ every year while the Whitmans of the world are getting 5. Is that really so awful in exchange for every student in the catchment area feeling like they have a shot at TJ?

If your answer is yes, you're engaging in a behavior called "resource hoarding".

If you’re concerned about resource hoarding, you should be more concerned about TJ not serving its community. Kids handed an increasingly arbitrary golden ticket attend a state of the art school while kids living within walking distance to TJ attend run down Annandale or have to cross 395 and 495 to get to Edison. You have no problem with resource hoarding or elitism as long as the seats are doled out under the spoils system you prefer.

Terrible point you tried to make there. First of all, TJ wouldn't be an elite, state of the art school if it were NOT supported by Governor's School funds and private capital to do exactly what it is doing...

and second, the new system has greatly INCREASED the number of students from the area surrounding TJ who actually get to attend it instead of going to Annandale or Edison.

It's also the opposite of resource hoarding when the students benefiting from a system that you refer to as "increasingly arbitrary" don't have resources to begin with.

Just failed embarrassingly on all fronts here.

I don’t see any thoughtful response there. You are iso enamored of the geographical tokenism promoted under the new policy that you’re blind to the ongoing second-class experience afforded the vast majority of kids who live in the areas closest to TJ.

1) Edison and Annandale both got renovated maybe 8-12 years ago. Their physical plant is no more "second-class" than TJ's is, and calling their experience "second-class" is a needless insult to two hard-working administrations and staffs.

2) What makes the TJ experience different is the priorities of the students who attend and the unique facilities afforded by TJ's status as a Governor's School and the private investment that's been inspired by its existence in this form. That goes away if TJ becomes a neighborhood school - something its physical plant is unprepared to handle.

Annandale’s last renovation was cheap and more than a dozen years ago and the students in parts of North Springfield required to cross both 395 and 495 to get to Edison. The Edison renovation was more recent but nothing like TJ’s.

TJ absolutely could become a community school again. You just don’t want that to ever happen because you enjoy privileges for a small number of kids at the expense of others, so long as it’s on your terms. You certainly have no basis to imply others are “privilege hoarders.”

TJ’s building could not host a community school without extensive renovations and retrofitting. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the differences between TJ and a community school.

I understand your desire to claim TJ would be wasted on the unwashed masses. It’s just not persuasive. There are also ongoing costs associated with not using it to benefit those living closest to the school.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m telling you that the building is inadequate to host a community school. The cafeteria would have to be massively expanded, the research wing and science labs would have to be demolished and retrofitted to improve capacity or else exist as wasted space, and that’s just the beginning of it.

They retrofitted an office building in Baileys Crossroads to make it an ES so I’m sure they could make whatever adjustments were needed to a magnet HS to make it suitable for a neighborhood HS. It would also be fine for Jefferson to continue to have nice labs. You sound like you’d want them to torch the place if it weren’t being used exactly the way you want.

TJ has become an unnecessary distraction from FCPS meeting its key mission. It chews up far, far too much of the system’s existing bandwidth, and it’s not even educating the region’s most talented kids any longer. Meanwhile the kids living closest to the school get screwed. Giant fail.

Let's pretend for a moment that FCPS turned TJ into a community school for next year, with a capacity of ~2000 kids. And remember that at present, only about 65% of TJ students are from Fairfax County.

How are you going to fill that school? You have to develop boundaries for where the new TJ is going to draw from, and based on geography, it's a fair guess that about 1200 of those kids are probably going to come from Annandale, let's say 600 from Justice, and 200 from Edison.

Now Annandale is left with a shell of its former population, so they're going to have to draw from somewhere. The obvious solution is to redraw the boundaries such that they grab a good chunk of those back from Woodson, and probably a chunk from Falls Church as well. But wait - Justice has to close the gap too! So they're probably going to need some kids from Falls Church as well in order to fill their building.

Falls Church is currently under renovation to expand their capacity. But how will they fill it? Probably by snagging some kids from Marshall, is my best guess. Now Marshall will have to reach into Madison (even more than it already does) and McLean, and maybe even Oakton.

Can you even imagine what would happen to the folks in, say, eastern Mantua if they all of a sudden woke up one day and they were zoned to Annandale instead of Woodson? Their property values would plummet and you'd start to see folks moving all over the place. You're talking about people losing $50-100K of equity in their house overnight.

If there's no TJ for their kids to angle towards, the property values in the Carson area would plummet as well. Not as much value in sending them to Nysmith either.

You'd probably have a stemming of the tide in terms of immigrant families moving to this area in search of tech jobs, which would have an impact on that sector as well.

You're just not thinking this through when you talk about returning TJ to the community. TJ in its current form is entirely too important to the fabric of Northern Virginia.

Honestly, the more I think through this, the more it would almost just make sense to close either Falls Church or Annandale as a high school altogether if you did this. You could make the same argument for TJ, I guess, but the building is nicer so it'd make more sense for the community to just close Annandale given the amount of work they've already put into Falls Church.

If that’s an honest assessment, it stems from profound ignorance of the need for another neighborhood school in FCPS and the opportunities available if Jefferson were returned to such use.

You would create far more problems than you would solve, at an enormous cost to the taxpayer. Full stop. That's why this is not an idea that merits serious discussion.

It was being seriously discussed in many Democratic/SB circles before the admissions changes in 2020. Those in charge weren’t exactly profiles in courage, and they realized some of those agitating for change could be easily bought off, but it doesn’t mean that TJ isn’t continuing to be a time and resource suck or that discussions over its future won’t continue. It’s actually quite amusing that those pleased with the latest changes just want everyone else to shit up and go away, when the near-entire history of the magnet school has been contentious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was sheer idiocy to encourage high achieving kids to attend AAP centers and then have the same 1.5% quota for Carson and a bottom-feeder like Poe or Whitman. Even if it wasn’t illegal it was sure as hell stupid.

Why? The kids at Carson, Rocky Run, and Longfellow had plenty of other spaces to compete for after the quotas were filled and ended up doing very well. They're still getting 30-50 kids into TJ every year while the Whitmans of the world are getting 5. Is that really so awful in exchange for every student in the catchment area feeling like they have a shot at TJ?

If your answer is yes, you're engaging in a behavior called "resource hoarding".

If you’re concerned about resource hoarding, you should be more concerned about TJ not serving its community. Kids handed an increasingly arbitrary golden ticket attend a state of the art school while kids living within walking distance to TJ attend run down Annandale or have to cross 395 and 495 to get to Edison. You have no problem with resource hoarding or elitism as long as the seats are doled out under the spoils system you prefer.

Terrible point you tried to make there. First of all, TJ wouldn't be an elite, state of the art school if it were NOT supported by Governor's School funds and private capital to do exactly what it is doing...

and second, the new system has greatly INCREASED the number of students from the area surrounding TJ who actually get to attend it instead of going to Annandale or Edison.

It's also the opposite of resource hoarding when the students benefiting from a system that you refer to as "increasingly arbitrary" don't have resources to begin with.

Just failed embarrassingly on all fronts here.

I don’t see any thoughtful response there. You are iso enamored of the geographical tokenism promoted under the new policy that you’re blind to the ongoing second-class experience afforded the vast majority of kids who live in the areas closest to TJ.

1) Edison and Annandale both got renovated maybe 8-12 years ago. Their physical plant is no more "second-class" than TJ's is, and calling their experience "second-class" is a needless insult to two hard-working administrations and staffs.

2) What makes the TJ experience different is the priorities of the students who attend and the unique facilities afforded by TJ's status as a Governor's School and the private investment that's been inspired by its existence in this form. That goes away if TJ becomes a neighborhood school - something its physical plant is unprepared to handle.

Annandale’s last renovation was cheap and more than a dozen years ago and the students in parts of North Springfield required to cross both 395 and 495 to get to Edison. The Edison renovation was more recent but nothing like TJ’s.

TJ absolutely could become a community school again. You just don’t want that to ever happen because you enjoy privileges for a small number of kids at the expense of others, so long as it’s on your terms. You certainly have no basis to imply others are “privilege hoarders.”

TJ’s building could not host a community school without extensive renovations and retrofitting. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the differences between TJ and a community school.

I understand your desire to claim TJ would be wasted on the unwashed masses. It’s just not persuasive. There are also ongoing costs associated with not using it to benefit those living closest to the school.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m telling you that the building is inadequate to host a community school. The cafeteria would have to be massively expanded, the research wing and science labs would have to be demolished and retrofitted to improve capacity or else exist as wasted space, and that’s just the beginning of it.

They retrofitted an office building in Baileys Crossroads to make it an ES so I’m sure they could make whatever adjustments were needed to a magnet HS to make it suitable for a neighborhood HS. It would also be fine for Jefferson to continue to have nice labs. You sound like you’d want them to torch the place if it weren’t being used exactly the way you want.

TJ has become an unnecessary distraction from FCPS meeting its key mission. It chews up far, far too much of the system’s existing bandwidth, and it’s not even educating the region’s most talented kids any longer. Meanwhile the kids living closest to the school get screwed. Giant fail.

Yeah, they retrofitted that building to great expense because they had major overcrowding problems. That is simply not the case here. Turning Jefferson into a neighborhood school, in addition to the expense of changing the building’s physical plant, would require a redrawing of boundaries all over Fairfax County and would throw entire pyramids into turmoil.

The huge amounts of private investment in the school would dry up immediately if TJ were returned to the neighborhoods - so you’d have large, expansive research labs with nothing in them. And what of the Design and Tech classrooms? TJ has the second smallest footprint in FCPS after Justice, so it’s not like there’s a ton of room to make changes.

Finally, it has been a VERY long time, if at all, since FCPS was selecting the most talented students for TJ year over year. What they have done is selected the most advanced, and in many cases the children of the most motivated, well-connected, and well-resourced parents in the area. And many of those students are still getting into the school, for better or for worse. They are now selecting a different crop of talented students, a significant minority of whom are less advanced in math than TJ kids have been historically. It doesn’t mean those other kids are necessarily more talented.

You accuse me of wanting to torch the place if it’s not filled the way I want…. but that’s exactly what you’re advocating for, whether you realize it or not.

You’re nuts. Super-sized and/or overcrowded high schools are common within FCPS. Just because TJ has a capped enrollment doesn’t mean the restoration of a neighborhood school that could quickly serve more county students than a regional school that’s admitting kids from other jurisdictions wouldn’t be a great opportunity to address some of these longstanding problems. And precisely because boundaries would have to change there would be an opportunity to redress some of the biggest snafus of past decades, such as the gradual, careless concentration of poverty at Annandale.

Moreover, if you really want to argue that FCPS has long failed at admitting the most talented students to TJ (and they certainly aren’t doing it now), that only underscores that the county’s ambitions have outstripped its competence. What we now unfortunately have is a politically driven spoils system, intended to buy off some School Board members who otherwise would be taking a harder look at TJ’s continued utility by doling out a limited number seats on an almost random basis to kids in their districts who in many cases had demonstrated no particular aptitude for a specialized curriculum.

Of course, we pay a heavy price for this between the direct costs spent over the years on fending off investigations and litigation and the indirect costs that result from the disproportionate amount of attention that one school receives relative to others in a system with roughly 200 schools.

We would be well served at this point to wind down the magnet program.

So, essentially, again - because you disagree with who is receiving the benefit, you want to burn it down. Got it.

That's a lot of words and co-opting of issues that I'm betting you don't really care about (what have you done to address them that's realistic?) for what's essentially sour grapes. Cool.

There is nothing destructive about concluding a building may have a higher and better use for county students than its current use, so shelve your misleading “burning it down” analogies.

First off, that analogy was yours (the word used was "torch").

Second, you still haven't made an argument that justifies the cascading effect that shutting down the magnet program would have on the entirety of Northern Virginia. You've come nowhere close.

[Anonymous]

This is what you get for voting for these left wing extremists to the school board. Serves them right.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is what you get for voting for these left wing extremists to the school board. Serves them right.

The board won the case.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is what you get for voting for these left wing extremists to the school board. Serves them right.

The board won the case.

Of course FCPS was so quick to send a gloating email.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It was sheer idiocy to encourage high achieving kids to attend AAP centers and then have the same 1.5% quota for Carson and a bottom-feeder like Poe or Whitman. Even if it wasn’t illegal it was sure as hell stupid.

Why? The kids at Carson, Rocky Run, and Longfellow had plenty of other spaces to compete for after the quotas were filled and ended up doing very well. They're still getting 30-50 kids into TJ every year while the Whitmans of the world are getting 5. Is that really so awful in exchange for every student in the catchment area feeling like they have a shot at TJ?

If your answer is yes, you're engaging in a behavior called "resource hoarding".

If you’re concerned about resource hoarding, you should be more concerned about TJ not serving its community. Kids handed an increasingly arbitrary golden ticket attend a state of the art school while kids living within walking distance to TJ attend run down Annandale or have to cross 395 and 495 to get to Edison. You have no problem with resource hoarding or elitism as long as the seats are doled out under the spoils system you prefer.

Terrible point you tried to make there. First of all, TJ wouldn't be an elite, state of the art school if it were NOT supported by Governor's School funds and private capital to do exactly what it is doing...

and second, the new system has greatly INCREASED the number of students from the area surrounding TJ who actually get to attend it instead of going to Annandale or Edison.

It's also the opposite of resource hoarding when the students benefiting from a system that you refer to as "increasingly arbitrary" don't have resources to begin with.

Just failed embarrassingly on all fronts here.

I don’t see any thoughtful response there. You are iso enamored of the geographical tokenism promoted under the new policy that you’re blind to the ongoing second-class experience afforded the vast majority of kids who live in the areas closest to TJ.

1) Edison and Annandale both got renovated maybe 8-12 years ago. Their physical plant is no more "second-class" than TJ's is, and calling their experience "second-class" is a needless insult to two hard-working administrations and staffs.

2) What makes the TJ experience different is the priorities of the students who attend and the unique facilities afforded by TJ's status as a Governor's School and the private investment that's been inspired by its existence in this form. That goes away if TJ becomes a neighborhood school - something its physical plant is unprepared to handle.

Annandale’s last renovation was cheap and more than a dozen years ago and the students in parts of North Springfield required to cross both 395 and 495 to get to Edison. The Edison renovation was more recent but nothing like TJ’s.

TJ absolutely could become a community school again. You just don’t want that to ever happen because you enjoy privileges for a small number of kids at the expense of others, so long as it’s on your terms. You certainly have no basis to imply others are “privilege hoarders.”

TJ’s building could not host a community school without extensive renovations and retrofitting. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the differences between TJ and a community school.

I understand your desire to claim TJ would be wasted on the unwashed masses. It’s just not persuasive. There are also ongoing costs associated with not using it to benefit those living closest to the school.

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m telling you that the building is inadequate to host a community school. The cafeteria would have to be massively expanded, the research wing and science labs would have to be demolished and retrofitted to improve capacity or else exist as wasted space, and that’s just the beginning of it.

They retrofitted an office building in Baileys Crossroads to make it an ES so I’m sure they could make whatever adjustments were needed to a magnet HS to make it suitable for a neighborhood HS. It would also be fine for Jefferson to continue to have nice labs. You sound like you’d want them to torch the place if it weren’t being used exactly the way you want.

TJ has become an unnecessary distraction from FCPS meeting its key mission. It chews up far, far too much of the system’s existing bandwidth, and it’s not even educating the region’s most talented kids any longer. Meanwhile the kids living closest to the school get screwed. Giant fail.

Let's pretend for a moment that FCPS turned TJ into a community school for next year, with a capacity of ~2000 kids. And remember that at present, only about 65% of TJ students are from Fairfax County.

How are you going to fill that school? You have to develop boundaries for where the new TJ is going to draw from, and based on geography, it's a fair guess that about 1200 of those kids are probably going to come from Annandale, let's say 600 from Justice, and 200 from Edison.

Now Annandale is left with a shell of its former population, so they're going to have to draw from somewhere. The obvious solution is to redraw the boundaries such that they grab a good chunk of those back from Woodson, and probably a chunk from Falls Church as well. But wait - Justice has to close the gap too! So they're probably going to need some kids from Falls Church as well in order to fill their building.

Falls Church is currently under renovation to expand their capacity. But how will they fill it? Probably by snagging some kids from Marshall, is my best guess. Now Marshall will have to reach into Madison (even more than it already does) and McLean, and maybe even Oakton.

Can you even imagine what would happen to the folks in, say, eastern Mantua if they all of a sudden woke up one day and they were zoned to Annandale instead of Woodson? Their property values would plummet and you'd start to see folks moving all over the place. You're talking about people losing $50-100K of equity in their house overnight.

If there's no TJ for their kids to angle towards, the property values in the Carson area would plummet as well. Not as much value in sending them to Nysmith either.

You'd probably have a stemming of the tide in terms of immigrant families moving to this area in search of tech jobs, which would have an impact on that sector as well.

You're just not thinking this through when you talk about returning TJ to the community. TJ in its current form is entirely too important to the fabric of Northern Virginia.

Depriving the areas near TJ of a neighborhood school had a long-term negative effect on those areas and also on Annandale. This injury occurred over decades and wouldn’t be undone overnight, but the community would benefit over time from a neighborhood school.

And, yes, other boundaries would change, but in the process FCPS might address a whole range of other current problems in the system that apparently don’t bother you, but weigh heavily on the minds of others (such as the prospect of Centreville soon having 3000 kids).

In any event, there’s a glaring contradiction between asserting that TJ admissions had to be revamped because families at three middle schools were “privilege hoarders” but then claiming we could never return TJ to use as a community school because it might adversely impact the property values of someone in, say, Mantua.

There isn't any contradiction at all. Addressing the TJ admissions process had a net impact on a very small number of families one way or the other but increased access to students from all over the county and across socioeconomic lines. It was the right thing to do and that's borne out fairly obviously to those who aren't blinded by self-interest.

You chose one small roadblock that is more of a political issue than anything to illustrate your case, ignoring the other significant issues that would be caused by TJ ceasing to exist in its current form. The only reason I brought up the hypothetical family in Mantua is to indicate how difficult it would be to sell the population at large on this hare-brained idea.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is what you get for voting for these left wing extremists to the school board. Serves them right.

+1

This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. First they supported quotas. The courts struck down quotas so they pivoted to affirmative action. And the latest rebranding is DE&I. It's amazing the arguments they will use to justify a racist policy. "It's about creating an inclusive environment." "They bring a different perspective and that makes the team stronger." "Race is just one of the many factors we take into account during the hiring and promotions process."

They are as bad as the crazies still counting ballots to prove Trump won. They have been buying into propoganda for so long that they can't even think clearly or objectively. I can't, for the life of me, understand why nobody on the left (even moderates) ever questions the idea that all aspects of society must have proportional racial representation. It's a very strange goal and if you told someone from another country about our policies, they would look at you like you are crazy.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like this should go to the supreme court where it's not lunny left judges

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is what you get for voting for these left wing extremists to the school board. Serves them right.

+1

This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. First they supported quotas. The courts struck down quotas so they pivoted to affirmative action. And the latest rebranding is DE&I. It's amazing the arguments they will use to justify a racist policy. "It's about creating an inclusive environment." "They bring a different perspective and that makes the team stronger." "Race is just one of the many factors we take into account during the hiring and promotions process."

They are as bad as the crazies still counting ballots to prove Trump won. They have been buying into propoganda for so long that they can't even think clearly or objectively. I can't, for the life of me, understand why nobody on the left (even moderates) ever questions the idea that all aspects of society must have proportional racial representation. It's a very strange goal and if you told someone from another country about our policies, they would look at you like you are crazy.

Maybe they looked at TJ admissions and thought they were ridiculous. For a student in the south east portion of the county, the new system gives them a much better shot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is what you get for voting for these left wing extremists to the school board. Serves them right.

+1

This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. First they supported quotas. The courts struck down quotas so they pivoted to affirmative action. And the latest rebranding is DE&I. It's amazing the arguments they will use to justify a racist policy. "It's about creating an inclusive environment." "They bring a different perspective and that makes the team stronger." "Race is just one of the many factors we take into account during the hiring and promotions process."

They are as bad as the crazies still counting ballots to prove Trump won. They have been buying into propoganda for so long that they can't even think clearly or objectively. I can't, for the life of me, understand why nobody on the left (even moderates) ever questions the idea that all aspects of society must have proportional racial representation. It's a very strange goal and if you told someone from another country about our policies, they would look at you like you are crazy.

Precisely what bothers you about an inclusive environment that brings together differing perspectives?