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Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)
FCPS Boundary Review Updates
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Anonymous
And you think applying the same level of consideration that would be implicit in the Coates and Parklawn large scope studies should not be applied elsewhere in this county wide school division? Forestville should remain a Langley feeder but it's base school boundary needs to change. In the wonderul world of FCPS boundary dominoes there can be what some consider winners and losers. Fact is the Forestville boundary was built to keep residences in the Langley pyramid and was most recenlty done for that Colvin Run opening. Conditiona and capacities have changed - I don't care about zip codes/SES/etc but do care about what borders other jurisdictions and what has access to other FCPS school sites at any given grade level. |
Anonymous
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The fact that they just “bridge” the Timberlane attendance island shows how dumb this whole thing is.
Let’s not pretend that moving an adjacent street arbitrarily somehow improves the community in any way whatsoever. |
Anonymous
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Looking at the 3/26 BRAC presentation with circled split feeders and comparing them to the 2030 CIP projections, it does feel many of these will be absorbed into one middle school or high school. The attendance islands were also easy to pick up though there might have been a little more weighing over which direction they fell.
Using Graham Road ES as the most extreme example, I don’t think anyone could have predicted the domino effect it would have. Many of the potential split feeders seem obvious and will also help with capacity. That final capacity map will really shake FCPS up. I am glad they are getting it out so soon. |
Anonymous
Will be interesting to see if they update any of the attendance island scenarios for the next release post the 4/11 BRAC regional feedback. Or if those will fall into capacity adjustments. |
Anonymous
It would be great if the thresholds that triggered the Coates and Parklawn studies were considered in the county-wide review. The last CIP projects Coates at 163% capacity in 2029 and Parklawn at 146%. These schools are experiencing severe overcrowding that is expected to get worse. That fully warrants attention, whereas a lot of the other changes that Thru Consulting has identified seem more like solutions in search of a problem. Again, if you want to argue to change the assignments for where kids now at Forestville ES go to ES, MS, or HS, have at it. It's not my fight. But I will reiterate that a different change previously discussed - reassigning a Longfellow/McLean attendance island to Cooper/Langley - would not by itself warrant changes to Cooper/Langley boundaries. |
Anonymous
What they put out there was half-baked, as they identified moving a relatively small part of Shrevewood to Longfellow/McLean. So they'd "bridge" the Timber Lane island, but in the process turn Shrevewood into a lopsided split feeder to Kilmer/Marshall and Longfellow/McLean. To your point, would anyone currently in the Timber Lane island assigned to Longfellow/McLean feel more "connected" to the community if the Falls Hill area also on the same side of Route 7 is dragged along for the ride? And, even if they might, wouldn't it come at the expense of Shrevewood families whose kids might end up sent to a different middle and high school than the vast majority of the Shrevewood kids? Of course, the suggestion is that this process is iterative, and that they may look at the problems they've created on 4/11 in the later sessions in April/May. But, boy, isn't this a lot of potentially moving kids around for relatively little benefit? |
Anonymous
To the NJ-based consulting firm that the school board picked through a no-bid process, our kids are merely pawns on a chess board. F mental health, right school board? |
Anonymous
I am not pretending students are pawns. Equity? Main things are level of funding based on programs: fIB over AP, IBMY, extra wads of $ for magnet schools, immersion extra staff v stipend for a lead teacher, etc. FCPS is a county wide school division and it has had many boundary processes over the decades. Not my fault none of the at large members had the idea of converting one of Poe / Holmes to an elementary and syncing the 6-8 mess with the rest of the school division. Who makes decisions on AAP sites and feeds? It is really shocking that any given group of at large SB members have not examined the issue. FCPS builds new sites and has renovated/expanded others. The political decision to expand West Potomac and the Mount Vernon/Franconia orchestrated sneak move to sell off public land to the Saudis zoned for a school were bad decisions. Those 2 should have been stopped by the Board of Supervisors. Time to b1rch about the Herndon HS or Falls Church HS expansions is long gone. Now it's crunch the boundaries time to what fills the buildings to get reasonable capacity utilization. FYI. obvious entities that should have had repesentation on BRAC but were excluded are: Reston Association, Mclean Citizens Association, Town of Vienna, Town of Herndon. |
Anonymous
Oak Hill would feed into Chantilly HS then. Currently that little island is slated for Oakton. Yikes. |
Anonymous
Why advocate for moves if you appear to be against them? No one wants their own kids moved. Some equity focused people want other kids moved. Don’t be THAT person. |
Anonymous
can you expand on what you mean ? What’s the issue with IB? Our HS pyramid only has IB… |
Anonymous
DP. I think the issue is that students in poor performing IB schools transfer to AP schools, and students in poor performing AP schools transfer into IB. It’s a big brain drain for those schools, and does hurt the home school’s test scores a lot. I’m not advocating to restrict these transfers, but fixing that issue would do much more to help test scores than any boundary moves that will send families with means fleeing to private or elsewhere. |
Anonymous
DP. In the context of boundary discussions, the issue is not the merits of IB academically, so much as that having two academic programs (AP and IB) allows families at schools like Lewis and Herndon to pupil place, ostensibly to get AP rather than IB (example: Lewis transfers to Lake Braddock, Mount Vernon transfers to Hayfield) or IB rather than AP (example: Herndon transfers to South Lakes). Overall, because IB schools are lower-income, you see more pupil placements and the families who pupil place tend to be wealthier, because they have to be able to arrange their kids' transportation. So the argument is that if you view avoiding concentrations of poverty or having a wider economic spectrum of students as serving equity goals, getting rid of IB would reduce the number of pupil placements, increase the enrollments of some schools, and mitigate the current concentration of poverty at some schools. |
Anonymous
In fairness, as one of the Fox Mill families at Carson, most of the neighborhood will be very, very angry if moved to Hughes. We were already moved from a strong AP school in Oakton to a not so strong IB school in SLHS. Moving from a strong MS in Carson to Hughes is going to cause lots of anger. We get it, we are a small group who has already been ignored so it will most likely happen again, but everyone I know would strongly prefer to stay at Carson over moving. |
Anonymous
Plus, IB is more expensive to FCPS. This seems like a no brainer. I know two kids who graduated with IB diploma from two schools (Mt. Vernon and Robinson)--more than ten years ago. Both said they would rather have had AP because their AP friends got more college credit and there was far more flexibility. One ended up with a Fine Arts degree and the other with Computer Science. |