FCPS Boundary Review Updates

[Anonymous]

Can someone tell me what we’re actually trying to solve here? There have been thousands of posts and this hasn’t been answered by anyone, and yet the only places that urgently need boundary changes are Coates and Parklawn, and those changes appear to be delayed so that they can be wrapped together with the unnecessary ones.

We have it backward.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can someone tell me what we’re actually trying to solve here? There have been thousands of posts and this hasn’t been answered by anyone, and yet the only places that urgently need boundary changes are Coates and Parklawn, and those changes appear to be delayed so that they can be wrapped together with the unnecessary ones.

We have it backward.

We don't have it backwards.

The school board has it backwards.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How many students zoned to Lewis transfer out for non-TJ? I feel like the BRAC should be looking at that first before they start moving others into the pyramid.

They are not going to West Springfield. Here's the info from FCPS facilities dashboard transfer page
IB=tech Edison 54
AP TJ 39
AP Lake Braddock 32
Bryant 15
AP South County 11
IB Annandale <10
AP Fairfax <10
AP Falls Church <10
AP Hayfield <10
IB Justice <10
AP Langley <10
AP McLean <10
IB Mount Vernon <10
AP Oakton <10
IB Robinson <10
IB South Lakes <10
AP West Potomac <10
AP West Springfield <10
AP Woodson <10




Key transfers into:
Lake Braddock 34
Twain 67
Frost <10
Hayfield <10
Holmes <10
Irving <10
Longfellow <10
Robinson <10
South County <10

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:According to the 3/26 slides, they circled the Oak Hill split feeder (into Carson and Franklin) and the Carson three-way split (Westfield, South Lakes High School, and Oakton).

How will they address these issues?

If they send all Oak Hill students to Franklin and reassign Fox Mill kids and Crossfield kids from Carson to Hughes/Franklin, Carson could lose too many students.

This is a potentially explosive issue because there’s no easy solution.

Would they send all Oak Hill students to Carson and then to Westfield? This would upset many parents.

No one is moving Crossfield kids to South Lakes. Oakton is under capacity.

[Anonymous]

The process would make more sense if the School Board said "These X schools are overcrowded and will remain so for the foreseeable future. We have to adjust the boundaries to address the issue at these schools." Those boundary shifts would be understandable, even if it bothered parents to see kids shifted because a change in ES can lead to a change in MS and HS. The initial impact would be for kids in ES. There would be ripple effect because moving kids from School 1 (overcrowded) to schools 2,3,4 might cause those schools to gain too many students and have to shift boundaries, but it would be a limited geographic area. The larger impact should be to reduce overcrowding at HS in the long run.

There are a series of overcrowded ES across the county that need to be addressed. There are a few overcrowded HS that should be addressed. HS is going to be more tricky because of the AP/IB differences and the program inequality. High FARMs HS do not have the same number of AP/IB classes offered because they have a smaller group of students to take those classes and there is less interest in AP Physics C or the IB equivalent. There are going to be fewer kids interested in the AP electives, Pysch, Econ and the like, making it harder for those classes to be offered. No parent wants to move their kid from a school that offers a large array of AP/IB classes to a school that only offers the basic AP/IB because they don't have the student population to do more. No parent wants to move from a school that has 3 math after school math clubs/competition teams to a school with none. Or Science Olympiad or Model UN, pick your clubs. Part of the reason kids Principal Place out of many of the lower rated HS is because they want to go to a school with better class options. SLHS demonstrates that the class offering imbalance and club imbalance does not change, just compare the clubs at SLHA and Oakton HS or the class offerings, even 20 years after a boundary shift.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can someone tell me what we’re actually trying to solve here? There have been thousands of posts and this hasn’t been answered by anyone, and yet the only places that urgently need boundary changes are Coates and Parklawn, and those changes appear to be delayed so that they can be wrapped together with the unnecessary ones.

We have it backward.

The process initiated by the school board was originally started with the goal of One Fairfax and Equity, doing a county wide rezoning to move high performing neighborhoods into low performing schools, usually popular AP schools with lower FARMS and more English speaking students, to unpopular IB schools with higher FARMS and higher ESOL populations.

Initially, the school board stated at multiple meetings captured on video (do a deep dive on board docs to as far back as around 2019) that the main rezoning purpose was One Fairfax and Equity.

They restarted this focus on rezoning last summer, revising the old policy 8130 that limited rezoning to capacity driven or initiated by the school community as needed based on capacity, with grandfathering of high school students, to extensive county wide rezoning every 5 years, focused on One Fairfax and equity with no or limited grandfathering.

The justification against grandfathering was that moving 11th grade juniors and other teens mid high school will "teach them resiliency."

After the school district spent $500,000 on a no bid contract to hire Thru Consulting to run the rezoning (ignoring that we pay Gatehouse employees to do this stuff) they added overcrowding, bus commutes and eliminating split feeders/attendance islands to "equity of programs" to the 4 rezoning justifications. Unpopular One Fairfax was removed from the goals due to public outcry, but it is still the clear catalyst.

There were community meetings and a rezoning advisory committee picked last fall.

The advisory committee is around half randomly selected parents, 2 from each high school pyramid, and a bunch of left wing special interest groups. You can look it up on FCPS website, but around a third-ish of the hand picked special interest groups are non white racial/ethnic political advocacy groups or lbgtq groups. Since lots of lbgtq kids are at every single school, and the political advocates appointed have no children and are not from Fairfax County, there is no reason why they got special representation on the rezoning committee. It would have made more sense to appoint a VHSL representative or coaches rep on the committee in place of the lbgtq groups, since those sports programs actually do impact capacity and student transfers.

The committee has been meeting regularly.

They are now at the phase where they are going through specific recommendations made by Thru and giving feedback, which will mostly be ignored based on FCPS school board history.

Last week they went over attendance island rezoning recommendations.

Next meeting they will go through split feeder rezoning recommendations for schools under 25% of elementary students going to a different pyramid for high school and middle school.

The final meeting will be reviewing rezoning recommendations for schools over 100& capacity. This will be the big one, as moving one elementary school to a new pyramid creates a domino effect in other pyramids.

Now is the time to pay attention and advocate for your neighborhood.

Once that 3rd round of capacity maps is released, the game is over and tweaks will be minimum.

[Anonymous]

Now that high school boundary changes are being discussed in the 4/11 slides - it’s about time the committee also discusses and comments on grandfathering plans, at least for the high schoolers who will be impacted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can someone tell me what we’re actually trying to solve here? There have been thousands of posts and this hasn’t been answered by anyone, and yet the only places that urgently need boundary changes are Coates and Parklawn, and those changes appear to be delayed so that they can be wrapped together with the unnecessary ones.

We have it backward.

The process initiated by the school board was originally started with the goal of One Fairfax and Equity, doing a county wide rezoning to move high performing neighborhoods into low performing schools, usually popular AP schools with lower FARMS and more English speaking students, to unpopular IB schools with higher FARMS and higher ESOL populations.

Initially, the school board stated at multiple meetings captured on video (do a deep dive on board docs to as far back as around 2019) that the main rezoning purpose was One Fairfax and Equity.

They restarted this focus on rezoning last summer, revising the old policy 8130 that limited rezoning to capacity driven or initiated by the school community as needed based on capacity, with grandfathering of high school students, to extensive county wide rezoning every 5 years, focused on One Fairfax and equity with no or limited grandfathering.

The justification against grandfathering was that moving 11th grade juniors and other teens mid high school will "teach them resiliency."

After the school district spent $500,000 on a no bid contract to hire Thru Consulting to run the rezoning (ignoring that we pay Gatehouse employees to do this stuff) they added overcrowding, bus commutes and eliminating split feeders/attendance islands to "equity of programs" to the 4 rezoning justifications. Unpopular One Fairfax was removed from the goals due to public outcry, but it is still the clear catalyst.

There were community meetings and a rezoning advisory committee picked last fall.

The advisory committee is around half randomly selected parents, 2 from each high school pyramid, and a bunch of left wing special interest groups. You can look it up on FCPS website, but around a third-ish of the hand picked special interest groups are non white racial/ethnic political advocacy groups or lbgtq groups. Since lots of lbgtq kids are at every single school, and the political advocates appointed have no children and are not from Fairfax County, there is no reason why they got special representation on the rezoning committee. It would have made more sense to appoint a VHSL representative or coaches rep on the committee in place of the lbgtq groups, since those sports programs actually do impact capacity and student transfers.

The committee has been meeting regularly.

They are now at the phase where they are going through specific recommendations made by Thru and giving feedback, which will mostly be ignored based on FCPS school board history.

Last week they went over attendance island rezoning recommendations.

Next meeting they will go through split feeder rezoning recommendations for schools under 25% of elementary students going to a different pyramid for high school and middle school.

The final meeting will be reviewing rezoning recommendations for schools over 100& capacity. This will be the big one, as moving one elementary school to a new pyramid creates a domino effect in other pyramids.

Now is the time to pay attention and advocate for your neighborhood.

Once that 3rd round of capacity maps is released, the game is over and tweaks will be minimum.

The first few pages of this topic have good explanations with links to FCPS board docs backing the posts.

Start there.

Go to board docs. Watch the videos and read the documents to educate yourself and gain an understanding of the background, process and impact.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Now that high school boundary changes are being discussed in the 4/11 slides - it’s about time the committee also discusses and comments on grandfathering plans, at least for the high schoolers who will be impacted.

They are only grandfathering rising 12th graders

With 5 year rezoning cycles, grandfathering rising 10th and 11th graders messes up the purpose of rezoning.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:According to the 3/26 slides, they circled the Oak Hill split feeder (into Carson and Franklin) and the Carson three-way split (Westfield, South Lakes High School, and Oakton).

How will they address these issues?

If they send all Oak Hill students to Franklin and reassign Fox Mill kids and Crossfield kids from Carson to Hughes/Franklin, Carson could lose too many students.

This is a potentially explosive issue because there’s no easy solution.

Would they send all Oak Hill students to Carson and then to Westfield? This would upset many parents.

Are the only kids at Carson that go to South Lakes the ones from Fox Mill? The easy Solution would be to bring those kids back to Oakton.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Any idea roughly what % of Carson goes to each of the 4 high schools? With the new <25% guideline on split feeders, let’s see which are the likely high schools which will be most impacted.

I am pretty sure Carson's boundaries only split to three high schools-- Oakton, Westfield, and South Lakes. I am guessing it's approximately 33% of each, but that's based on a visual estimate based on looking at boundary maps, so it's not scientific at all.

The students who go to Chantilly are actually from the Franklin district, but they chose Carson for AAP.

The number of kids who attend SLHS from Carson is well below 33% of the student population. I know the Fox Mill classes at Carson are around 70 kids, I am not sure how many of the Floris kids attend SLHS but I think it is a small percentage. That said, I know of no one who wants to leave Carson for Hughes in the Fox MIll neighborhood. That doesn't mean that they don't exist, just that I don't know them.

It's really difficult to determine Carson's split because the AAP center is more than half of Carson's membership.
There are a LOT of Franklin kids at Carson for AAP--Navy, Waples Mill, Oak Hill, and Lee's Corner. In fact, there may be more Franklin kids there than Carson kids for AAP.

My guess is that the rest is split pretty evenly between South Lakes, Oakton, and Westfield.

I think that about 50% of Floris goes to South Lakes. I just looked at the boundary maps, and a large portion of Floris off of Monroe by Frying Pan Park go to South Lakes. Those neighborhoods are pretty heavily populated.
A lot of the portion on the boundary map for Floris is not populated. Lots of office buildings, etc. around the Air and Space museum. There are some smaller neighborhoods off of West Ox and Centreville Rd plus Discovery Square that go to Westfield.
And, Coates goes to Westfield. I doubt there are many high school students there now, but likely more in the future as Coates kids grow up. There is a lot of new construction in that area.

Wouldn't the easy solution be to send those kids back to Franklin since it is massively under capacity? That eliminates Chantilly kids from Carson. It still doesn't solve the fact that kids go to three other different high schools, but it at least eliminates the fourth. Just designate Franklin an AAP Center - it already has the AAP classes, it's just a name.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can someone tell me what we’re actually trying to solve here? There have been thousands of posts and this hasn’t been answered by anyone, and yet the only places that urgently need boundary changes are Coates and Parklawn, and those changes appear to be delayed so that they can be wrapped together with the unnecessary ones.

We have it backward.

I do think it's a good idea to eliminate split feeders. I grew up in a place where my ES was the only one that went to my middle school but ended up at a different high school. We made some good friends and then rarely saw them again after we all started HS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

They are only grandfathering rising 12th graders .

Source?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yeah — looking at the numbers — Carson will be the toughest split feeder to fix.

Franklin and Chantilly fix is possible if kids return to their base school. That may be an easier pill to digest given both schools are excellent in their own right.

Also the TJ 1.5% change, increases the appeal of Franklin MS as Carson is the biggest loser with the TJ admission changes.

Carson was built big. Base on it's location maybe split feed with Herndon spinning off the huge Hutchison so an AAP center fits in Herndon MS. Doing anything is always a problem with IB at South Lakes. ...just waiting for FCPS to proclaim the desirability of IB based on transfers from Herndon...

Just incredible that FCPS/Thru sits BRAC by region...Marshall!!!

1 Carson oakton 273 Franklin
5 Rocky Run chantilly 239 124 Liberty+86 Stone+ 29 Franklin
4 Lake Braddock lake braddock 236 54 Robinson+31 Hayfield + 11Holmess+106 Irving =34 Key
3 Twain edison 155 88 Hayfield+ 67 Key
2 Glasgow justice 130 29 Poe+ 101 Holmes
1 Hughes south lakes 118 Herndon
3 Sandburg west potomac 101 Whitman
6 Hayfield hayfield 100 Mount Vernon massive for no AAP
2 Jackson falles church 96 Thoreau
5 Frost woodson 62 47 Poe + 15 Holmes
5 Kilmer marshall 39 Thorau
2 Longfellow mclean 14 Kilmer immersion?

[Anonymous]

Sounds made up to me. The boundary review FAQ page has this: “ Similarly, any other related implementation decisions, including allowing current students to remain at their existing schools, have not yet been determined. ”