Skyview is Open for Opt-In from Any Rising 9th and 10th grader in Fairfax County

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry Reid, no one wants to attend Skyview. Leave our boundaries alone too. FCPS should never have purchased it.

A lot of people want to attend Skyview, but they have been waiting for boundaries to be announced. This opt in process was totally unnecessary.

A lot of people want to attend Skyview???

Yes, the Westfield kids want to get out the ghetto!

Are you saying wherever Westfield kids go, the school will be ghetto? So now Skyview will be ghetto, that is why opt-in number is so low?

No, they want to leave their ghetto school and start fresh somewhere else!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There was mostly praise for the School Board when they decided that the opportunity to buy KAA was too good to pass up.

They've since squandered a lot of that good will by their lack of candor and transparency.

If they'd approached this sensibly, they would have been very honest about what they were and were not purchasing. They were getting a school on a desirable site with a lot of amenities not found in a typical school, but also a school built for no more than 1200 students (including K-8 students) lacking a number of the athletic facilities of a typical high school. They could have said it would take time and some patience to get Skyview to a point where it could open and offer the same things as the most recent high schools opened by FCPS (Westfield and South County).

They didn't do that. If anything, they led people to believe the school was a turnkey acquisition and, even worse, they lied about the "savings" that buying Skyview would represent compared to FCPS building a new school itself. And, of course, the process for establishing the new boundaries for Skyview has pissed a ton of people off, because people who don't even have any interest in Skyview are now facing the possibility of boundary changes at the ES, MS and/or HS level that they had no reason to anticipate until very recently.

Because they had egg on their face, and Reid and some others couldn't get over the notion that KAA probably would work best as a magnet, they've dug themselves into a hole, first by committing to open Skyview this fall and then by orchestrating a flawed "opt in" approach that puts families at risk that they could enroll their kid(s) at Skyview only to find that they weren't zoned for the school and had to arrange for transportation for four years.

They tried to make Skyview sound like hot sh*t by saying enrollment would be limited to families in five pyramids, but then they couldn't even get 1000 kids from five pyramids that collectively have around 6300 9th and 10th graders interested. So now they've pivoted to opening up enrollment to families across the county, but of course the transportation issues loom even larger if you're talking about kids in Burke or Vienna rather than in Herndon.

In another decade, no one may remember any of this, but the initial rollout has been quite pathetic.

+1 This is spot on. Bravo.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry Reid, no one wants to attend Skyview. Leave our boundaries alone too. FCPS should never have purchased it.

A lot of people want to attend Skyview, but they have been waiting for boundaries to be announced. This opt in process was totally unnecessary.

A lot of people want to attend Skyview???

Yes, the Westfield kids want to get out the ghetto!

Are you saying wherever Westfield kids go, the school will be ghetto? So now Skyview will be ghetto, that is why opt-in number is so low?

No, they want to leave their ghetto school and start fresh somewhere else!

That's pretty ugly. It may be the attitude of some Floris parents, but of course Coates and McNair are along for the ride - and they aren't the ones pretending that Skyview is just going to be the HS version of Carson AAP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry Reid, no one wants to attend Skyview. Leave our boundaries alone too. FCPS should never have purchased it.

A lot of people want to attend Skyview, but they have been waiting for boundaries to be announced. This opt in process was totally unnecessary.

A lot of people want to attend Skyview???

Yes, the Westfield kids want to get out the ghetto!

Some of them are Floris kids who live a long way from Westfield.

And speaking of boundaries, apparently until there's a boundary the way kids will be transported is to take one bus to their base school and then a second bus from there to Skyview. And here I was thinking a switch to a much closer school would make for a shorter bus ride.

[Anonymous]

Will this potentially impact staffing numbers of other high schools and when would it be finalized?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Will this potentially impact staffing numbers of other high schools and when would it be finalized?

Of course it will. Reid does not care about the potential inconvenience to any other school. There was an initial deadline of mid-January to opt in so they could plan ahead but it turned out to be meaningless.

[Anonymous]

Skyview has been slowly losing students over the last month due to opt-ins becoming opt-outs. Things are not tending in the right direction for their numbers. They are hoping for a windfall of TJ rejects to keep the school above 600 students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Skyview has been slowly losing students over the last month due to opt-ins becoming opt-outs. Things are not tending in the right direction for their numbers. They are hoping for a windfall of TJ rejects to keep the school above 600 students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Skyview has been slowly losing students over the last month due to opt-ins becoming opt-outs. Things are not tending in the right direction for their numbers. They are hoping for a windfall of TJ rejects to keep the school above 600 students.

+1

[Anonymous]

I don’t have the enrollment numbers but I do have a close friend who will be teaching at Skyview and they are pumped about what is going on there - this is a teacher with decades of experience at a highly rated HS. Skyview will absolutely offer every advanced class even if there are a handful of kids - sorry, they will. Consider it a start up cost and those handful of kids will get private school ratios. I agree they should leave it a magnet and be clear on transport at and everything changes overnight. You only have to read the western boundary thread to see what a miserable group of parents FCPS has and they will never be happy with anything. If you said it’s TJ East with centralized pick ups you’d have a waiting list. It’s the double talk that has cost them. And what, they want to force a bunch of malcontents to attend? Why? Just properly label it a magnet and get ready for crowd control. I can’t believe the amount of BS on this thread based on insiders I know there. Reid definitely f-ed this up trying to cater to masses. The people who want Skyview are tech-forward AAP kids. Stop pandering to everyone else who seem to all prefer their own school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they don't have enough students, they are going to have to significantly cut back their course offerings for next year. They can't run classes with 15 students. FCPS budget is 30+ kids per HS class.

Agree. Even if FCPS cuts them a little slack for the first year with the staffind formulas (like they could have only 25 kids in a class), it won't be enough to save most of the courses. They won't be able to offer much.

I wouldn’t under-estimate the willingness of Reid and her minions to depart from the norms to try and keep Skyview afloat. It’s the only school she cares about.

Completely. Kids at Skyview are getting the full menu, I assure you. I’m personally glad so many people are stupid enough to not want to go to a cutting edge high school with a motivated staff. Makes my dreams of a magnet a little brighter every day. Can’t wait for the “based on community input we are a magnet” email. Best outcome for all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t have the enrollment numbers but I do have a close friend who will be teaching at Skyview and they are pumped about what is going on there - this is a teacher with decades of experience at a highly rated HS. Skyview will absolutely offer every advanced class even if there are a handful of kids - sorry, they will. Consider it a start up cost and those handful of kids will get private school ratios. I agree they should leave it a magnet and be clear on transport at and everything changes overnight. You only have to read the western boundary thread to see what a miserable group of parents FCPS has and they will never be happy with anything. If you said it’s TJ East with centralized pick ups you’d have a waiting list. It’s the double talk that has cost them. And what, they want to force a bunch of malcontents to attend? Why? Just properly label it a magnet and get ready for crowd control. I can’t believe the amount of BS on this thread based on insiders I know there. Reid definitely f-ed this up trying to cater to masses. The people who want Skyview are tech-forward AAP kids. Stop pandering to everyone else who seem to all prefer their own school.

If you said it was TJ East it would be in the City of Alexandria.

And if they spend a lot more per student on Skyview students than in students elsewhere (this will certainly be FOIA’d) there will be a bunch of School Board members losing their seats next year.

They can’t do a proper boundary study and so far it’s looking like they have no idea how to open a new high school, either.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If they don't have enough students, they are going to have to significantly cut back their course offerings for next year. They can't run classes with 15 students. FCPS budget is 30+ kids per HS class.

Agree. Even if FCPS cuts them a little slack for the first year with the staffind formulas (like they could have only 25 kids in a class), it won't be enough to save most of the courses. They won't be able to offer much.

I wouldn’t under-estimate the willingness of Reid and her minions to depart from the norms to try and keep Skyview afloat. It’s the only school she cares about.

Completely. Kids at Skyview are getting the full menu, I assure you. I’m personally glad so many people are stupid enough to not want to go to a cutting edge high school with a motivated staff. Makes my dreams of a magnet a little brighter every day. Can’t wait for the “based on community input we are a magnet” email. Best outcome for all.

The community apart from pockets of Crossfield still wants a neighborhood high school.

What they don’t want are their ES and MS boundaries diced up in the process or to be told they need to squint hard and pretend a building that isn’t ready yet is a neighborhood high school.

[Anonymous]

Do you have to provide transportation for your student if they go to Skyview?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do you have to provide transportation for your student if they go to Skyview?

That’s the problem, they’ve only guarnteeed transportation if you are in the permanent boundary, yet they asked people to decide to opt in before they drew the boundary.