Why does Annandale HS have a bad reputation?
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Anonymous
Glen Forest goes to Glasgow and Stuart. 80% of Poe goes to Annandale and the rest goes to Falls Church. |
Anonymous
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They're facilitating death spirals. Building more multi-family housing in areas where there is already too much. Strip out the single-Family-homes that provide a critical mass. "Concentrate" services.
It's deliberate. |
Anonymous
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http://www2.ed.gov/programs/titleiparta/index.html
40% appears to be the threshhold for title I. If the spread the kids out evenly between schools I bet they would lose a lot of funding. |
Anonymous
They might get less funding, but the schools probably would be better in the long run. Some schools are over 60% FARMS, how is that truly manageable, even with federal funding? |
Anonymous
Majority-FARMS schools are the norm in many public school districts all over the country. Would you be saying this if the FARMS students were mostly rural whites rather than suburban Hispanics and AAs? |
Anonymous
I've had the same thought, as well, and as an Annandale pyramid parent, it is infuriating. I wonder if there is any action, legal or otherwise, that I can take. |
Anonymous
I think it's generally considered on these boards that the public schools in nova are superior to a majority of the country. So, it could very well be because so much of the rest of the country has high farm rates. Those schools aren't as great and the SES make up is the reason. |
Anonymous
I know, which is why I corrected myself in the next post. I should know better, I've been to a number of meetings at Glasgow. I quite like Glasgow's campus, actually. |
Anonymous
In Fairfax County, all of the "good" high schools have AP. I took AP in high school, and will be sending my children to a high school that offers AP classes. Even the top prep schools that my managers and directors send their kids to offer AP classes. |
Anonymous
If you are focusing on school boundaries, legal challenges to boundary decisions in FCPS/VA always seem to fail. I think you would be better off trying to speak to the School Board reps in Mason and Braddock, Sandy Evans and Megan McLaughlin, as well as the citizen representatives from those districts on the FPAC, which is an advisory group to the School Board on facilities issues. I might also ask to meet privately with the at-large members on the School Board. Most if not all of the decisions that pulled single-family neighborhoods out of Annandale were made before either Evans or McLaughlin were elected. I don't know that McLaughlin would be any help, because she's a Woodson parent, but I've always sensed that Evans wants to do the right thing. She just gets pulled in a lot of different directions by people telling her that her top priority should be overcrowding at Bailey's and Glen Forest, the use of the Williston facility at Seven Corners, renovations at Falls Church HS, etc. McIlveen might take an interest, too. In terms of what gets built in Annandale, that's a BOS issue, except to the extent that FCPS gets involved in predicting what the student yields should be and developing estimates as to what types of proffers should be sought from the developers. I know Evans has been pushing to get the Facilities Staff to develop better estimates that would result in higher proffers in areas where more people with kids end up moving into multi-family housing than the current models predict. The bigger issue, of course, is the BOS's decision to approve more multi-family construction without a clearly articulated vision of how they'll affect the surrounding areas. It is one thing to build new MFH within walking distance of the Orange or Silver Line, but another thing to do it in the middle of Annandale. You probably have to get rid of Penny Gross if you want that to change. |
Anonymous
| Typo - should be "Willston," not "Williston." |
Anonymous
So, most DCUM people would consider Marshall and Robinson "good" schools, and they are IB. Many would consider South Lakes a "good" school, and it is IB. The rest get disparaged, but they have their supporters. The issue here really ought not to be whether the "good" schools have AP, but whether IB is the right program for the schools that have it. The data suggests to me that this isn't the case, and that there's an over-supply of IB in one part of the county. It's as if FCPS handed out IB like Halloween candy in eastern Fairfax for a few years, but isn't willing to admit that it didn't have such a great shelf life. |
Anonymous
The big problem with the federal vision of education is that in their eyes (the fed DOE) it is the schools that are poor (or doing a poor job), when it is the students that are poor inside the school and the issues of poverty are what need to be addressed. Many schools, in general, are doing the best they can with the population that they serve, but they tend to get dinged for something that they cannot control. All that said, yes, it is going to be a better situation for a "nonpoor" student to go to a school where there is not an overwhelming number of lower SES students. Schools with lots of FARMS are overwhelmed by nonacademic issues. Society needs to address the economic situation that is causing higher and higher numbers of poor students in our schools. The schools and teachers are not at fault in this. |
Anonymous
I don't think any federal agency can address the myriad factors that result in poverty and schools with high concentrations of poverty. I think it's a good thing if they try to prevent schools from giving in to a culture of defeatism, where everyone just shrugs, throws up their hands and assumes failure. The problem is dinging students and teachers for things they really cannot control. |
Anonymous
| Asiandale |