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Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)
FCPS High School Poverty and Enrollment
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Anonymous
Sending students and their families out of their community is not helpful to anyone. What opportunities is this going to present for the students at "both schools." |
Anonymous
Your post has a pretty black and white view of things that is rather childish. 1. No border enforcement, allowing children to flood into the country No one has said no border enforcement is a good policy EVER. And, most parents don’t just put their kids on a plane to America because they feel like it. More likely that last resort measure is pecans 2. --- Isolating those poor, non-English speaking students into separate schools (and certainly away from their own children) Children who speak no English should be isolated for a bit until they can learn some English. It would be really hard to start trigonometry in English when you have a 4th grade education level. That is what there are levels of ESL services in schools. I bet if Lewis continued Spanish immersion programs through high school and gave classes in high school in Spanish there would be more interest. The kids from Rose Hill could continue in ALL Spanish classes. Now that is a great skill! 3. Lax pupil placement that enables wealthier students to run from those schools Do you have direct experience with this- did you run? 4. -- Unequal educational and extracurricular activities at Fairfax schools Unequal educational and extracurricular activities run rampant and are a standard in America that is why we have sports try outs- sports/ex recuse are only for those who excel at sports. |
Anonymous
Less competition, more attention for individual students at WS. More students and involved parents, more teams and programs at Lewis. |
Anonymous
I don’t think it works out like this in real life, only in your perception. If there are more students, there will also be more competition and fewer slots on the available teams at Lewis. I guess I have no clue- what sports teams is Lewis missing? Did you just want AP placements and didn’t pupil place out or are you speaking about electives with the use of programs? Just because a school offers more electives doesn’t mean your child will get their chosen electives. Scheduling is always an issue. Also, few kids get attention in high school. Most are just part of the class. |
Anonymous
You’re asking questions that make you seem really ignorant so perhaps you need to stop posting for a while and educate yourself. |
Anonymous
The posters on this thread have confirmed my cynicism about the residents of Fairfax County. It confirms that FCPS let the gap get too big to ever change boundaries between certain schools. It confirms that Fairfax will continue to vote for liberal policies as long as they can avoid any of the consequences. I understand exactly why families would flee their countries to the U.S. and I don't blame them. Makes perfect sense. And most are really good people. But it the sovereign right of the U.S. to control who does get in and at what pace. It is the pace of the immigration and the concentration of those populations that has consequences. The current President nixed policies that were starting to stem the flow and so the floodgates were opened again. But as long as the Langleys, West Springfields, Madisons, and Martha's Vineyards of the world aren't impacted, nothing will change. |
Anonymous
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Interesting: in the two years since Lee was renamed to Lewis, the demographics at Lewis have changed quite a bit. Not only have the percentages changed, but the numbers of changed.
There are fewer Black, white and Asian kids there now than two years ago. There is a significant increase (more than 100) of Hispanic students. Maybe, the coming social justice academy is not as appealing as our SB thought it would be. |
Anonymous
There is a certain irony in the only high school in Fairfax that is named after black American (a civil rights leader no less) is now the poorest and most segregated high school in Fairfax. |
Anonymous
But you don’t seem to have the answers and you are talking about it like you know. So just type the answers instead of insults. You will feel better about yourself and have done a public service. |
Anonymous
Throwing in a couple of hundred UMC kids will not fix this problem. And, FWIW, you are always going to find pockets of poverty. You cannot redistribute enough students to fix that. We need a different model for this. Address the problem and the poverty where it is. When more than half of the school is speaking Spanish, we need a different model. And, it is not shifting kids. That just covers up the problem. Do you really think it would be fair to take a neighborhood and shift them to Lewis just to cover up the problem? Do you really think these kids benefit from IB? |
Anonymous
I apologize. I did mean Central little league, not North little league. The one w games at that park between Lewis and the mixing bowl. My mistake. |
Anonymous
There are big new houses zoned for Lewis. I agree about the parks though. People act like Lewis is some slum school. That is a falsehood. The neighborhoods zoned for Lewis are generally very well kept, manicured lawns, maintained homes. Drive around those immigrant neighborhoods and you will see houses where people take pride in themselves and their homes. The issue is tied to ESOL numbers. But people are assuming that those esol families zoned for Lewis are incapable of chosing to live in a "better" school zone, which only works if you ignore that many want to raise their families near family, friends, and a shared cultural community. The issue is far more complicated than the "move some WSHS kids to Lewis" poster wants it to be. It is a generational fix, not one that can be changed overnight by sprinkling some perceived WSHS fairy dust into Lewis. |
Anonymous
"ignore that many want to raise their families near family, friends, and a shared cultural community. " This is Fairfax. Most that live here are transplants from elsewhere. And yes, most families zoned for Lewis would opt out if they had options elsewhere. This is why charter schools are so popular in DC. Second, Spanish Immersion requires reform, such as providing additional instructional support via supplemental English classes. Immerse them in English, so they can participate and thrive in our society. Not isolating them and segregating them, as social justice warriors did by advocating for ebonics in urban schools. Separate is not equal. |
Anonymous
Here are the 2022-2023 FCPS stats showing what I am talking about and why this bump in enrollment at FCPS is just a temporaray issue, mostly due to class of 2026. 2022-2023 school year: Class of 2021: 578 students Class of 2022: 665 students Class of 2023: 642 students Class of 2024: 648 students Class of 2025: 651 students Class of 2026: 719 students (down from its pre-lockdown peak of almost 750 students) Class of 2027: 601 students Class of 2028: 570 students There is a roughly 70 students difference between the rising sophomore class and the 11th/12th grade classes. There is nearly a 150 student difference between the rising sophomore class and the current 8th grade class. The rising 11th and 12th grades at WSHS are both around 75 more students than the typical grade for that school and the rising 9th grade class is 30 students more than the typical class at WSHS. After that, the grades start to normalize back to normal historical enrollment numbers for WSHS. Once class of 2026 graduates, WSHS will be back aeound 2200/2300 students, which is below capacity. It is ridiculous to disrupt so many families and students by rezoning when this is a temporary issue caused by one extraordinarily large class. |
Anonymous
Have you been in those communities feeding into Lewis? They are true communities full of people who take pride in themselves and their surroundings, not so dc slums. |