So was the decline based on students aging out of elementary school? Kilmer is grotesquely overcrowded. Even with a 10 room modular it is 118% and only gets 20 in for AAP and a total of 39 from Thoreau. How is it possible that Kilmer, with no expansion of Kilmer Center square footage, lost about 200 program capacity seats? That is Providence District - Karl Fritsch. CIP 25-29 984 modular 1227 [10 rooms] CIP 26-30 791 modular 1023 [10 rooms difference 193 204 Westbriar Island and Westbriar are under Meren-Hunter Mill District. The Island is between Sunrise Valley [Meren] and Colvin Run {Lady]yet Thru or Thru/FCPS moved it to Wolf Trap. |
School Digger has (at least the last time I checked a year or two ago) some features that Great Schools lacks. For example, they graph achievement across time. You can really see the peaks and valleys. |
I don't think these changes will occur. They'll get thrown out the window with the conversation about split feeders. |
I think the smartest thing for a parent to do is go to the Virginia DOE and FCPS school profiles and look at the data themselves. |
Is there any place to pull data on the number of kids that feed into a HS from each MS? |
Let's be real, reputation for excellence = higher income families willing to invest in enrichment, tutoring, and academic extra curriculars. We should all know that the data show that regions with higher incomes, have better academic outcomes. Swap Langley kids with Justice kids and keep the same facilities and the same teachers and the same admin and Justice will suddenly have amazing test scores and Langley's test scores will drop. The school rankings for FCPS track with the economic wealth of the student population. Like it or not, SLHS test scores moved to the middle of FCPS rankings when the county moved kids from other HS to SLHS 20 some years ago. I doubt that there was a significant gain in test scores for the FARMs population that makes up the school. The change came from the new students' tests scores. TJ's scores are high because the kids have to meet certain criteria to apply and be accepted to TJ. Many of the strongest students in FCPS, LCPS, APS apply to TJ. Mclean, Langley, and Oakton have high test scores because the families value school, push their kids to attend highly ranked colleges, and are able/willing to pay for enrichment and tutoring to make sure that kids achieve high test scores and go to college. There is nothing wrong with any of that but those schools' reputations have little to do with the schools and more to do with the wealth in the area. |
So Sunrise Valley is to the west of the Westbriar island, Colvin Run is to the east and north, and Wolftrap (not "Wolf Trap") is to the south. Moving the island to Wolftrap, which is already a fairly even split feeder to Madison and Marshall, aligns with keeping those families at Kilmer/Marshall. Sunrise Valley feeds to Hughes/South Lakes, and Colvin Run feeds to Cooper/Langley. Ever since Colvin Run opened, Westbriar kids in the island have been bussed past Colvin Run on their west to Westbriar. Going to Wolftrap is a straight shot south down Beulah Road. This is actually one of the changes that probably makes sense. It's not credible that Kilmer only has a program capacity of 791 without the modular. The school got renovated in the early 2000s and they would not have left it with so little capacity. Something funny is going on there but, with Frisch as the board member and Kilmer plunked in Region 5 with the rest of the Marshall pyramid, no one seems to be in any hurry to figure out why there was such a big drop in the stated capacities. |
They can't throw all those changes out if they want to bridge the Timber Lane attendance island and keep it at McLean. Maybe they modify it. That area south of Route 50 proposed to move to Longfellow while remaining at Falls Church, and which would create a crazy split feeder at Longfellow, doesn't make any sense, either. |
When is next BRAC? FOIA mandates that the public can attend, right? |
The factors that have resulted in high scores at TJ are generaly the same as the factors that result in high scores at McLean, Langley, and Oakton. Of course, some of that relates to family resources and support, but not all of it. All these schools benefit from a wider community of staff, teachers, parents, and students pulling together, for the most part, to make those schools academically strong environments. Same can be said for some other schools like Chantilly as well. Treating everything as determined purely by family economics is way too simplistic. |
4/25, and the public is barred from attending. Whether that is legal or not is another question. Then some of the materials from the 4/25 meeting will get posted a few days later. |
That’s a violation of FOIA law, the school board created that committee. |
If a MS is a straight feeder to a high school, you can generally figure that out from the FCPS enrollment statistics. If a school is a split feeder, FCPS currently hides the ball on the split, even though the information is readily available to FCPS staff. If you try and FOIA that information, they will demand hundreds of dollars up front to process a request. Some of that information may be shared in connection with the 4/25 BRAC meeting in a few weeks, since the purpose of that meeting is to discuss the potential elimination or modification of split feeders. It is not practicable to eliminate all of them, but it looks like they will prioritize any split feeders that are 80-20% or more lopsided. Most of the split feeders split to two MS or two HS but there are some that split to three (or even four when the AAP kids are included). For example, Carson splits to Oakton, South Lakes, and Westfield (and to Chantilly if AAP is included), and Thoreau splits to Madison, Marshall, and Oakton. Ironically, when Thru Consulting came up with scenarios to eliminate the attendance islands on 4/11 they proposed multiple new split feeders that would be exactly the type of split feeders they've suggested they'll be looking at on 4/25. Good way to keep themselves busy, I guess. |
Great Schools is the worst, School Digger is better if you care about SOL scores, and US News is best for high schools when it comes to overall academic performance and college readiness. |
What would you do about Kilmer? I posted that stuff including the Karl Fritsch Kilmer mystery. Decades ago it was an undercapacity dump with no AAP/GT...now way over and divested of most transfer in AAP. So the current island can get to Colvin Run from Beulah driving through Shouse Village. It's a shorter distance than Wolftrap and would move some out of Kilmer. |