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Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)
FCPS comprehensive boundary review
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Anonymous
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All of this points to the fact that FCPS never should have been expanding schools at every renovation but should have been using space available at nearby schools to solve capacity issues. West Potomac, Herndon, West Springfield, Madison, etc.
Waste of taxpayer dollars and a vote of no confidence in certain schools by the Board when they refused to use boundary changes to send students to those schools. Now people think their school should automatically get an expansion when they are at or over capacity when we should be moving students. The Board set a bad precedent. |
Anonymous
No crap. That’s obviously what we are doing. Though the correct answer would be to fix that problem rather than take students from safer schools and put them in unsafe schools. |
Anonymous
How do you fix Lewis or Mt Vernon? |
Anonymous
Moving students disrupts the school system more than you realize. It causes disruption in communities and families. Schools do not fall apart because they are overcrowded. Many times the more crowded schools are the more successful ones. Why do people want their kids to stay in those schools? Renovation and additions can also be disruptive. Some of the issue is lack of routine maintenance. When doors are off bathroom stalls, it is not because of age--let's face it. |
Anonymous
Because they have successfully isolated a large proportion of the poor, ESL population in the other schools??? I mean, the true answer is to get to the root of the problem, but blue voters have prevented that for years while at the same time avoiding the consequences. |
Anonymous
This assumes an outcome, and then assumes further outcomes based on political considerations or "optics" rather than sound planning. Moving more kids into Lewis and Mount Vernon is a band-aid that doesn't address the root causes for why these schools have low enrollments. The most obvious root causes are IB, safety concerns, and liberal pupil placement. In Mount Vernon's case, it serves Ft. Belvoir, and military families there have placement options that FCPS can't alter. Hayfield, an AP school, gets a large number of MV kids every year. They need to address the root causes first before reassigning kids. Otherwise, they are just encouraging more families to exit FCPS. There is no need to move anyone out of Langley unless it's overcrowded, and the optics of moving kids out of a recently expanded middle school (Cooper) into one with less capacity (Herndon MS) aren't great, either. A far more reasonable and politically astute approach would be to announce that FCPS is taking a deep dive into the need for AAP centers and IB programs, and updating the outdated 2008 renovation queue, before any boundary changes are implemented. As a fallback, in the short term, they could simply eliminate ES attendance islands, and only change the MS/HS assignments for those islands with the consent of the affected communities. Instead, they are over-selling a product for which there is limited demand, and putting the future electability of many local Democratic politicians in jeopardy. |
Anonymous
The root causes are not fixable. IB is just an excuse to transfer not an actual problem. Either they just give up on the schools or they rezone to try an fill them. Pushing families into those schools is going to infuriate them. Doing it while maintaining laughably economically segregated schools isn't going to happen especially when those schools border higher farms rate schools |
Anonymous
THIS! People care about their kids. What is the first thing people ask when looking for a house? You cannot disregard that --no matter how many times you say there is no assurance. Look for the market to slide if this continues. |
Anonymous
The root cause is uncontrolled immigration for 25-30 years. That is the simple fact. |
Anonymous
When you have gone far enough down a certain road, it's an even worse precedent to abandon that to the detriment of the limited number of remaining schools. All it does is tell people that the School Board doesn't have a clue what it's doing and is prepared to rob Peter to pay Paul. Far-right folks who object to every tax bill and far-left liberals who salivate at the opportunity to stick it to certain schools they deem "privileged" find this prospect enticing. Many of us in the middle consider it an abomination, and the county really isn't going to benefit when the tax base inevitably declines due to FCPS's incompetence. |
Anonymous
A very large percentage of high school transfers involve IB students transferring to AP schools or vice versa. FCPS has twice as many AP schools as IB, and IB is more expensive per student, so having AP at all or almost all the schools would reduce costs and also reduce pupil placements out of schools like Lewis and Mount Vernon, which are both IB, as well as out of Herndon, which is AP. Planning would become easier with more predicable enrollments and fewer pupil placements. I don't really know what the rest of your post is getting at. Yes, if families feel their kids are being rezoned into different schools for purely expedient reasons by a school system that isn't doing the hard work to make those schools more attractive, they are going to object. Some will have no other options, and will go along with the changes, but there will be further attrition from FCPS and an exit of higher-income taxpayers from the county. Neither of these things is in Fairfax's long-term interests. |
Anonymous
Why do people want students to not pupil place from Lewis or Mt. Vernon....it's an awfully transparent attempt at classism, racism, etc. Are you really scared of these students transferring from these schools? Nobody talks about the other side of the pyramid and kids placing from Herndon to langley. |
Anonymous
| IB is the easiest excuse for pupil placement. Remove it and the same students leaving now will find other reasons. If anything, it's an escape valve for the families who would be the loudest complaining about their kids getting substandard educations if they were forced into those schools. There is no way to make Lewis or Mt Vernon acceptable to a family currently zoned for West Springfield or Hayfield or even West Potomac. The composition of the student body means that resources will be focused on remediation and that any class not on the highest track is going to move at a snails pace at best. |
Anonymous
The goal should be to make these schools more attractive to their current populations, rather than expand the boundaries and just end up with more kids pupil placing out of these schools, which just reinforces the message that these schools are problematic and that FCPS's purported solutions are ineffective. Herndon and Langley are both AP, and the limited number of students pupil placing from Herndon to Langley are taking a foreign language available at Langley but not Herndon. You could consider adding those languages to Herndon and other schools, or eliminating them from Langley and making them on-line courses, but in general pupil placements for a foreign language are a small fraction of total pupil placements compared to pupil placements for IB vs. AP. They aren't large enough in numbers to be particularly relevant to a discussion about boundary changes due to schools being over capacity or under enrolled. |
Anonymous
| Will there be poors? |