Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Someone pupil placing for AP cares about the availability of an advanced academic track. That requires a sufficient cohort. Given the IB passage rates and Lewis and Mt Vernon, it's safe to say that does not exist. Do you just offer the classes knowing there will only be a couple of kids in Physics C or linear algebra?
I think the answer to the bold is absolutely yes as one incentive to get students back to these schools. Low student to teacher ratio in advanced classes would be a good thing.
Schools are staffed based on the number of students. If you offer advanced classes for two or three kids, that means you're packing even more kids into regular classes.
The staffing formulas are not the same at every school, and you're making assumptions that may or may not be correct about how many kids would enroll in certain classes at Lewis and Mount Vernon if IB were replaced with AP and the number of out-bound pupil placements came down.
Do you really think there is enough room in the budget for them to add teachers to teach empty classes?
Let's say it a little louder since you missed it the first several times: you're making assumptions that these classes will be empty or minimally enrolled.
Bottom line is that, if we are to retain IB, it should be because it's the best program for a particular school (and it isn't at many schools), not merely because it gives some families an ability to engage in arbitrage by buying in a less expensive area zoned to an IB school and then pupil placing their kid to an AP school.
Schools that have trouble offering IB Math HL are suddenly going to be able to offer calc AB, calc BC, multivariable and linear algebra? That's minimum that the neighboring schools offer
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Someone pupil placing for AP cares about the availability of an advanced academic track. That requires a sufficient cohort. Given the IB passage rates and Lewis and Mt Vernon, it's safe to say that does not exist. Do you just offer the classes knowing there will only be a couple of kids in Physics C or linear algebra?
I think the answer to the bold is absolutely yes as one incentive to get students back to these schools. Low student to teacher ratio in advanced classes would be a good thing.
Schools are staffed based on the number of students. If you offer advanced classes for two or three kids, that means you're packing even more kids into regular classes.
The staffing formulas are not the same at every school, and you're making assumptions that may or may not be correct about how many kids would enroll in certain classes at Lewis and Mount Vernon if IB were replaced with AP and the number of out-bound pupil placements came down.
Do you really think there is enough room in the budget for them to add teachers to teach empty classes?
The irony here is that we're currently paying to keep Lewis and Mount Vernon as IB schools, and the IBO requires that every IB World School be able to offer sufficient IB classes for students to receive the IB diploma. That continues to be the case whether those schools together have fewer than a dozen IB diploma recipients.
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Someone pupil placing for AP cares about the availability of an advanced academic track. That requires a sufficient cohort. Given the IB passage rates and Lewis and Mt Vernon, it's safe to say that does not exist. Do you just offer the classes knowing there will only be a couple of kids in Physics C or linear algebra?
I think the answer to the bold is absolutely yes as one incentive to get students back to these schools. Low student to teacher ratio in advanced classes would be a good thing.
Schools are staffed based on the number of students. If you offer advanced classes for two or three kids, that means you're packing even more kids into regular classes.
No, this would be an additional supplement to the existing staff above and beyond the normal.
Otherwise, isn't the system set up to bleed off all the advanced students from the poorer schools and have them go to the wealthier schools that do offer the classes? This becomes a downward spiral for the poorer schools. Or you are a poor kid who is taking advanced classes, but your family can't arrange to get you to another school via pupil placement (can't provide transportation). So now this student can't take the classes he or she needs.
The downward spiral has already happened. There are plenty of wealthy and middle class neighborhoods in the Mt Vernon catchment. They either pupil place or opt for private. A very few go to Mt Vernon
So, yes, FCPS set up rules and conditions that were bound to result in the bifurcated (rich, poor or higher performing and lower performing) schools we have now. That along with unchecked immigration and Great Schools type websites...
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Someone pupil placing for AP cares about the availability of an advanced academic track. That requires a sufficient cohort. Given the IB passage rates and Lewis and Mt Vernon, it's safe to say that does not exist. Do you just offer the classes knowing there will only be a couple of kids in Physics C or linear algebra?
I think the answer to the bold is absolutely yes as one incentive to get students back to these schools. Low student to teacher ratio in advanced classes would be a good thing.
Schools are staffed based on the number of students. If you offer advanced classes for two or three kids, that means you're packing even more kids into regular classes.
No, this would be an additional supplement to the existing staff above and beyond the normal.
Otherwise, isn't the system set up to bleed off all the advanced students from the poorer schools and have them go to the wealthier schools that do offer the classes? This becomes a downward spiral for the poorer schools. Or you are a poor kid who is taking advanced classes, but your family can't arrange to get you to another school via pupil placement (can't provide transportation). So now this student can't take the classes he or she needs.
The downward spiral has already happened. There are plenty of wealthy and middle class neighborhoods in the Mt Vernon catchment. They either pupil place or opt for private. A very few go to Mt Vernon
So, yes, FCPS set up rules and conditions that were bound to result in the bifurcated (rich, poor or higher performing and lower performing) schools we have now. That along with unchecked immigration and Great Schools type websites...
Far more kids go to private than pupil place (especially if you discount the military kids pupil placing by right). When Ft Hunt high closed one of Groveton or Mt Vernon was going to end up small and under enrolled. It ended up being Mt Vernon
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Someone pupil placing for AP cares about the availability of an advanced academic track. That requires a sufficient cohort. Given the IB passage rates and Lewis and Mt Vernon, it's safe to say that does not exist. Do you just offer the classes knowing there will only be a couple of kids in Physics C or linear algebra?
I think the answer to the bold is absolutely yes as one incentive to get students back to these schools. Low student to teacher ratio in advanced classes would be a good thing.
Schools are staffed based on the number of students. If you offer advanced classes for two or three kids, that means you're packing even more kids into regular classes.
No, this would be an additional supplement to the existing staff above and beyond the normal.
Otherwise, isn't the system set up to bleed off all the advanced students from the poorer schools and have them go to the wealthier schools that do offer the classes? This becomes a downward spiral for the poorer schools. Or you are a poor kid who is taking advanced classes, but your family can't arrange to get you to another school via pupil placement (can't provide transportation). So now this student can't take the classes he or she needs.
The downward spiral has already happened. There are plenty of wealthy and middle class neighborhoods in the Mt Vernon catchment. They either pupil place or opt for private. A very few go to Mt Vernon
So, yes, FCPS set up rules and conditions that were bound to result in the bifurcated (rich, poor or higher performing and lower performing) schools we have now. That along with unchecked immigration and Great Schools type websites...
Far more kids go to private than pupil place (especially if you discount the military kids pupil placing by right). When Ft Hunt high closed one of Groveton or Mt Vernon was going to end up small and under enrolled. It ended up being Mt Vernon
Only because they combined Groveton and Fort Hunt to create West Potomac, when they could have divided Fort Hunt between Groveton and Mount Vernon. Otherwise the obvious assumption would be that closing one HS in an area would increase the enrollment at nearby schools.
Then, years later of course, they expanded West Potomac to 3000 and left Mount Vernon under-enrolled. Classically bad decision engineered by the likes of Karen Corbett Sanders with other area politicians like Scott Surovell cheering FCPS on.
But since that was such an obvious blunder, now they can't expand any other schools regardless of the need, right? Because why commit one blunder when you can commit two?
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Someone pupil placing for AP cares about the availability of an advanced academic track. That requires a sufficient cohort. Given the IB passage rates and Lewis and Mt Vernon, it's safe to say that does not exist. Do you just offer the classes knowing there will only be a couple of kids in Physics C or linear algebra?
I think the answer to the bold is absolutely yes as one incentive to get students back to these schools. Low student to teacher ratio in advanced classes would be a good thing.
Schools are staffed based on the number of students. If you offer advanced classes for two or three kids, that means you're packing even more kids into regular classes.
No, this would be an additional supplement to the existing staff above and beyond the normal.
Otherwise, isn't the system set up to bleed off all the advanced students from the poorer schools and have them go to the wealthier schools that do offer the classes? This becomes a downward spiral for the poorer schools. Or you are a poor kid who is taking advanced classes, but your family can't arrange to get you to another school via pupil placement (can't provide transportation). So now this student can't take the classes he or she needs.
The downward spiral has already happened. There are plenty of wealthy and middle class neighborhoods in the Mt Vernon catchment. They either pupil place or opt for private. A very few go to Mt Vernon
So, yes, FCPS set up rules and conditions that were bound to result in the bifurcated (rich, poor or higher performing and lower performing) schools we have now. That along with unchecked immigration and Great Schools type websites...
Far more kids go to private than pupil place (especially if you discount the military kids pupil placing by right). When Ft Hunt high closed one of Groveton or Mt Vernon was going to end up small and under enrolled. It ended up being Mt Vernon
Only because they combined Groveton and Fort Hunt to create West Potomac, when they could have divided Fort Hunt between Groveton and Mount Vernon. Otherwise the obvious assumption would be that closing one HS in an area would increase the enrollment at nearby schools.
Then, years later of course, they expanded West Potomac to 3000 and left Mount Vernon under-enrolled. Classically bad decision engineered by the likes of Karen Corbett Sanders with other area politicians like Scott Surovell cheering FCPS on.
But since that was such an obvious blunder, now they can't expand any other schools regardless of the need, right? Because why commit one blunder when you can commit two?
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Someone pupil placing for AP cares about the availability of an advanced academic track. That requires a sufficient cohort. Given the IB passage rates and Lewis and Mt Vernon, it's safe to say that does not exist. Do you just offer the classes knowing there will only be a couple of kids in Physics C or linear algebra?
I think the answer to the bold is absolutely yes as one incentive to get students back to these schools. Low student to teacher ratio in advanced classes would be a good thing.
Schools are staffed based on the number of students. If you offer advanced classes for two or three kids, that means you're packing even more kids into regular classes.
No, this would be an additional supplement to the existing staff above and beyond the normal.
Otherwise, isn't the system set up to bleed off all the advanced students from the poorer schools and have them go to the wealthier schools that do offer the classes? This becomes a downward spiral for the poorer schools. Or you are a poor kid who is taking advanced classes, but your family can't arrange to get you to another school via pupil placement (can't provide transportation). So now this student can't take the classes he or she needs.
The downward spiral has already happened. There are plenty of wealthy and middle class neighborhoods in the Mt Vernon catchment. They either pupil place or opt for private. A very few go to Mt Vernon
So, yes, FCPS set up rules and conditions that were bound to result in the bifurcated (rich, poor or higher performing and lower performing) schools we have now. That along with unchecked immigration and Great Schools type websites...
Far more kids go to private than pupil place (especially if you discount the military kids pupil placing by right). When Ft Hunt high closed one of Groveton or Mt Vernon was going to end up small and under enrolled. It ended up being Mt Vernon
Only because they combined Groveton and Fort Hunt to create West Potomac, when they could have divided Fort Hunt between Groveton and Mount Vernon. Otherwise the obvious assumption would be that closing one HS in an area would increase the enrollment at nearby schools.
Then, years later of course, they expanded West Potomac to 3000 and left Mount Vernon under-enrolled. Classically bad decision engineered by the likes of Karen Corbett Sanders with other area politicians like Scott Surovell cheering FCPS on.
But since that was such an obvious blunder, now they can't expand any other schools regardless of the need, right? Because why commit one blunder when you can commit two?
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Someone pupil placing for AP cares about the availability of an advanced academic track. That requires a sufficient cohort. Given the IB passage rates and Lewis and Mt Vernon, it's safe to say that does not exist. Do you just offer the classes knowing there will only be a couple of kids in Physics C or linear algebra?
I think the answer to the bold is absolutely yes as one incentive to get students back to these schools. Low student to teacher ratio in advanced classes would be a good thing.
Schools are staffed based on the number of students. If you offer advanced classes for two or three kids, that means you're packing even more kids into regular classes.
No, this would be an additional supplement to the existing staff above and beyond the normal.
Otherwise, isn't the system set up to bleed off all the advanced students from the poorer schools and have them go to the wealthier schools that do offer the classes? This becomes a downward spiral for the poorer schools. Or you are a poor kid who is taking advanced classes, but your family can't arrange to get you to another school via pupil placement (can't provide transportation). So now this student can't take the classes he or she needs.
The downward spiral has already happened. There are plenty of wealthy and middle class neighborhoods in the Mt Vernon catchment. They either pupil place or opt for private. A very few go to Mt Vernon
So, yes, FCPS set up rules and conditions that were bound to result in the bifurcated (rich, poor or higher performing and lower performing) schools we have now. That along with unchecked immigration and Great Schools type websites...
Far more kids go to private than pupil place (especially if you discount the military kids pupil placing by right). When Ft Hunt high closed one of Groveton or Mt Vernon was going to end up small and under enrolled. It ended up being Mt Vernon
Only because they combined Groveton and Fort Hunt to create West Potomac, when they could have divided Fort Hunt between Groveton and Mount Vernon. Otherwise the obvious assumption would be that closing one HS in an area would increase the enrollment at nearby schools.
Then, years later of course, they expanded West Potomac to 3000 and left Mount Vernon under-enrolled. Classically bad decision engineered by the likes of Karen Corbett Sanders with other area politicians like Scott Surovell cheering FCPS on.
But since that was such an obvious blunder, now they can't expand any other schools regardless of the need, right? Because why commit one blunder when you can commit two?
they expanded Madison the year before
Not to 3000 seats they didn't.
Capacity this year is 2,371 and enrollment is 2,081. Prior to the addition, capacity was 2,113. The expansion was every bit as unnecessary as West Potomac's
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think it’s very telling that you think something can be done to make families want to stay at their in bounds school while in the same breath making it clear that there’s nothing that could be done that would make it even slightly acceptable for you to send your kid to that same school. (And I say this as someone whose kids stay at their in bounds less desirable FCPS schools.)
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think it’s very telling that you think something can be done to make families want to stay at their in bounds school while in the same breath making it clear that there’s nothing that could be done that would make it even slightly acceptable for you to send your kid to that same school. (And I say this as someone whose kids stay at their in bounds less desirable FCPS schools.)
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think it’s very telling that you think something can be done to make families want to stay at their in bounds school while in the same breath making it clear that there’s nothing that could be done that would make it even slightly acceptable for you to send your kid to that same school. (And I say this as someone whose kids stay at their in bounds less desirable FCPS schools.)
We’re different posters.
I understand that some people are okay with a poorer performing school or can’t afford alternatives. Just not sure why the school board thinks the boundary changes are going to solve anything.
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think it’s very telling that you think something can be done to make families want to stay at their in bounds school while in the same breath making it clear that there’s nothing that could be done that would make it even slightly acceptable for you to send your kid to that same school. (And I say this as someone whose kids stay at their in bounds less desirable FCPS schools.)
If they make these schools more attractive, more students will stay there, and that should be the goal in the first instance. If, then, at some point, they really need to redistrict kids to those schools, the school will also be more attractive to the rezoned kids.
On the other hand, if they don't make the schools more attractive, and merely rezone students there, many of the rezoned students simply won't end up attending. We all know this.
Is your goal simply to punish other families by rezoning them to schools they won't allow their kids to attend in their current state (failing IB programs, security issues, etc)? Are you worried that, if we undertook efforts to strengthen these schools, it will reflect adversely on you because you send your kid to a "less desirable" (your words) school now?
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think it’s very telling that you think something can be done to make families want to stay at their in bounds school while in the same breath making it clear that there’s nothing that could be done that would make it even slightly acceptable for you to send your kid to that same school. (And I say this as someone whose kids stay at their in bounds less desirable FCPS schools.)
If they make these schools more attractive, more students will stay there, and that should be the goal in the first instance. If, then, at some point, they really need to redistrict kids to those schools, the school will also be more attractive to the rezoned kids.
On the other hand, if they don't make the schools more attractive, and merely rezone students there, many of the rezoned students simply won't end up attending. We all know this.
Is your goal simply to punish other families by rezoning them to schools they won't allow their kids to attend in their current state (failing IB programs, security issues, etc)? Are you worried that, if we undertook efforts to strengthen these schools, it will reflect adversely on you because you send your kid to a "less desirable" (your words) school now?
There are many here who just want to soak the perceived rich. It’s a way for them to channel their DEI energy now that November went so badly for them.
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think it’s very telling that you think something can be done to make families want to stay at their in bounds school while in the same breath making it clear that there’s nothing that could be done that would make it even slightly acceptable for you to send your kid to that same school. (And I say this as someone whose kids stay at their in bounds less desirable FCPS schools.)
If they make these schools more attractive, more students will stay there, and that should be the goal in the first instance. If, then, at some point, they really need to redistrict kids to those schools, the school will also be more attractive to the rezoned kids.
On the other hand, if they don't make the schools more attractive, and merely rezone students there, many of the rezoned students simply won't end up attending. We all know this.
Is your goal simply to punish other families by rezoning them to schools they won't allow their kids to attend in their current state (failing IB programs, security issues, etc)? Are you worried that, if we undertook efforts to strengthen these schools, it will reflect adversely on you because you send your kid to a "less desirable" (your words) school now?
Other than closing escape hatches, I've yet to hear anyone actually offer a way to make Lewis or Mt Vernon more attractive. How do you make a barely accredited school appeal to families that care about education?
Anonymous wrote:Do the people representing each pyramid all have children currently enrolled in FCPS?
No they do not, this was confirmed at the Mount Vernon community meeting when one of the community reps had only older children who had already graduated.
I think this is good. Most adults in Fairfax County do not have children in the schools, but since they are also part of the community and also pay taxes that fund the schools, they should have a say too.
Except when this argument is applied to the immigration issue, the same folks say stfu "just because you pay property taxes doesn't mean your kid has priority over the new arrival undocumented ESL kids". So yeah miss me with this. They should not have an equal say as parents with children in FCPS.
Parents already have an outsized role here, not asking for parity - but it’s nice that some of the committee member represent the majority.
If you don’t include their voices, you will have a problem with community support and a much harder time paying for it all.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the key to better schools is getting more people who don’t have any significant stake more involved. 🙄
Thinking that people who live in your community with no children in public schools means they do not have a stake in the public schools is not correct. Of course they have a stake. They are part of the community.
Thinking that non parents should have more than minimal representation on the committee that primarily affects school kids is like saying I should have a say in the California interstate Highway system because I drive there once every couple of years.
+1
2 or 3 seats out of 50 would be the right amount of voice. The vast majority should have been parents.
According to FCPS, there are almost 183,000 students in FCPS.
Some households have more than one adult and some households have more than one child in the public schools. So, any guesses for what percentage of adults in the county have no children currently in the schools? My guess is between 60-70%.
You seem to be saying that the very large majority of households with no children currently enrolled in the public schools only deserve 4-6% representation. I am not suggesting that it should be commensurate with the population or even close to it, but it should be more than 4-6%. Perhaps, 2-3 seats for those with under 5 year olds, 2-3 seats for those whose children are within 5 years of their high school graduation and 2-3 for the others.
DP. My biggest issue with the whole process is that the school board has intentionally marginalized the very families who will be most affected by the changes. That’s of course intentional but it’s just so richly ironic that the left now seeks to silence its victims.
It's ironic that all your assumptions are based on conspiracy.
DP. It all starts with the fact that no one associated with FCPS has remotely made a compelling case for boundary adjustments at a time when enrollment is flat and birth rates are declining. Add to that the fact that, as discussed earlier, the purported benefits described by FCPS seem contrived.
All told, it feels like we’re being asked to go along with some Orwellian farce, where anything can be done to advance an “equity” agenda, so long as that word is replaced with “efficiency” as often as possible.
Maybe the concerns expressed by posters here will turn out to be unfounded, and the scale of the changes will be more modest and aligned with what the affected communities actually want. If so, that will be despite the lack of candor on the part of Reid and the School Board, and largely due to people finding other avenues to express their concerns even when Reid and the School Board tried their hardest to orchestrate a process where those concerns would be ignored.
Overall enrollment is flat to declining but that isn’t true across the system. Enrollment is projected to decline in many boundaries but increase in other boundaries. That’s a great argument for redistricting. Reading through this thread, many say the solution for those growing areas is not redistricting but school expansions (“other schools got them so we should too”). But both FCPS administration and the school board have said in the last year that FCPS cannot afford to undertake the extensive renovations and expansions it has pursued to date, and that, given budget realities and interest rates, FCPS needs to focus its capital budget on renovstions that are much more limited in scope, i.e., which are necessary to keep its aging facilities / construction safe for children. In other words, more capacity isn’t coming where needed and FCPS needs to live within its means, so kids need to be moved.
“We screwed up and added seats where they weren’t most needed, so now we’re going to move your kids to Herndon to cover up our mistakes. Otherwise we can’t keep giving ourselves raises. Please accept our apologies.”
Why is moving some kids to Herndon so terrible? Do your kids know any current students? From what we hear, it’s not a hell-hole as many hear believe it to be.
I’m not interested in anyone trying to convince me where I should send my kids, especially when there is a bigger gang presence in that school. That’s a full stop for us. Hard no.
No one is trying to convince you. They are going to draw lines and you are free to accept them, move, or pay for private school
DP. The question for you is why you apparently think it's a good thing for them to redraw the lines when the main reason the lines may be redrawn is to gloss over their own incompetence. Accepting this is tantamount to rewarding them for malfeasance.
They are going to push families into Lewis and Mt Vernon. Doing that while leaving Langley alone won't happen. You don't have to like it, but having a school with less than 5% FARMS while pushing kids into majority FARMS schools isn't going to happen
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think it’s very telling that you think something can be done to make families want to stay at their in bounds school while in the same breath making it clear that there’s nothing that could be done that would make it even slightly acceptable for you to send your kid to that same school. (And I say this as someone whose kids stay at their in bounds less desirable FCPS schools.)
+ 1. Very telling. Gross actually.
What's gross is thinking that simply moving kids around like widgets is the solution. It's gross because it's so obviously NOT a solution that the only rational explanation would be to disrupt the education of other kids.
I mean, that may be what the Democrats who control FCPS and the county are about these days (they used to care about good government and strong schools), but it's not a winning formula.
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