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?
I don’t think FCPS is doing it to punish anyone, and I certainly don’t think anyone deserves to be punished (I’m not even sure why there would be punishment). I also don’t see being assigned to any particular school as a punishment. We’re very UMC but were assigned to one of the “less desirable” FCPS schools. We could’ve afforded private school. But there has been nothing at any time that has made us feel that our kids haven’t been getting a very good education. So there was no reason to go private or to move. I think too many parents don’t give schools a chance and let reputations scare them from even trying. (It’s kind of like the thread in off topic about Hampton Inn, etc - people like non-highly-regarded things when they try them but are too afraid to say it anywhere except an anonymous message board. How silly.)
As for why FCPS is doing this, I think a very large part is a fiscal move. There is a budget crisis. Commercial real estate hasn’t recovered, eroding the tax base. Some schools are overcrowded. And there are seats available. But the seats require re-drawing the boundaries to fill. I think my only concerns are reducing (preferably, eliminating) split feeders and making sure that all resources (seats) available are being used before creating any new seats. I’d rather the capital dollars be spent on fixing the buildings than expanding any buildings.
At present, there is a good chance they are going to redistrict without grandfathering, which many would view as highly disruptive and indeed punitive.
Your post comes across as if you'd see it as a personal rebuke if someone wasn't keen on being redistricted to your school. It may not have anything to do with your school, but just the preferences that people have for their existing schools, which they may have carefully picked. Making the "less desirable" schools more desirable, however, would only redound to your benefit.
Many of us would like to see FCPS come up with a new renovation queue, so that the oldest schools that received the cheapest renovations don't get a double whammy in the coming decades. If the county is really in a crisis mode, they should own up to that and not balance their budget on the backs of FCPS families. And it is really quite offensive for parents at schools that have received additions or renovations that we all paid for to say "no mas" and then pretend they are taking the high road.
I really don’t care if anyone wants to go to my kids school. I am not looking for a financial boost to my house - would only increase my taxes. My point truly is just that too many people get worked up about the fear of being sent to “that” school when quite likely it’s nowhere near what you think. Plus, if your kid is one of 400+ moving to “that” school, chances are “that” school is going to change dramatically (and no doubt for the better since your kid will be there).
As I said earlier in this thread, myself and many others in my West Springfield community, are willing to redistrict to Lewis (or South County or LBSS) for our younger kids who would start there as freshmen. In fact, I think there could be a lot of benefit to moving to a school with less competition for sports, theater, etc. I would hope they will continue expanding their AP offerings. But, I am 100% opposed to making my current freshman student switch high schools between his sophomore and junior year, which the school board has left as a very real possibility. I think when I looked at what they approved in that 8130 policy was when I got really upset about boundary changes. It's a ridiculous document and makes me completely untrusting of anything they propose moving forward.
This School Board includes some awful people who are unwilling to make decisions and instead insisted on their need to “keep all the options open,” even if that meant greater uncertainty and anxiety over an extended period of time for the people they are supposed to represent.
Very few of them should ever hold office again, and certainly not Rachna Sizemore-Heizer, Sandy Anderson, or Kyle McDaniel.
When we moved here, we chose our neighborhood for its community feel. We had toddlers and were concerned about the elementary school. We found a neighborhood with a walkable school and were extremely happy with it. The middle school and high school are SHORT bus rides. This made being part of the school community very easy.
The high school is good--but not the very top tier and that is fine. It is and has been crowded for years, but meets the needs.
Some people look for other considerations. It may be an immersion program or a high school language program. It may that a small high school is preferred. It may be a theater program. Any number of considerations.
The point is that people have different wishes. Redistricting denies families their wishes. I would be extremely disappointed if my school--which is crowded--sends my neighborhood further away. I'm sure that people in Great Falls likely wanted Langley High School. That would not be my preference, but I understand that. Langley is not overcrowded and it does not make sense to me to disrupt students just to please the School Board.
I'm sure the same is true throughout Fairfax County.
It seems to me that Lewis is the school most discussed on this thread. I have experience teaching in an extremely poor elementary school. We managed to get grants to help the kids and some of the results were remarkable.
POOR KIDS CAN ALSO LEARN. It seems that the School Board thinks the only way they can succeed is by pouring in affluent kids. How about building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down? From the map, it appears that the Lewis boundary is reasonable. Why not work on building a community at the school? It takes work. Apply for a grant to have special assistance. Acknowledge that language is a problem and address it.
Anonymous wrote:When we moved here, we chose our neighborhood for its community feel. We had toddlers and were concerned about the elementary school. We found a neighborhood with a walkable school and were extremely happy with it. The middle school and high school are SHORT bus rides. This made being part of the school community very easy.
The high school is good--but not the very top tier and that is fine. It is and has been crowded for years, but meets the needs.
Some people look for other considerations. It may be an immersion program or a high school language program. It may that a small high school is preferred. It may be a theater program. Any number of considerations.
The point is that people have different wishes. Redistricting denies families their wishes. I would be extremely disappointed if my school--which is crowded--sends my neighborhood further away. I'm sure that people in Great Falls likely wanted Langley High School. That would not be my preference, but I understand that. Langley is not overcrowded and it does not make sense to me to disrupt students just to please the School Board.
I'm sure the same is true throughout Fairfax County.
It seems to me that Lewis is the school most discussed on this thread. I have experience teaching in an extremely poor elementary school. We managed to get grants to help the kids and some of the results were remarkable.
POOR KIDS CAN ALSO LEARN. It seems that the School Board thinks the only way they can succeed is by pouring in affluent kids. How about building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down? From the map, it appears that the Lewis boundary is reasonable. Why not work on building a community at the school? It takes work. Apply for a grant to have special assistance. Acknowledge that language is a problem and address it.
Omg are you seriously calling all the kids at the worse performing schools POOR? Get a grip. RICH KIDS CAN ALSO PERFORM POORLY. MIDDLE CLASS KIDS ALSO.
Anonymous wrote:When we moved here, we chose our neighborhood for its community feel. We had toddlers and were concerned about the elementary school. We found a neighborhood with a walkable school and were extremely happy with it. The middle school and high school are SHORT bus rides. This made being part of the school community very easy.
The high school is good--but not the very top tier and that is fine. It is and has been crowded for years, but meets the needs.
Some people look for other considerations. It may be an immersion program or a high school language program. It may that a small high school is preferred. It may be a theater program. Any number of considerations.
The point is that people have different wishes. Redistricting denies families their wishes. I would be extremely disappointed if my school--which is crowded--sends my neighborhood further away. I'm sure that people in Great Falls likely wanted Langley High School. That would not be my preference, but I understand that. Langley is not overcrowded and it does not make sense to me to disrupt students just to please the School Board.
I'm sure the same is true throughout Fairfax County.
It seems to me that Lewis is the school most discussed on this thread. I have experience teaching in an extremely poor elementary school. We managed to get grants to help the kids and some of the results were remarkable.
POOR KIDS CAN ALSO LEARN. It seems that the School Board thinks the only way they can succeed is by pouring in affluent kids. How about building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down? From the map, it appears that the Lewis boundary is reasonable. Why not work on building a community at the school? It takes work. Apply for a grant to have special assistance. Acknowledge that language is a problem and address it.
Omg are you seriously calling all the kids at the worse performing schools POOR? Get a grip. RICH KIDS CAN ALSO PERFORM POORLY. MIDDLE CLASS KIDS ALSO.
Anonymous wrote:When we moved here, we chose our neighborhood for its community feel. We had toddlers and were concerned about the elementary school. We found a neighborhood with a walkable school and were extremely happy with it. The middle school and high school are SHORT bus rides. This made being part of the school community very easy.
The high school is good--but not the very top tier and that is fine. It is and has been crowded for years, but meets the needs.
Some people look for other considerations. It may be an immersion program or a high school language program. It may that a small high school is preferred. It may be a theater program. Any number of considerations.
The point is that people have different wishes. Redistricting denies families their wishes. I would be extremely disappointed if my school--which is crowded--sends my neighborhood further away. I'm sure that people in Great Falls likely wanted Langley High School. That would not be my preference, but I understand that. Langley is not overcrowded and it does not make sense to me to disrupt students just to please the School Board.
I'm sure the same is true throughout Fairfax County.
It seems to me that Lewis is the school most discussed on this thread. I have experience teaching in an extremely poor elementary school. We managed to get grants to help the kids and some of the results were remarkable.
POOR KIDS CAN ALSO LEARN. It seems that the School Board thinks the only way they can succeed is by pouring in affluent kids. How about building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down? From the map, it appears that the Lewis boundary is reasonable. Why not work on building a community at the school? It takes work. Apply for a grant to have special assistance. Acknowledge that language is a problem and address it.
Since an apparent troll went to town on your post, just wanted to say thanks for sharing this. It's very thoughtful and resonates with many of us.
Anonymous wrote:When we moved here, we chose our neighborhood for its community feel. We had toddlers and were concerned about the elementary school. We found a neighborhood with a walkable school and were extremely happy with it. The middle school and high school are SHORT bus rides. This made being part of the school community very easy.
The high school is good--but not the very top tier and that is fine. It is and has been crowded for years, but meets the needs.
Some people look for other considerations. It may be an immersion program or a high school language program. It may that a small high school is preferred. It may be a theater program. Any number of considerations.
The point is that people have different wishes. Redistricting denies families their wishes. I would be extremely disappointed if my school--which is crowded--sends my neighborhood further away. I'm sure that people in Great Falls likely wanted Langley High School. That would not be my preference, but I understand that. Langley is not overcrowded and it does not make sense to me to disrupt students just to please the School Board.
I'm sure the same is true throughout Fairfax County.
It seems to me that Lewis is the school most discussed on this thread. I have experience teaching in an extremely poor elementary school. We managed to get grants to help the kids and some of the results were remarkable.
POOR KIDS CAN ALSO LEARN. It seems that the School Board thinks the only way they can succeed is by pouring in affluent kids. How about building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down? From the map, it appears that the Lewis boundary is reasonable. Why not work on building a community at the school? It takes work. Apply for a grant to have special assistance. Acknowledge that language is a problem and address it.
Since an apparent troll went to town on your post, just wanted to say thanks for sharing this. It's very thoughtful and resonates with many of us.
Anonymous wrote:1. IB is more expensive.
2. IB is less flexible
3. I understand that iB requires more writing, but my kids have had plenty of writing in AP English.
4. IB is fine if you plan to send your kid to a European college
To get an IB Diploma, the students take several two year courses. This limits the flexibility to others who can pick and choose AP classes according to interests and talent.
IB also requires that there be an IB coordinator which adds to the expense in some cases.
If the SB does what they are planning, there will be shifts from AP to IB and vice versa. The shift from AP to IB could be particularly difficult and limit the ability to pursue an IB diploma.
The School Board is very foolish if they think they can do this boundary redistricting for "equity" while the courses at different high schools for advanced students are dramatically different.
FCPS was keen on IB between the late 90s and late 00s, a period in which 8 high/secondary schools were converted from AP to IB:
Justice 1994
Mount Vernon 1994
Edison 1998
Robinson 1998
South Lakes 1999
Marshall 2000
Annandale 2001
Lewis 2001
At most of these schools, the explicit goal was to stem "white flight" by offering a special program that was held out as a "school within a school." It didn't really stem "white flight," but the schools with IB got stigmatized in some instances because there was a perception that FCPS was only offering IB at "failing schools." Of the 8 schools in FCPS with IB, all but one (Robinson) were in the bottom half of FCPS schools when they first got IB.
The watershed for IB in FCPS was when FCPS tried to convert Woodson High from AP to IB. Parents objected, and FCPS abandoned the plan to convert Woodson to IB. Subsequently, FCPS opened two new high schools (Westfield and South County) as AP schools, and no more high/secondary schools were converted to IB.
So a lot of the talk about IB in FCPS has more to do with the optics of IB in FCPS than IB itself. Both AP and IB can prepare kids well for college, but AP is generally perceived as more flexible, whereas IB is viewed as more prescriptive (at least for those who want to pursue the full "IB diploma" program, which was the original intent of IB) and writing-intensive. Another general observation is that most AP courses cover more material, and more closely resemble intro-level college courses, whereas IB courses cover less material but in greater depth.
People do forget though that in 2000, Robert E. Lee (Lewis) was a largely upper middle class school. That AP to IB conversion was probably not targeted at stemming white flight specifically.
Anonymous wrote:When we moved here, we chose our neighborhood for its community feel. We had toddlers and were concerned about the elementary school. We found a neighborhood with a walkable school and were extremely happy with it. The middle school and high school are SHORT bus rides. This made being part of the school community very easy.
The high school is good--but not the very top tier and that is fine. It is and has been crowded for years, but meets the needs.
Some people look for other considerations. It may be an immersion program or a high school language program. It may that a small high school is preferred. It may be a theater program. Any number of considerations.
The point is that people have different wishes. Redistricting denies families their wishes. I would be extremely disappointed if my school--which is crowded--sends my neighborhood further away. I'm sure that people in Great Falls likely wanted Langley High School. That would not be my preference, but I understand that. Langley is not overcrowded and it does not make sense to me to disrupt students just to please the School Board.
I'm sure the same is true throughout Fairfax County.
It seems to me that Lewis is the school most discussed on this thread. I have experience teaching in an extremely poor elementary school. We managed to get grants to help the kids and some of the results were remarkable.
POOR KIDS CAN ALSO LEARN. It seems that the School Board thinks the only way they can succeed is by pouring in affluent kids. How about building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down? From the map, it appears that the Lewis boundary is reasonable. Why not work on building a community at the school? It takes work. Apply for a grant to have special assistance. Acknowledge that language is a problem and address it.
“Building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down” means what, exactly?
Anonymous wrote:When we moved here, we chose our neighborhood for its community feel. We had toddlers and were concerned about the elementary school. We found a neighborhood with a walkable school and were extremely happy with it. The middle school and high school are SHORT bus rides. This made being part of the school community very easy.
The high school is good--but not the very top tier and that is fine. It is and has been crowded for years, but meets the needs.
Some people look for other considerations. It may be an immersion program or a high school language program. It may that a small high school is preferred. It may be a theater program. Any number of considerations.
The point is that people have different wishes. Redistricting denies families their wishes. I would be extremely disappointed if my school--which is crowded--sends my neighborhood further away. I'm sure that people in Great Falls likely wanted Langley High School. That would not be my preference, but I understand that. Langley is not overcrowded and it does not make sense to me to disrupt students just to please the School Board.
I'm sure the same is true throughout Fairfax County.
It seems to me that Lewis is the school most discussed on this thread. I have experience teaching in an extremely poor elementary school. We managed to get grants to help the kids and some of the results were remarkable.
POOR KIDS CAN ALSO LEARN. It seems that the School Board thinks the only way they can succeed is by pouring in affluent kids. How about building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down? From the map, it appears that the Lewis boundary is reasonable. Why not work on building a community at the school? It takes work. Apply for a grant to have special assistance. Acknowledge that language is a problem and address it.
“Building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down” means what, exactly?
It's already a great school. No need to build it top down, bottom up or left to right right to left.
“Building the school from the bottom up instead of the top down” means what, exactly?
It means teaching the kids where they are. Providing for their academic needs. If they are able to do the upper level (in this case, IB) classes, that is great. If they are not, then start where they are.
There is a belief that if you give students challenges that they will meet them. That is true in some cases, but most students will give up if the instruction level is too high.
It used to be in education that the instruction was to start with what they know and move to what they don't know. But, now, it seems that the belief is to give them information that is too difficult and they will eventually "get it." Even very intelligent kids get frustrated at times. Frustration is not helpful.
It takes a mix of easy and difficult. But, you don't start with the difficult. You start with the easy and expose them to the difficult--but it is like building a house. You have to have a firm base or it will topple over. In this case, the kids will give up.
With the current situation--and this is throughout Fairfax County--language is a serious problem. I don't have the answer, but I do know that if a child cannot speak English, you cannot expect him to master the information being taught. Even math requires language.
I taught young children. I frequently had non-English speaking kids. At the level I taught, they quickly caught on to the language. That is not so easy for high school students. I guess there are different ways to approach this, but if a child cannot read in his native language by high school, it is a little puzzling that we expect him to read English.
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?
I don’t think FCPS is doing it to punish anyone, and I certainly don’t think anyone deserves to be punished (I’m not even sure why there would be punishment). I also don’t see being assigned to any particular school as a punishment. We’re very UMC but were assigned to one of the “less desirable” FCPS schools. We could’ve afforded private school. But there has been nothing at any time that has made us feel that our kids haven’t been getting a very good education. So there was no reason to go private or to move. I think too many parents don’t give schools a chance and let reputations scare them from even trying. (It’s kind of like the thread in off topic about Hampton Inn, etc - people like non-highly-regarded things when they try them but are too afraid to say it anywhere except an anonymous message board. How silly.)
As for why FCPS is doing this, I think a very large part is a fiscal move. There is a budget crisis. Commercial real estate hasn’t recovered, eroding the tax base. Some schools are overcrowded. And there are seats available. But the seats require re-drawing the boundaries to fill. I think my only concerns are reducing (preferably, eliminating) split feeders and making sure that all resources (seats) available are being used before creating any new seats. I’d rather the capital dollars be spent on fixing the buildings than expanding any buildings.
+ 1 I hope you are on the BRAC for my pyramid, because you get it!
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?
I don’t think FCPS is doing it to punish anyone, and I certainly don’t think anyone deserves to be punished (I’m not even sure why there would be punishment). I also don’t see being assigned to any particular school as a punishment. We’re very UMC but were assigned to one of the “less desirable” FCPS schools. We could’ve afforded private school. But there has been nothing at any time that has made us feel that our kids haven’t been getting a very good education. So there was no reason to go private or to move. I think too many parents don’t give schools a chance and let reputations scare them from even trying. (It’s kind of like the thread in off topic about Hampton Inn, etc - people like non-highly-regarded things when they try them but are too afraid to say it anywhere except an anonymous message board. How silly.)
As for why FCPS is doing this, I think a very large part is a fiscal move. There is a budget crisis. Commercial real estate hasn’t recovered, eroding the tax base. Some schools are overcrowded. And there are seats available. But the seats require re-drawing the boundaries to fill. I think my only concerns are reducing (preferably, eliminating) split feeders and making sure that all resources (seats) available are being used before creating any new seats. I’d rather the capital dollars be spent on fixing the buildings than expanding any buildings.
+ 1 I hope you are on the BRAC for my pyramid, because you get it!
And I hope the BRAC members from our pyramid counter this (likely self-serving) shilling for the SB. If they do not, we will still show up to register our deep disappointment with FCPS for behaving so erratically and throwing our kids under a bus after attending to the needs of so many other pyramids.
As for why FCPS is doing this, I think a very large part is a fiscal move. There is a budget crisis. Commercial real estate hasn’t recovered, eroding the tax base. Some schools are overcrowded. And there are seats available. But the seats require re-drawing the boundaries to fill. I think my only concerns are reducing (preferably, eliminating) split feeders and making sure that all resources (seats) available are being used before creating any new seats. I’d rather the capital dollars be spent on fixing the buildings than expanding any buildings.
+ 1 I hope you are on the BRAC for my pyramid, because you get it!
No. That is not what they are doing. They are shifting for "equity." They are not shifting because of overcrowded schools. They are shifting because it is easier to pour in achieving students than to teach those who are struggling.
When have you heard the SB address the problem of how to teach students that come here and do not speak English, and, in some cases, have not been educated in their native language?
When have you heard them discuss anything truly educational? Sure, the "Science of Reading." How long did it take them to address reading instruction? And, by the way, the "Science of Reading" is not new.
As for why FCPS is doing this, I think a very large part is a fiscal move. There is a budget crisis. Commercial real estate hasn’t recovered, eroding the tax base. Some schools are overcrowded. And there are seats available. But the seats require re-drawing the boundaries to fill. I think my only concerns are reducing (preferably, eliminating) split feeders and making sure that all resources (seats) available are being used before creating any new seats. I’d rather the capital dollars be spent on fixing the buildings than expanding any buildings.
+ 1 I hope you are on the BRAC for my pyramid, because you get it!
No. That is not what they are doing. They are shifting for "equity." They are not shifting because of overcrowded schools. They are shifting because it is easier to pour in achieving students than to teach those who are struggling.
When have you heard the SB address the problem of how to teach students that come here and do not speak English, and, in some cases, have not been educated in their native language?
When have you heard them discuss anything truly educational? Sure, the "Science of Reading." How long did it take them to address reading instruction? And, by the way, the "Science of Reading" is not new.
The shilling is just so obvious. The same people who swear we can’t possibly expand any more schools because money is so tight and we now have to redistrict for efficiency will never say a word about how Karl Frisch’s $80M boondoggle at Dunn Loring is a waste of money that could be put to far better use expanding at least two other schools (keeping school communities intact and reducing any potential need to redistrict kids from those schools).
I almost hope they are FCPS getting paid overtime to parrot the SB’s talking points because it’s depressing to think other community members have allowed themselves to become such bots.
This thread is exactly why parent preferences should carry little or no weight. Everyone wants different things. Everyone has a different story (we bought in a certain neighborhood for the schools). Everyone is motivated by those personal circumstances. But those are you problems.
FCPS should make the goals and decisions transparent and then just do it.
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