Anonymous wrote: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.
They have made the goals transparent. "Equity." In their view, that means shifting wealthier kids to poor schools. Not sure how they plan to do the opposite.
This is not about better education. It is to cover up problems they refuse to address.
Anonymous wrote: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.
What on earth are you talking about? If a public school system is going to ignore “parent preferences” because those in charge know so much better (hint: they often don’t), then let’s just give families vouchers.
Yours is the same thinking that delivered the governor’s race to Youngkin in 2021.
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.
Blah blah blah....all the people here combining about equity use it as a political football.
Anonymous wrote: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.
Anonymous wrote: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.
+2. Have to take the emotion out.
The whole process is being driven by emotion and the desire to stick it to some schools and communities.
If you look at the capacity dashboard there are very few schools projected to be seriously overcrowded five years from now.
Anonymous wrote: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.
What on earth are you talking about? If a public school system is going to ignore “parent preferences” because those in charge know so much better (hint: they often don’t), then let’s just give families vouchers.
Yours is the same thinking that delivered the governor’s race to Youngkin in 2021.
This is exactly what should happen in PUBLIC schools. We pay taxes and elect school board members to make decisions for us.
If you don’t like that model, you should go private, where you have some control and (potentially) influence in outcomes for YOUR child.
Anonymous wrote: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.
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
Post additions there is no valid comparison between Madison and West Potomac. CIP:
madison instructional Area 347,588
design capacity 2,503 program capacity 2,387
west potomac Instructional Area 432,450 SF [net of Pulley Career Center]. Unknown sq footage per academy.
design capacity 3,049 program capacity 2,896.
Academies include hip hop dance https://westpotomacacademy.fcps.edu/academics/courses That site is a perfect example of what facts are not represented accurately in the CIP. Obviouly dental tech training uses square footage...
The Board of Superviors noted the [Mckay] "elephant in the room" of open capacity at Mount Vernon when discussing the potential
bond referendum. It's a behomoth and there could have been boundary changes from West Potomac to MV and WP to Edison and Edison to Lewis.
Anonymous wrote: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.
+2. Have to take the emotion out.
The whole process is being driven by emotion and the desire to stick it to some schools and communities.
If you look at the capacity dashboard there are very few schools projected to be seriously overcrowded five years from now.
Again, take the emotion out. When I read on here that people think others want to "stick it to them", it sounds awfully dramatic and possibly narcissistic. Yes, it will likely effect lots of families in all sorts of ways, but I don't believe anybody is being targeted.
Anonymous wrote: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.
What on earth are you talking about? If a public school system is going to ignore “parent preferences” because those in charge know so much better (hint: they often don’t), then let’s just give families vouchers.
Yours is the same thinking that delivered the governor’s race to Youngkin in 2021.
This is exactly what should happen in PUBLIC schools. We pay taxes and elect school board members to make decisions for us.
If you don’t like that model, you should go private, where you have some control and (potentially) influence in outcomes for YOUR child.
Hey, your rhetoric lost in 2021 and it hasn’t done much better since then. If you want to keep reducing support for public schools, just keep parroting the party line that the FCPS “experts” know so much better than parents and that families can “take it or leave it.”
Of course, when many of those currently footing the bill “leave it,” and support for FCPS further diminishes, you won’t be too happy with that, either.
Anonymous wrote: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.
+2. Have to take the emotion out.
The whole process is being driven by emotion and the desire to stick it to some schools and communities.
If you look at the capacity dashboard there are very few schools projected to be seriously overcrowded five years from now.
Again, take the emotion out. When I read on here that people think others want to "stick it to them", it sounds awfully dramatic and possibly narcissistic. Yes, it will likely effect lots of families in all sorts of ways, but I don't believe anybody is being targeted.
Then you simply haven’t been paying much attention.
Anonymous wrote: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.
+2. Have to take the emotion out.
The whole process is being driven by emotion and the desire to stick it to some schools and communities.
If you look at the capacity dashboard there are very few schools projected to be seriously overcrowded five years from now.
Again, take the emotion out. When I read on here that people think others want to "stick it to them", it sounds awfully dramatic and possibly narcissistic. Yes, it will likely effect lots of families in all sorts of ways, but I don't believe anybody is being targeted.
Being targeted and being deliberately ignored are two sides of the same coin.
Anyone advocating for parents to not have a voice in this process would be wise to remember how Youngkin was elected in the first place. Ignoring parents is an extreme left agenda item. Moderate democrats don’t come close to wanting that.
Unfortunately, the school board is far left. Gotta imagine that the republicans in Richmond and across the state are salivating at the upcoming boundary changes.
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.
Agreed, I look forward to spending time and money campaigning against each of them. And I voted Democratic until very recently.
Anonymous wrote:Anyone advocating for parents to not have a voice in this process would be wise to remember how Youngkin was elected in the first place. Ignoring parents is an extreme left agenda item. Moderate democrats don’t come close to wanting that.
Unfortunately, the school board is far left. Gotta imagine that the republicans in Richmond and across the state are salivating at the upcoming boundary changes.
I think it's more nuanced than many people on here claim.
I dont see people saying parents should have NO voice, but not all the voice. I see some people saying that taxpayers that don't have children should also have a voice. And I see people saying that there should be some totally "unbiased" people trying to look at these decisions from a factual/data perspective. There's a little too be said for each of those thoughts.
Everything has become so politicized, but I don't think this can necessarily fit neatly with a political party or fringe of a party.
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