I wasn't being flip. A million dollar house pays $10K a year in property taxes. Average cost per student is $19K. Even the north Arlington schools that have fewer resource teachers (ESOL HILT, special ed) are still about $12-13K per kid in the building. Only 25% of Arlington's tax base is from single family homes. People with kids are being massively subsidized by the commercial sector and by non-parent homeowners, and they wouldn't care if a thousand families moved out of the county next year. |
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They would be thrilled to see kids from million dollar homes go bye bye. Those families are a huge drain on funds, and their countribution doesn't even get close. Low income families in south Arlington are their favorites. Those families are thrilled to be here and make no fuss over anything. They don't care about trailers, class size, enrichment, or test scores. They are a dream. The rich north Arlington homeowners are the nightmare. |
I am with you, how about some sort of tax if you have more than 2 kids? The Tax Revenue would go to pay for a new High School. I see alot of families in Bluemont with 3 kids+ who are being subsidized in their +$1M homes. |
NP here. Sorry, but you're really being myopic. Good public schools are what attracts that 25% of buyers to the county, and if you remove them, you get a situation like Alexandria. Close-in, great location, arguably MUCH nicer town center. Prices are much lower than Arlington. Why? Schools. You start fuckin' with schools, and you depress the value of real estate, and therefore the tax revenue, of the whole county. |
Of course, if you remove all families real estate value would decrease significantly. Either way, there are too many rug rats in the county and we need to start coming up with creative ways to tax the HENRYs. |
The schools are massively overcrowded! What the 85% of Arlingtonians who DONT have kids in the schools want is for them to stop growing. And, actually, to shrink--to get rid of the trailers, and go back to the 1990's enrollment levels. Most people in Arlington would love it a thousand families left and took their kids with them--out of the schools, out of the pools, off the bike trails. It's families who tear down the ranches and build the damn McMansions up to the lot lines. Seriously. It's a totally idle threat. Parents don't realize how little political power they have in Arlington, and why you have to play a very long game if you want to effectuate change. You can't start paying attention when your kid is in fifth grade, and then start stamping your feet. |
Dp- they don't Care. Who is they? Older home owners. They bought their home when it was under 200k. If the wealthy leave, it just means middle class will start moving in. They would be thrilled to have a home so close to work downtown. Arlington is a better commute than Alexandria. A substantially better commute. 80% of the county doesn't have kids. There is plenty of wealth in there. They are praying you'll bale or go private. |
The 15% of us with children in the schools would like the schools to stop growing too. And if you want the county to stop adding to people to the schools, pools and bike trails, tell the County Board to stop approving multi-family housing because yes, as the county gets increasingly urban, families live in apartments and condos and send their children to APS. Growth for the past 5 years in APS has come increasingly from multi-family housing and is projected to continue to do so. Tell the County Board to put its plans to turn Lee Highway into the next Columbia Pike on hold because none of the schools along Lee Highway have space for the kids who will live in all the new buildings. The County Board is pushing density and urbanization and development which only adds people to schools, pools and bike trails, to name a few. |
Oh no no no... I hear what you are saying about slowing down the urbanization. I bought a sfh home in what I considered a close in "suburb" . I paid a premium for space and to be situated around other sfh's. Then the county added two 100 % CAF's to my area and have plans to add at least two, but possible 5-6 more. Now, the county wants to rezone my neighborhood to allow " access dwellings and rental units". bring on the triple plexes and rooming houses. It's Lee Highway's turn to shoulder the load and share in the vibrancy. |
When I did a quick google search on double shifting, the only articles that turned up were about schools in Mexico, Rwanda and other developing countries. And possibly in Florida for a brief period of time in the aftermath of a major hurricane. Do any school systems in the U.S. do this and on a long term basis? How? What are the results? |
No. It's time to stop with ALL the multifamily buildings. The Lee Hwy plan is beyond stupid considering it would happen around the same time that everyone gets booted from 66 (thanks, Richmond!). |
curious about this too. |
North Carolina and California have counties that do year-round multitrack schools, and it's reflective of their lack of commitment to quality public education. It's a bullshit approach to the problem, and it is proposed by people with no real-world experience of the day-in, day-out demands of public education. My school switched to a staggered schedule for a while after a natural disaster. I liked having the free time, but I didn't receive as good an education as I would have if it had been the normal schedule. |
+1 we moved here 9 years ago and our neighbors raved about the options for ES and the amazing schools. Our oldest is entering K and we are moving out of Arlington. While not the sole factor, the overcrowding projections were definitely on our minds. If we still had the county options available and the playgrounds that existed when we moved here, we may have stayed. Fwiw, I think the projections are low. Four homes that we can see from our house have recently been sold by older people and each was purchased by a family with children still in preschool. |