Langley/McLean/Marshall Boundaries
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
| Can someone explain why Marshall and Langley have such beautiful buildings while McLean is old and unattractive (and the bathrooms are really bad). |
Anonymous
McLean's renovation is over ten years ago. Marshall's is newer and Langley's is just getting done. Go look at Falls Church HS if you want to feel better about McLean's facility. |
Anonymous
McLean was built in the mid-50s and renovated in the early 00's. Langley and Marshall were built in the mid-60s and renovated within the last five years. I think McLean's front entrance and library look the nicest (every renovated high school in FCPS now, except TJ, ends up looking the same), but Langley and Marshall have some nice interior spaces, especially Langley. |
Anonymous
+1. Falls Church deserves a first-class upgrade when they renovate it. They got a raw deal back in 2008, when FCPS created its renovation queue, because Falls Church was under-enrolled at the time and FCPS assigned higher priority to renovating schools that were at or above-capacity. |
Anonymous
On the other hand, Longfellow was renovated more recently than Kilmer, and Cooper is still several years away from its renovation. |
Anonymous
Did you see the last cip report? The planning for the new western hs will start in fy2026 and the permitting in fy2028. The construction will take another five years or so. |
Anonymous
How many Herndon HS students would actually move to the new school? I would assume all town of Herndon students would stay at Herndon High (like town of Vienna at Madison). The students north of the town of Herndon and in Reston zoned for Herndon HS also probably wouldn't move, as those areas aren't really where a new school is needed or likely to be built. That leaves the area immediately around Hutchison ES that is not in the town of Herndon, and that's about it. But that wouldn't take all that many students out of Herndon High. I don't see how many students would be moving out of Herndon High and creating room for students from Langley. |
Anonymous
Not the poster to whom you're responding, but there's only one high school in FCPS that has to take kids from a specific jurisdiction. That's Fairfax HS, which all City of Fairfax students must attend. Clifton, Herndon, and Vienna are towns. They don't own schools, and town residents have no right to stay at their current high schools (Clifton - Robinson; Herndon - Herndon; and Vienna - Madison). Part of the Town of Vienna, for example, went to Oakton at one point. But I think you're right that the new western HS might only draw from one Herndon feeder. It could also draw from current feeders to Westfield, Oakton, Chantilly and possibly South Lakes. That could open up space at Herndon for Forestville students who currently go to Langley. That is many years away and not part of any solution to the immediate problem of Langley's declining enrollment and overcrowding at McLean. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
I am a Langley parent and I think all three options are fine. Please stop making assumptions about what Langley parents prefer, because it's simply not true. Our elementary is Colvin Run and my kids were disappointed when half their friends split in middle school to attend Longfellow or Kilmer. I have absolutely no objection to pulling into Langley Tysons and parts of Vienna. |
Anonymous
Wasn't McLean renovated in the last few years? It's certainly looked a lot better than Langley for some time now. Whenever my kids had activities at McLean, I was always impressed by how nice the building was in comparison to Langley. |
Anonymous
Just as I thought - McLean was ALREADY renovated, in 2002 - and you expect it to be renovated again?? Langley's ONLY renovation was just completed, and very much overdue as they had never had one. 
|
Anonymous
Kind of seems like that makes sense, no? |
Anonymous
+1 They love to use Langley parents as scapegoats, but no one I know has any issue with moving Tysons/Vienna kids to Langley. It's become this (sub)urban myth that Langley is against that, when the reality is, these decisions are up to the SB, not parents. |
Anonymous
I'm not the PP, but let's acknowledge some history: * One of Janie Strauss's predecessors on the School Board did favors for his neighbors by getting some single-family neighborhoods south of Route 7 in Reston and Herndon moved into the Langley district. * In the late 1970s, when FCPS proposed to move part of Langley to McLean, parents complained, and a student was quoted in the Washington Post as follows: "Here at Langley we have Jaguars and Corvettes in the parking lot. Over at McLean they have pickups and Chevys." * In the mid-1980s, when FCPS staff proposed to move some Vienna neighborhoods zoned for Langley to Marshall, the parents persuaded the School Board to move them to McLean instead. * When the Spring Gate apartments were built in the late 1990s, Janie Strauss got FCPS to make an administrative boundary change that sent the students from those apartments to Marshall rather than McLean. * In 2011, when running for re-election, Strauss went to Great Falls and touted the fact that she'd kept Langley out of the 2008 boundary study that moved kids from other schools (Westfield, Oakton, and Madison) to South Lakes. * In 2018, Langley has the least multi-family housing of any neighborhood high school in FCPS and is the only neighborhood high school with less than 3% FARMS. Given that history, it's not surprising that some think Langley parents might try to cherry-pick which neighborhoods are reassigned. But it's great to hear current Langley parents are open to whatever FCPS decides makes the most sense. |