Annadale schools

[Anonymous]

PP, you seem pretty defensive about this and I am not trying to engage. My only point is that I don't think it is necessarily a good thing for kids to go to school only with children whose economic situation and family social structures are all similar to their own. I think it can give them a very unrealistic view of the world. JMO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP, you seem pretty defensive about this and I am not trying to engage. My only point is that I don't think it is necessarily a good thing for kids to go to school only with children whose economic situation and family social structures are all similar to their own. I think it can give them a very unrealistic view of the world. JMO.

I think the poster who criticized Woodson in such harsh terms (apparently in order to sing Annandale's praises) was the defensive one. I'm just trying to understand what you wrote.

I think I understand your point now, and even agree with it to some extent. I do think it's good if schools have kids from plenty of different backgrounds, particularly at the high school level, so that kids don't feel like drones who all have to march to exactly the same beat. Even so, I don't think it's possible for a student to attend any public school in Fairfax and not have contact with students who have different family social structures, if not economic situations, from their own. At the end of the day, I'd be surprised if students from Woodson in 2010 have a strikingly less realistic "view of the world" than students at Annandale.

[Anonymous]

Question about Falls Church high: does anyone here know why the composite SAT scores for Falls Church fell by 100 points last year? They seem to be the only school in Fairfax county with this problem, and they were already down near the bottom. (23rd out of 24th in Fairfax in terms of 2009 SAT scores.) We'll probably move out of boundary by the time my daughter hits high school, and I know scores aren't everything, but I'm curious. Was there a push for more students to start taking the SAT, so the scores fell as more marginal students started taking them?

Ironically, we may be moving TO Falls Church to escape my daughter having to go to Falls Church high school. That seems funny to me.

Parts of Annandale do feed into Woodson, but you see a pretty big price jump when you look at houses in Annandale high school district vs. Woodson high school district. Woodson doesn't seem to have townhouses at all; Annandale has quite a few. Other houses in Annandale feed into Falls Church high. Those houses are near metro, though, so they tend to be higher-priced than similar houses in Annandale high boundary. (I don't know much about Stuart.)

A very bright friend of mine graduated from Woodson and she said the pressure to succeed there was insane, and that was back in '95; I imagine it's worse now.

[Anonymous]

New poster here -- we're looking for simply good schools in Fairax County (not McLean b/c we can't afford it, not Arlington b/c we need 4-5 bedrooms). I don't care about diversity, I just want a good school pyramid. FWIW, I was a minority in my high school and very much appreciated the social perspective I got; however, I got a shitty education (it was just a bad school; nothing related to race) and want to be sure my kids don't have to go through 10 years of college just to learn everything they should have learned in high school.

So diversity aside, what pyramids are ideal (in/out/around the beltway, but not further west than Vienna)?

[Anonymous]

I would look at the Woodson, Lake Braddock and Oakton pyramids. (Many areas near the Vienna Metro feed to Oakton.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:New poster here -- we're looking for simply good schools in Fairax County (not McLean b/c we can't afford it, not Arlington b/c we need 4-5 bedrooms). I don't care about diversity, I just want a good school pyramid. FWIW, I was a minority in my high school and very much appreciated the social perspective I got; however, I got a shitty education (it was just a bad school; nothing related to race) and want to be sure my kids don't have to go through 10 years of college just to learn everything they should have learned in high school.

So diversity aside, what pyramids are ideal (in/out/around the beltway, but not further west than Vienna)?

If you'd prefer to be no further out than Vienna and/or the Beltway, Oakton and Lake Braddock are probably non-starters. Oakton HS is west of the Beltway, and most of the Oakton feeder schools are even further west. Lake Braddock SS - which is huge - is also a good bit west of the Beltway out in Burke.

There are quite a few "simply good" pyramids closer to Arlington/DC, but some are more affordable than others. What is your housing budget?

[Anonymous]

Life-long Arlington resident here chiming in to say that Woodson has had a good reputation for a long time, and also that I looove the Mantua neighborhood....

[Anonymous]

Looking purely at test scores you will find that Woodson students consistently test on par with the McLean schools (caveat of course, that testing doesn't tell you everything about a school, etc) and the housing stock is MUCH more affordable (we bought a 5 bedroom last year for under 500k). Parts of Annandale and Fairfax feed into Woodson, look at 22032 and 22031 zip codes.

[Anonymous]

Oakton HS is west of the Beltway, and most of the Oakton feeder schools are even further west. Lake Braddock SS - which is huge - is also a good bit west of the Beltway out in Burke.

The high schools are located there, but not all the neighborhoods that feed to them are that far out.

The FCPS Cluster map be helpful.

http://commweb.fcps.edu/directory/cluster.cfm

[Anonymous]

Just be forewarned that MANY high schools are involved in a big boundary study, so a neighborhood now zoned for a particular high school may be shifting rather soon. It's easy to see how the Woodson boundaries are going to change, for example.

http://www.boarddocs.com/vsba/fairfax/Board.nsf/d62d9cb847ef1cbd87257328006795e4/b093f639f7faa88f872576f00062fb20/$FILE/Annandale%20Regional%20Facilities%20Study-JH.pdf

[Anonymous]

To respond to the last series of posts:

1. Woodson students do not test "on par" with McLean (that is, McLean or Langley) students, but they aren't too far behind.

2. Looking at an area cluster map doesn't tell you as much as looking at the Oakton HS boundaries does. Most of the students who attend Oakton HS live substantially to the west of the school itself.

3. At this point, it's hard to say what will come out of the Annandale Regional Study - since Annandale is over-crowded and Woodson is projected to be under-enrolled in the future, it seems more likely that some Annandale students will be moved to Woodson than that neighborhoods currently assigned to Woodson will be redistricted (with the possible exception of the Oak View ES/Frost MS/Woodson HS "attendance island" that is surrounded by areas assigned to Robinson SS). At this point, no one really knows.

[Anonymous]

The cluster map itself is not helpful, but if you click on the map, then it shows you the high schools for each cluster and then you can link to their boundary maps. Oakton HS is right behind the Vienna Metro and the neighborhoods around the metro station feed to Oakton HS. Technically that may be "Fairfax" or "Oakton", but for commuting purposes it is the same as "Vienna", which is what the OP asked about.

The study linked to in the PP is interesting. Our ES is mentioned in that document, but is not within 1 mile of the Lacey site. Looking at that document, it seems like in the next 10-20 years, there is going to be some pretty significant re-districting in that area of FCPS.

[Anonymous]

Here's a link to the Oakton HS boundary map - it shows both that the neighborhoods around the Vienna metro are zoned to Oakton and that most Oakton students live further west:

http://www.fcps.edu/images/boundarymaps/oaktonhs.pdf

Some of the areas near the metro that are assigned to Oakton HS are also assigned to Jackson MS, rather than the middle schools that most Oakton HS students attend (Franklin and Carson). That's a potential negative for some families, since most Jackson students attend Falls Church HS instead, so the kids in that area don't really get to stay with the same group of friends throughout school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
3. At this point, it's hard to say what will come out of the Annandale Regional Study - since Annandale is over-crowded and Woodson is projected to be under-enrolled in the future, it seems more likely that some Annandale students will be moved to Woodson than that neighborhoods currently assigned to Woodson will be redistricted (with the possible exception of the Oak View ES/Frost MS/Woodson HS "attendance island" that is surrounded by areas assigned to Robinson SS). At this point, no one really knows.

Several School Board members mentioned during the two work sessions that many high schools would be shifted, and the domino effect would continue both westbound and southbound. Neighborhoods on the western end of Woodson's boundaries will likely be shifted, and neighborhoods on the eastern end would also likely be shifted.

I agree with the PP that things will look dramatically different 10+ years from now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Several School Board members mentioned during the two work sessions that many high schools would be shifted, and the domino effect would continue both westbound and southbound. Neighborhoods on the western end of Woodson's boundaries will likely be shifted, and neighborhoods on the eastern end would also likely be shifted.

I agree with the PP that things will look dramatically different 10+ years from now.

Could be - but I'll believe it when I see it. Individual School Board members often claim they favor a comprehensive, county-wide redistricting, but recent changes generally have been modest.

In Woodson's case, the school was recently renovated and is projected to be under-enrolled five years from now. The School Board would get a LOT of flack if it proposed to send students in the western part of the Woodson area to its neighboring schools - Fairfax and Robinson - each of which is projected to be above-capacity five years from now. It seems more likely that FCPS would decide to send more students from neighboring areas to Woodson instead.