South Arlington and North Arlington Schools
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Anonymous
Woo... hoo? My property values are going up/I picked the right place? We love this neighborhood and want to stay. Maybe we'll add on... |
Anonymous
| If you bought in alcova your property values will absolutely go up. Still zoned for wakefield, but not kenmore. |
Anonymous
Oh please give it a rest with the "southern" inferiority complex! Have you walked through every neighborhood in Arlington? Alcova Heights is just very nice, (a lot nicer looking in fact than several N. Arlington neighborhoods - nothing against the residents) - just talking about curb appeal, the streets and lots of gorgeous houses. There are a lot of million dollar homes there - or if you will 900K to 1.2 mil. But all the houses regardless of price are well kept, with inviting yards, beautiful flowers and trees... For the record: I'm not an Alcova Heights resident (And not in real estate) - I just walk and drive through the neighborhood regularly. |
Anonymous
I'm one of the above posters and totally agree with Alcova Heights be really attractive. There is better pride of ownership across the board over there. I keep hoping it will spread over to the other side of Columbia Pike in my neighborhood. My hood is kind of a mixed bag.... Seems like there could be quite a bit of shake up with the new school and redrawing boundaries. How are people currently zoned Henry going to take being rerouted to Drew without Montessori? What happens when Barcroft loses most of the SFH feeding into it? Does Randolph get touched at all? No plans for Carlin Springs other more low income density? It's great we will be getting more seats, but it's possible performance may go down significantly at some of these already underperforming schools. |
Anonymous
Socio-economic segregation based on misguided housing policies is very unfortunate in my opinion, but the affordable housing activists do not consider that an important issue at all. And local Hispanic leaders and housing activists are against busing, even though we bus largely Latino neighborhoods at the high school level to W-L and Yorktown creating somewhat gerrymandered boundaries. So I suspect that the future boundaries for the new elementary school will cause further segregation. Barcroft will likely become much more isolated, not unlike Carlin Springs, where most all the families in Glencarlyn send their kids to choice schools like Campbell. |
Anonymous
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many many parents in barcroft already send their kids to a choice school.mifmthe line for new elementary is drawn at george mason, which I is just too,logical to avoid, barcroft is the next carlin springs diversitymwise.
However, carlin springs has tapped into some grant money to help get more resources to boost test score etc. I think if the county through redistricting and housing policy deliberately makes 3 schools with very high concentrations of poverty, it must greatly increase the resources at those schools above all,others in the county. Now,throwing money at poor kids' schools doesn't solve the problem, but it will help and the county owes it to the kids and families in those schools. |
Anonymous
I don't think anyone currently zoned to Henry would be zoned away from Henry, if Henry is moved one 'square' to the adjacent planning unit, because it is currently a pretty small boundary, it doesn't extend that far south. Plus the new school would have more seats, so I think there would be new kids zoned in, but not current students zoned out. As far as from where the additional students would come - that will be wide open - Alcova Heights would make so much sense, since the students could walk, but they could also walk to TJ from the current Long Branch boundary. I think it really depends HOW MANY seats would open up in addition - and that will determine how much the zone for TJ- Henry could be enlarged! However, if the new school is built on the current Drew property instead of TJ then seats will open up there instead and the current (closest to Drew )Henry students may be zoned away from Henry. Then the Drew boundary would enlarge and pull other students to Drew. Is that what you meant? |
Anonymous
Yes! Pride of ownership makes ALL. the difference! You don't have to have a large, or an expensive house, just maintain your property well and have a pleasant yard and so on.... Are you in Douglas Park, PP? I've always wanted to go to the Halloween fest there (but it's advertised as too scary for the little ones, so we haven't made it yet!  )
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Anonymous
| Even if it's built at TJ, if they use the old Patrick Henry building for montessori, 400+ seats will open up at Drew, naturally extending the boundaries. We are currently zoned for Randolph and are wondering if it could change to Drew (would prefer Randolph). We will see |
Anonymous
I think it's likely they'll pull some from oak ridge some from Randolph and some from Henry. They will have 400 seats to fill. |
Anonymous
Hello! Yes, Douglas park! We take our Halloween very seriously in Douglas Park.
How old are your kiddos? I think young elementary is fine, but every kid is different. Some kids are easily frightened. It is a lot of fun though! |
Anonymous
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Wow....I am just now finding this whole thread....it would have been so helpful a couple of years ago when I moved to S. Arlington from my native Alexandria, VA. I can relate to so many themes in this thread, that have angered and baffled me as I try to get the best education for my child....
....Yet as much as I care about my little situation, it doesn't matter diddly squat if the vast majority of Arlingtonians are being squeezed in both directions, funneled every more sharply into the haves and have-nots, which every trend in this city is siphoning us into. It's as dang depressing to watch the middle class shrink below my feet as a polar bear must feel standing on his vanishing iceberg...knowing he has a limitless swim ahead to find rest and solid ground again... YES and double yes to 9/24 16:05 what I have heard from some older neighbors is that they favor affordable housing generally because they don't like how the character of Arlington has been changing. In their view, it used to be a more collegial, accessible, middle class place, and now it's becoming snobby and out of touch. They like their neighborhoods and they're sick of the ostentatious new builds. That also describes the sweet little neighborhood I grew up in in Alexandria to a "T". My parents are still there, in their late 70s, and even though I am in my late 40s, I have been mourning for many decades now the now accelerating trend towards tear-downs, the complete deforestation in some cases of whole yards, and the difficulty in finding common ground with neighbors whose payscales are nothing in the stratosphere of the ordinary low-level bureaucrats and city public servants whose doors were once all open to all of us kids running up and down the block....There was no such thing as "home security systems," no one locked their doors, and if you were bored, you just went outside because there was almost always a group of kids playing ball in the middle of the road....most of the moms were stay-at-home, and there were little stars on cardboard posted in windows so that elementary kids who walked home in small groups by themselves would know which house door to knock on if they needed any help. I was actually a latch-key child, which worked out fine because the neighborhood was so safe, and my friends' Mom's were home, so I didn't feel alone. That was the late 1960s-70s. Even by the time my sister, ten years younger, came along, that world had started to disappear...3 families on our block became empty nesters, and YUPPIES (Young, Urban, Professionals?), as they were known in the 80s, moved in, childless. I think this was the time Arlington, too, was shutting down schools and starting rec centers? I worked in Mitch Synder's Community for Creative Non-Violence homeless shelter in down town DC... he later killed himself, which unfortunately seems emblematic of so much of the idealism of the 70s that I was raised in, especially as part of the first bussed and integrated schools generation. But like other posters, in my 20s and 30s I had tons of roomates, low pay (I actually lived outside the area all over the country), and didn't expect housing to be affordable for me in this area. When I came back, it wasn't affordable, and like another poster, it took me decades to save enough to buy a house when I was 45--and then it was "a crappy condo in S. Arlington"---which actually I am so grateful for since, at last, I am building equity--and I hope to have paid off before I am 75.... I never had a chance to buy in N. Arlington where the better schools are, nor in any area where the better schools are, nor could we ever afford private schools....so it's nice for those who do, but that is unfortunately a very privileged minority.... But still, Alexandria on the surface looked remarkably unchanged even through the 1990s, while Chevy Chase and Bethesda were bemoaning the loss of their neighborhoods... the first rumblings started in the 2000s, and are in full force today...as they are in Arlington...who can afford these $800,000 (tear down old colonials) to $5 million homes? Is it the K-St. lobbyists who are also corrupting our democracy into an oligarchy? What ordinary person has that kind of money, or at least financing??? And yes, yes, and yes, to the poster who had kids in both S. and N. Arlington who knows the timber and tone of the N. and S. schools are night and day....from flyers about food for needy children to be fed over the weekend, to a wealth of expensive extra-curricular opportunities....We were just FLOORED at how bad Abington actually was...moldy carpet, windowless dark halls, but above all, the children were months, if not years behind grade level....and they kicked my child under the desk for participating, since it made their non-participation look bad! The principal and other admin just gave me the BS lip service that "All Arlington schools are equally good"....and my child said it was heartbreaking that the other children truly were starving, and begging for food.... So I totally relate to the FARMS numbers just starting to trend down in some of the S. Arlington schools, where middle class people on ordinary salaries can afford to buy, and now the Columbia Pike affordable housing is going to re-concentrate this intense poverty into a few schools and raise FARMS kids back to 80% (which some have already been at times if you look on School Digger, which has more historical data....)....Whereas as long as FARMS kids in any one school are around 30%, as Charles Barret in Alexandria was, EVERY child seems to get a great education..... Which brings us back to the bussing discussion...Arlington would have maybe 30% FARMS in every school if evenly distributed....but "bussing's not going to happen" because there doesn't seem to be the will? I know it is unpopular to everyone to leave the relative comfort of their neighborhood, but I agree that VOICE is aiming too low to accept schools with such high concentrations of poverty, and to agree to further that trend. If we keep siphoning our city's children into these two wildly disparate school systems, aren't we shooting ourselves in the foot? By creating an underclass who can never escape poverty, and another group who doesn't need to ever see or feel the sting of inequality in their bubble of comfort and privilege? I totally agree with the posters that putting more affordable housing down when already the schools are over-crowed, and intensely unequal, is just ludicrous. Especially because this city is NOT affordable at all who make too much to get help, but not millions---the retirees in N. Arlington are quaint indeed, when they think that this shrinking middle class, their children (the Millenials) are going to get the help....no, as the posters on this thread note, only people who are way below the starting level salaries of the millennials who are going to get "affordable housing." My brain hurts trying to figure out any workable answers. The trends are in place. We are living in one of the highest points of inequality in the U.S. since the days of the robber barons, and it sucks for everyone, even the super rich even if they don't realize it yet. I wouldn't feel very safe if I was rich in a country whose underclass was growing and getting hungrier by the day. The whole New Deal of the 1930s was created to stave off a revolution, to placate and mollify, since the rise of communism was a real fear in such desperation. Even more than the New Deal, the WWII preparations that put everyone to work, even women, ushered in a vibrant middle class that stayed strong until the decline of unionism starting in the 1970s....when even the head of corporations made no more than 40 times the lowest paid worker...as opposed to 400 or more times more today... I don't know of a political revolution in history that was not precipitated by increasing levels of inequality... So yeah, for the short term, voting for independent candidates in this one-party rule of the Democrats that has gotten us so out of touch may be the best we can do. As much as people are leery of Clement, I am really scared by Dorsey's comments in the earlier quoted Washington Post article... there aren't great choices, and I was SO happy Vishstadt won, and is continuing to deliver on the promises he was elected on....though I definitely WONT vote for Cristol... Thanks so much to everyone who participated on this thread....you all really, truly, get it, and bring up excellent points describing the problem to a tee....where we go from here remains to be seen, but no matter how much affordable housing is or is not built in Arlington, I have to hope, as a new S. Arlington purchaser, that the trend is towards gentrification of S. Arlington, just as Del Ray Alexandria went from solidly working class to unaffordable in my little lifetime. |
Anonymous
| Thanks for that meaty comment, PP -- very interesting! |
Anonymous
thanks for your kind reply...I do get scared by some of the snarkiness on this board, though at the same time I totally get that people need to vent, and I'm glad they do...I just try to reserve my worst venting where most people can't hear me 
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Anonymous
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Thank you for your thoughtful post, pp.
BTW, for those who want to see independent candidate McMenamin elected to the Arlington Board, it is suggested that voters only chose one candidate, not two, in November. Full details here: https://www.arlnow.com/2015/10/15/the-right-note-vote-mike-and-only-mike/ |