Boundary Review Meetings

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did any board members inquire on the academic impact of proposed boundary changes at the high school level? For example, how would average GPA's, test scores, etc. look different based on students moving in or out? We are an impacted family and trying to understand the extent of the academic impact, if any.

It would be speculation to try and answer those specific questions. They could be more transparent about the anticipated impact on ESOL and FARMS rates, but they don’t want to highlight that they are driving up those percentages at some schools like Justice and Marshall.

They could simply run the numbers using student information from last year. No speculation involved. How would these previous year statistics be different if the changes had been in place earlier.

Maybe, but it’s more number crunching than they’ve ever undertaken with any prior boundary changes. In the past they’ve provided some information on the anticipated demographic impact but not at that level of granularity. They certainly won’t do it this time.

But this is the first comprehensive review in over 40 years

Which means we’ll get less, not more, information since they are dealing simultaneously with more changes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m halfway through the YouTube video of last night’s meeting.

I’m often critical of the school board on these forums, but, I’ll give praise where it is due - several board members now seem focused on increasing enrollment for under enrolled schools through programming decisions and transfers. That’s welcome news.

I personally would rather see them just address it with programming, but a look at transfers should come before further boundary changes, if programming decisions don’t fix the issue. Further boundary changes should be a last resort after these two approaches have been exhausted.

Anyway, hopefully this is a sea change in how they approach capacity issues in the future.

I have not listened yet. However, they need to be realistic in their programming.

For example, when they renamed Lee to Lewis and chose to put in a social justice program that was thinly veiled as a "leadership program" , did anyone consider that this was sending a "message" about the school?

Transfers were specifically mentioned as a potential solution to Lewis. I would rather they just look at programming, but at least they are going to look at something other than disastrous and unwanted boundary moves.

What does that even mean? It would be one thing if they just stepped up and said we need to get rid of IB at Lewis and have a full set of AP courses. Saying they will look at transfers is sort of meaningless. You can’t have one set of transfer requirements to transfer out of Lewis and another set to pupil place out of Chantilly.

Oh but they’re going to have a meeting with Lewis families and reps later this month to talk about it and get feedback. I’m sure that won’t be a waste of time. The Lewis families have been very active and vocal on what they want. They deserve better than what’s happened in this process.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The school board meeting was pretty concerning. The areas highlighted for further review will be addressed in between cycles. AAP centers at all middle schools will likely be implemented between cycles, but not all at once. The comprehensive review is looking to be a yearly battle.

They should be looking at borders for schools that are at 95% and over capacity, that is a part of their job. They need to get better projections for future growth and they need to make decisions that might not be popular but help students by lessing the effects of over crowding. Changing schools will never be popular, people don’t want it. The School Board needs to make the unpopular call from time to time. But they need to have a plan that makes sense that is defensible and it needs to be more then we want to balance population groups.

And they need to deal with one of the big causes of the problem, IB vs AP. Choose one and have it at every school. The complete program. Have 2 IB schools that kids can pupil place into. Set those at schools that are centered for half of the County to make it easier for all families to get there. Kids can opt-in to IB, just like the Academies. But the kids leaving IB schools for other schools is a part of the problem with under and over enrollment at some schools.

Nope.

FCPS should do a full residency check of any high school they are considering for rezoning as the very first step, sending back to their base schools all program tansfers and any student whose parents do not have current proof of residency.

No school with 50+ transfers into the school in spite of being "closed" to transfers for more than a decade, and a known history of people sending their kids to the school by using old addresses or someone else's addresses (cough cough, WSHS) should be considered for rezoning until FCPS is certain the the only students attending the school are those who live or rent in bounds.

Second, FCPS should revamp curriculum at any high school that has a critical mass of students, more than 50, transferring to other high schools.

If hundreds of families are using AP to transfer out from an undesired IB program, then eliminate IB and put AP into the dang school.

Third, put AAP at every middle school. This will solve many high school transfers of smart kids out of poor performing high schools.

These 3 steps need to be looked at before a single high school is considered for rezoning.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of us with students impacted immediately by these changes - I say please vote this school board out and make sure they never serve in public office again!

You underestimate the intelligence of voters in our area who simply vote down ballot either red or blue.

When the Republican party runs a moderate, they will win. I won’t vote for a MAGA crazy or a Tea Party crazy for school board. I can count on the Democrats getting in each others way, because that seems to be the way of the Democrats. Putting people on the board who are willing to exclude students for a number of reasons instead of working to find common sense solutions is not acceptable.

I don’t like the current board but replacing them with a different type of awful, one that is intolerant and dismissive and homophobic is not a good replacement. Changing out left wing Progressives for right wing nut jobs is not a good trade.

Maybe the local Republican party will listen and run some moderates. Actual moderates who are focused on education and can present a solid plan for things like redistricting when schools are over crowded and how to adjust the CIP and how to better support SPED programs. Heck, toss in how to downsize the admin positions at Gatehouse and return that money to the schools. They would have a good deal of support.

Sandy Anderson's opponent was conservative, but cdntrist on school issues and much more qualified than Anderson.

Her opponent's area of expertise was special ed...

Her opponent was a mom’s for liberty whacko. Nice try with the revisionist history.

DP, but there was a lot of “revisionist history” on display from Karl Frisch last night.

He claimed this process was “messy” because it was so transparent. Wrong. It was messy because much of the work was outsourced to an incompetent outside consultant, and Frisch was one of the architects for that decision, since his goal was to try and avoid accountability by saying the School Board was relying on outside “experts.” That blew up in their faces because Thru Consulting was staggeringly bad, so of course people vented to their School Board members.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m halfway through the YouTube video of last night’s meeting.

I’m often critical of the school board on these forums, but, I’ll give praise where it is due - several board members now seem focused on increasing enrollment for under enrolled schools through programming decisions and transfers. That’s welcome news.

I personally would rather see them just address it with programming, but a look at transfers should come before further boundary changes, if programming decisions don’t fix the issue. Further boundary changes should be a last resort after these two approaches have been exhausted.

Anyway, hopefully this is a sea change in how they approach capacity issues in the future.

I have not listened yet. However, they need to be realistic in their programming.

For example, when they renamed Lee to Lewis and chose to put in a social justice program that was thinly veiled as a "leadership program" , did anyone consider that this was sending a "message" about the school?

Transfers were specifically mentioned as a potential solution to Lewis. I would rather they just look at programming, but at least they are going to look at something other than disastrous and unwanted boundary moves.

What does that even mean? It would be one thing if they just stepped up and said we need to get rid of IB at Lewis and have a full set of AP courses. Saying they will look at transfers is sort of meaningless. You can’t have one set of transfer requirements to transfer out of Lewis and another set to pupil place out of Chantilly.

Oh but they’re going to have a meeting with Lewis families and reps later this month to talk about it and get feedback. I’m sure that won’t be a waste of time. The Lewis families have been very active and vocal on what they want. They deserve better than what’s happened in this process.

I support the Lewis meeting to figure out a solution, not moving boundaries as a band aid. As Sandy said yesterday, it’s clear that WSHS families aren’t interested in moving to Lewis, so they need to approach any concerns about capacity in a realistic way. That’s programming.

Good for FCPS for realizing this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For those that watched the meeting - was your sense they will approve this and then keep working on the other changes or make amendments now?

My impression after watching her speak is that Sandy Anderson is going to make changes to WSHS mid cycle, and possibly on the final map

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The school board meeting was pretty concerning. The areas highlighted for further review will be addressed in between cycles. AAP centers at all middle schools will likely be implemented between cycles, but not all at once. The comprehensive review is looking to be a yearly battle.

They should be looking at borders for schools that are at 95% and over capacity, that is a part of their job. They need to get better projections for future growth and they need to make decisions that might not be popular but help students by lessing the effects of over crowding. Changing schools will never be popular, people don’t want it. The School Board needs to make the unpopular call from time to time. But they need to have a plan that makes sense that is defensible and it needs to be more then we want to balance population groups.

And they need to deal with one of the big causes of the problem, IB vs AP. Choose one and have it at every school. The complete program. Have 2 IB schools that kids can pupil place into. Set those at schools that are centered for half of the County to make it easier for all families to get there. Kids can opt-in to IB, just like the Academies. But the kids leaving IB schools for other schools is a part of the problem with under and over enrollment at some schools.

Nope.

FCPS should do a full residency check of any high school they are considering for rezoning as the very first step, sending back to their base schools all program tansfers and any student whose parents do not have current proof of residency.

No school with 50+ transfers into the school in spite of being "closed" to transfers for more than a decade, and a known history of people sending their kids to the school by using old addresses or someone else's addresses (cough cough, WSHS) should be considered for rezoning until FCPS is certain the the only students attending the school are those who live or rent in bounds.

Second, FCPS should revamp curriculum at any high school that has a critical mass of students, more than 50, transferring to other high schools.

If hundreds of families are using AP to transfer out from an undesired IB program, then eliminate IB and put AP into the dang school.

Third, put AAP at every middle school. This will solve many high school transfers of smart kids out of poor performing high schools.

These 3 steps need to be looked at before a single high school is considered for rezoning.

So we have to revamp the curriculum at every school that has more than 50 kids reported by FCPS as transferring to TJHSST?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The school board meeting was pretty concerning. The areas highlighted for further review will be addressed in between cycles. AAP centers at all middle schools will likely be implemented between cycles, but not all at once. The comprehensive review is looking to be a yearly battle.

They should be looking at borders for schools that are at 95% and over capacity, that is a part of their job. They need to get better projections for future growth and they need to make decisions that might not be popular but help students by lessing the effects of over crowding. Changing schools will never be popular, people don’t want it. The School Board needs to make the unpopular call from time to time. But they need to have a plan that makes sense that is defensible and it needs to be more then we want to balance population groups.

And they need to deal with one of the big causes of the problem, IB vs AP. Choose one and have it at every school. The complete program. Have 2 IB schools that kids can pupil place into. Set those at schools that are centered for half of the County to make it easier for all families to get there. Kids can opt-in to IB, just like the Academies. But the kids leaving IB schools for other schools is a part of the problem with under and over enrollment at some schools.

Nope.

FCPS should do a full residency check of any high school they are considering for rezoning as the very first step, sending back to their base schools all program tansfers and any student whose parents do not have current proof of residency.

No school with 50+ transfers into the school in spite of being "closed" to transfers for more than a decade, and a known history of people sending their kids to the school by using old addresses or someone else's addresses (cough cough, WSHS) should be considered for rezoning until FCPS is certain the the only students attending the school are those who live or rent in bounds.

Second, FCPS should revamp curriculum at any high school that has a critical mass of students, more than 50, transferring to other high schools.

If hundreds of families are using AP to transfer out from an undesired IB program, then eliminate IB and put AP into the dang school.

Third, put AAP at every middle school. This will solve many high school transfers of smart kids out of poor performing high schools.

These 3 steps need to be looked at before a single high school is considered for rezoning.

+1. Anyone arguing that FCPS should just adjust boundaries and ignore FCPS families is not a serious person and is just ignoring the reality of the situation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of us with students impacted immediately by these changes - I say please vote this school board out and make sure they never serve in public office again!

You underestimate the intelligence of voters in our area who simply vote down ballot either red or blue.

When the Republican party runs a moderate, they will win. I won’t vote for a MAGA crazy or a Tea Party crazy for school board. I can count on the Democrats getting in each others way, because that seems to be the way of the Democrats. Putting people on the board who are willing to exclude students for a number of reasons instead of working to find common sense solutions is not acceptable.

I don’t like the current board but replacing them with a different type of awful, one that is intolerant and dismissive and homophobic is not a good replacement. Changing out left wing Progressives for right wing nut jobs is not a good trade.

Maybe the local Republican party will listen and run some moderates. Actual moderates who are focused on education and can present a solid plan for things like redistricting when schools are over crowded and how to adjust the CIP and how to better support SPED programs. Heck, toss in how to downsize the admin positions at Gatehouse and return that money to the schools. They would have a good deal of support.

Sandy Anderson's opponent was conservative, but cdntrist on school issues and much more qualified than Anderson.

Her opponent's area of expertise was special ed...

Her opponent was a mom’s for liberty whacko. Nice try with the revisionist history.

DP, but there was a lot of “revisionist history” on display from Karl Frisch last night.

He claimed this process was “messy” because it was so transparent. Wrong. It was messy because much of the work was outsourced to an incompetent outside consultant, and Frisch was one of the architects for that decision, since his goal was to try and avoid accountability by saying the School Board was relying on outside “experts.” That blew up in their faces because Thru Consulting was staggeringly bad, so of course people vented to their School Board members.

This! Take the BRAC for instance...started as a weird lottery. Names and contact of members weren't released until public outcry. New reps were to represent special interests groups with no transparency on why certain groups were chosen. They made all members sign an NDA that scared many of them into not engaging with communities as much as they would have liked. BRAC's first round of recommendations were only released after public outcry (in fact some BRAC members did not even want their first recs released). The public never saw the last recommendations from the BRAC. Now, there is a 'skeleton BRAC' being created with no transparency of who will be on it and how will they be chosen. And this is just BRAC. Don't get me started on the Sept. public meetings that where meaningless, and the boundary tool comments map that was meaningless because people could literally write hundreds of comments in all areas and there was no way to know how many individual households actual participated. The fact they the board called it 'messy' because parents participated (as best they could) in the process is insulting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If anyone is watching...I feel horrible for region 4 (West Springfield). Their rep just said she is going to keep making changes over and over again. Watch out Hunt Valley, Daventry, Sangster, White Oaks, others??

Yes Sandy Anderson is going to put WSHS on the list of areas of concern which was at the end of the superintendent’s plan. She said she was disappointed no changes were made and more changes there need to be considered.

The original proposals had much of Hunt Valley south of the Parkway at South County, creating a split feeder out of HVES.

Yes. I think was was disappointed that Hunt Valley didn't move either, regardless of creating a split. It's hard to tell because she refuses to engage constructively with her constituents. During this whole process, she never initiated West Springfield specific meetings (outside of the poorly constructed ones by Thru) like other regional board members did, and had some very contentious zoom meetings with neighborhood who had to reach out to her office repeatedly. She helped to create a kill or be killed mentality for all of West Springfield which made neighborhood feel like they had to fight each other.

I spoke with her on the telephone, months after requesting a call from her.

She was fairly clear that she wants to move Hunt Valley and Sangster out, and replace them with Lewis students from Rolling Valley.

She has been saying this consistently for almost 2 years.

In her statement last night, she stated that she has been telling constituents her plans for "18 months" and is disappointed that what she wanted changed with WSHS is not on ther superintendent's map. You can watch the meeting to see for yourself. It is towards the end.

When someone tells you and anyone who will listen exactly what they plan to do, for 2 years consistently, believe them.

Springfield district voters would be fools to elect Anderson again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m halfway through the YouTube video of last night’s meeting.

I’m often critical of the school board on these forums, but, I’ll give praise where it is due - several board members now seem focused on increasing enrollment for under enrolled schools through programming decisions and transfers. That’s welcome news.

I personally would rather see them just address it with programming, but a look at transfers should come before further boundary changes, if programming decisions don’t fix the issue. Further boundary changes should be a last resort after these two approaches have been exhausted.

Anyway, hopefully this is a sea change in how they approach capacity issues in the future.

I have not listened yet. However, they need to be realistic in their programming.

For example, when they renamed Lee to Lewis and chose to put in a social justice program that was thinly veiled as a "leadership program" , did anyone consider that this was sending a "message" about the school?

Transfers were specifically mentioned as a potential solution to Lewis. I would rather they just look at programming, but at least they are going to look at something other than disastrous and unwanted boundary moves.

What does that even mean? It would be one thing if they just stepped up and said we need to get rid of IB at Lewis and have a full set of AP courses. Saying they will look at transfers is sort of meaningless. You can’t have one set of transfer requirements to transfer out of Lewis and another set to pupil place out of Chantilly.

Oh but they’re going to have a meeting with Lewis families and reps later this month to talk about it and get feedback. I’m sure that won’t be a waste of time. The Lewis families have been very active and vocal on what they want. They deserve better than what’s happened in this process.

I support the Lewis meeting to figure out a solution, not moving boundaries as a band aid. As Sandy said yesterday, it’s clear that WSHS families aren’t interested in moving to Lewis, so they need to approach any concerns about capacity in a realistic way. That’s programming.

Good for FCPS for realizing this.

Putting a finer point on this. People don't want to move out of their WS schools period. It's not just folks not wanting to Lewis.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Did any board members inquire on the academic impact of proposed boundary changes at the high school level? For example, how would average GPA's, test scores, etc. look different based on students moving in or out? We are an impacted family and trying to understand the extent of the academic impact, if any.

I don't think academic impact is a priority for this school board, except maybe Moon, Dunne and Dr. Andersen (different from Sandy Anderson)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The school board meeting was pretty concerning. The areas highlighted for further review will be addressed in between cycles. AAP centers at all middle schools will likely be implemented between cycles, but not all at once. The comprehensive review is looking to be a yearly battle.

They should be looking at borders for schools that are at 95% and over capacity, that is a part of their job. They need to get better projections for future growth and they need to make decisions that might not be popular but help students by lessing the effects of over crowding. Changing schools will never be popular, people don’t want it. The School Board needs to make the unpopular call from time to time. But they need to have a plan that makes sense that is defensible and it needs to be more then we want to balance population groups.

And they need to deal with one of the big causes of the problem, IB vs AP. Choose one and have it at every school. The complete program. Have 2 IB schools that kids can pupil place into. Set those at schools that are centered for half of the County to make it easier for all families to get there. Kids can opt-in to IB, just like the Academies. But the kids leaving IB schools for other schools is a part of the problem with under and over enrollment at some schools.

Nope.

FCPS should do a full residency check of any high school they are considering for rezoning as the very first step, sending back to their base schools all program tansfers and any student whose parents do not have current proof of residency.

No school with 50+ transfers into the school in spite of being "closed" to transfers for more than a decade, and a known history of people sending their kids to the school by using old addresses or someone else's addresses (cough cough, WSHS) should be considered for rezoning until FCPS is certain the the only students attending the school are those who live or rent in bounds.

Second, FCPS should revamp curriculum at any high school that has a critical mass of students, more than 50, transferring to other high schools.

If hundreds of families are using AP to transfer out from an undesired IB program, then eliminate IB and put AP into the dang school.

Third, put AAP at every middle school. This will solve many high school transfers of smart kids out of poor performing high schools.

These 3 steps need to be looked at before a single high school is considered for rezoning.

So we have to revamp the curriculum at every school that has more than 50 kids reported by FCPS as transferring to TJHSST?

If you remove the TJ numbers, which is implied in the comment, then the schools with high transfer rates are the IB schools and Herndon.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The school board meeting was pretty concerning. The areas highlighted for further review will be addressed in between cycles. AAP centers at all middle schools will likely be implemented between cycles, but not all at once. The comprehensive review is looking to be a yearly battle.

They should be looking at borders for schools that are at 95% and over capacity, that is a part of their job. They need to get better projections for future growth and they need to make decisions that might not be popular but help students by lessing the effects of over crowding. Changing schools will never be popular, people don’t want it. The School Board needs to make the unpopular call from time to time. But they need to have a plan that makes sense that is defensible and it needs to be more then we want to balance population groups.

And they need to deal with one of the big causes of the problem, IB vs AP. Choose one and have it at every school. The complete program. Have 2 IB schools that kids can pupil place into. Set those at schools that are centered for half of the County to make it easier for all families to get there. Kids can opt-in to IB, just like the Academies. But the kids leaving IB schools for other schools is a part of the problem with under and over enrollment at some schools.

Nope.

FCPS should do a full residency check of any high school they are considering for rezoning as the very first step, sending back to their base schools all program tansfers and any student whose parents do not have current proof of residency.

No school with 50+ transfers into the school in spite of being "closed" to transfers for more than a decade, and a known history of people sending their kids to the school by using old addresses or someone else's addresses (cough cough, WSHS) should be considered for rezoning until FCPS is certain the the only students attending the school are those who live or rent in bounds.

Second, FCPS should revamp curriculum at any high school that has a critical mass of students, more than 50, transferring to other high schools.

If hundreds of families are using AP to transfer out from an undesired IB program, then eliminate IB and put AP into the dang school.

Third, put AAP at every middle school. This will solve many high school transfers of smart kids out of poor performing high schools.

These 3 steps need to be looked at before a single high school is considered for rezoning.

So we have to revamp the curriculum at every school that has more than 50 kids reported by FCPS as transferring to TJHSST?

Not TJ. The post says IB/AP specifically.

Getting accepted to TJ is not a transfer loophole.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did any board members inquire on the academic impact of proposed boundary changes at the high school level? For example, how would average GPA's, test scores, etc. look different based on students moving in or out? We are an impacted family and trying to understand the extent of the academic impact, if any.

I don't think academic impact is a priority for this school board, except maybe Moon, Dunne and Dr. Andersen (different from Sandy Anderson)

I would agree with these three being different.