Well, the website advocating a move to Chantilly is down. So I don't know if there is an organized effort to move there anymore. |
I do think this process is necessary. We almost certainly won’t be affected (other than my kids losing friends,) but we went through a recent smaller boundary thing and I was still on board even if it meant a non-preferred solution for us.
The county isn’t doing everything well, but they need to be able adjust things to improve the overall logistics of the county. |
No. THIS process is not necessary. From where I sit, this is not improving things at all. I still don't see where they are addressing the immediate and serious need for Coates, and maybe others, that need attention now. |
I would argue that adjusting school boundaries won’t improve the overall logistics of FCPS one bit. It actually enables them to continue to misallocate capital resources and then cover up their mistakes by moving kids around like widgets. |
Emerald Chase parent here. Long story short, we love Oak Hill. It’s the closest school to our community and our kids are able to bike/walk there. We recently lived through an expansion/renovation so there are no capacity issues. I would like my kids to be able to stay with their friends through their school careers. So if the rest of Oak Hill went to Carson and Westfield, I would be happy, I am not looking to “trade up” to Chantilly like some are implying. Westfield is a great school. If we aren’t able to keep the Oak Hill kids together this round of rezoning due to capacity issues, I’d rather we just keep the status quo and revisit in 5 years to see what capacity looks like.
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Coates and park lawn boundary changes were delayed for the comprehensive boundary review. They delayed making changes to address actual needs at those schools to allow themselves to make unnecessary changes. You can’t make this stuff up. Rank incompetence. |
That is looking at something strategically and for a longer term rather than just fixing a pocket of need. |
Why can’t they make Westbriar feed entirely to Marshall? If that means some Town of Vienna families go to Marshall, so be it. |
Sacrifice fixing an urgent problem to make changes that create more problems. Gatehouse at its finest, folks. |
Different poster from the area. There are also big drops in enrollment in that area which the CIP projections and the THRU numbers are completely ignoring. FCPS CIP is using projections from some secret formula. Thru is only looking at school membership from September 2024. If you look at school membership beyond the current numbers, there is going to be a clear drop in enrollment. Fall 2026, when rezoning is implemented, WSHS will have a fairly decent drop in enrollment when Class of 2026 graduates because the current Irving 7th grade is almost 140 fewer students, 718 for class of 2026 vs 581 for the current Irving 7th grade. Even if all 50-60 of the AAP kids return from Lake Braddock AAP along with the usual dozen Catholic school kids, there is still an enrollment drop of around 60-70 students. The current 6th grade will make Irving a little bigger next year, but then there is a HUGE drop in the current 5th grade enrollment, who will be the 7th grade class when rezoning starts in 2026, and the 9th grade class in 2028. Enrollment in that pyramid is with stable, or a steady decline after the 5th grade class, with another huge drop with the kindergarten class. Thru did not take any of the immediate future enrollment drops or the long term enrollment drops into account when developing their rezoning plan. The used current membership, ie attendance, at each school based of fall 2024 numbers, which makes little sense because the rezoning affects 2026 and beyond. |
I agree. A very small portion of TOV goes to Westbriar. It’s mostly the country club that falls within that region. If TOV feels strongly enough to have all of TOV attend Madison, they should look into moving the TOV parts of Westbriar to Vienna ES and Wolftrap. |
But they aren't looking at it from the longer term. The draft maps they've released look at the school populations for this year. And then they move kids around based on that. They're not looking at what happens in years after that, most likely because CIP numbers are notoriously incorrect. And if you're going to switch 30 kids from one school to another to "fix" overcrowding, that's a problem because the CIP numbers at some schools are routinely off more than that figure in any given year. This is a mess. I have no problems with them doing a comprehensive review. But they seem to be using this as an opportunity to switch thousands of kids around to make things look better on paper, when the changes don't make sense in real life. And with no guaranteed grandfathering, they're just going to rip kids away from their communities and friends for no good reason. Fix Coates and Park Lawn because those schools are legitimately overcrowded. But leave others alone unless there's a really pressing need for a change AND the community agrees with it. |
I have to laugh when I see WSHS families who benefitted from Jeff Platenberg’s largesse finally waking up to the fact that FCPS planning is atrocious. |
Well, frankly, if you have no problem with a comprehensive review, then you only have yourself to blame. Sometimes people can be so dense… |
Who is Jeff Platenberg? |