Lemon Road Elementary
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Anonymous
No, the majority of FHES students are not underperforming. And the student backgrounds at the two schools are similar now but they likely won't be when all is said and done. For most schools I think this kind of transition usually happens over a longer period of time than we are dealing with here. The area being studied mostly (not entirely, but mostly) consists of lower income students according to FCPS's own documents. And the school system has determined that lower income populations tend to need additional services. The school would get more resources as a result, presumably more staff too. I just hope it all fits in the building, and then into the expanded Lemon Road building. Post-expansion there's no obvious place to add trailers should Lemon Road start bursting its seams. Nobody wants a repeat of what happened at Freedom Hill. As far as parental support, I hope that the families that move to Lemon Road do have actively involved parents. If they aren't engaged and can't be engaged then Lemon Road will have a far smaller base of parents to fall back on for support than Freedom Hill currently enjoys. Que sera sera, and we will just have to hope for the best. |
Anonymous
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Lemon Road and Freedom Hill are both pretty good schools that are very diverse.
What's at issue is that FCPS proposes to reassign an area that includes a large number of low-income, non-English speaking students from Freedom Hill to much smaller Lemon Road. Because Lemon Road is much smaller, doing so will have a far bigger impact on the student profile at Lemon Road than it will on the student profile at Freedom Hill. At one level, it's not the least bit irrational. Students need to be educated, Freedom Hill is over-crowded, Lemon Road is under-enrolled, the area in question is closer to Lemon Road than Freedom Hill, and there's room to build an addition at Lemon Road. From a purely logistical perspective, it's almost a no-brainer, but it will have a huge effect on Lemon Road. FCPS wants to do this in two tranches. In the first instance, some part of the study area with approximately 100 students will be carved out to reassign to Lemon Road. Then, after the Lemon Road addition is built, the staff wants to do another boundary study that pulls in additional students from, at a minimum, Shrevewood and Westgate. As a result, there will be a lot of attention as to exactly which 100 students from Freedom Hill get reassigned to Lemon Road first. The area that is closest to Lemon Road is the area with the most students with special needs and consists largely of low-income, heavily Hispanic garden apartments off Pimmit and Los Pueblos Drives and some apartment complexes that have seen better days. The remaining part of the study area consists primarily of moderately to very expensive townhouses near Marshall HS and a more expensive apartment complex. On the one hand, you could argue that sending the lowest-income area to Lemon Road first makes the most sense, because it's closest to the school and those students may get more attention at Lemon Road while it is still small. On the other hand, doing so would probably turn Lemon Road overnight into something close to a Title I school, which will send parents from some of the nicer neighborhoods assigned to Lemon Road neighborhoods running for the exits. That's why I think many Lemon Road parents will beg FCPS to send kids from the nicer area to Lemon Road first, and only send the other kids to Lemon Road at the same time as additional students from the Pimmit Hills and Idylwood areas assigned to Westgate and Shrevewood get reassigned to Lemon Road. If the latter were to occur, Lemon Road's demographics wouldn't bounce around quite as much, and you'd likely see more people sticking with the school. I don't know what FCPS will ultimately do. One has the sense that the School Board is somewhat overwhelmed by the growing enrollment and just looking for places to find seats for students. At the same time, they have to deal with the perception that their every move is taken to address the growing, often low-income, Hispanic population (i.e., the recent Annandale HS redistricting, the announced plans to build more schools near Baileys' Crossroads) and that they take middle and upper-income families, whose children typically attend classes with more students and often are themselves reassigned to new schools at the staff's whim, for granted. Hopefully, the new Board will actually listen to what people have to say as the study unfolds, and not just do whatever Dean Tistadt recommends. |
Anonymous
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So... We should be responding to the changing demographics of our county... Fairfax County and FCPS needs to figure out how to explain that we are trying to serve our community...our entire community...not just the haves...not just the have nots.
This demographic shift is with us, won't change; and it is happening faster elsewhere in the county. |
Anonymous
| they need to check immigration status of the parents AND the child, before enrolling children, this would really fix a lot of the issues |
Anonymous
wow. |
Anonymous
Funny, funny... I was born in Texas... Do I need to have a green card to emigrate from there? ? ? |
Anonymous
Well, yeah, but you have to consider how FCPS best goes about needing those needs. There's a bit of a conflict between FCPS proclaiming that major enrollment growth is expected in the Tysons area and then responding with a limited boundary study that involves only two schools, only one of which is now over-crowded. It is hard for me to see how limiting the scope of an inevitably broader study and potentially concentrating low-income students in one school in the area - Lemon Road - is going to serve the needs of the haves or the have-nots. There's a big risk that the haves will bail on Lemon Road ("yes, let them," I can hear the responses already) and that the have-nots will end up in a school that has a very high concentration of students with special needs. If that can be avoided, why not try? People in this area are well aware of, and accept, diversity, but when a school reaches a tipping point of FRR/ESOL students, it's pretty darn hard to reverse it. To the other poster, I'm sorry that the Lemon Road letter to the School Board went largely ignored. Janie Strauss spoke in her gentle tones and urged the parents last night to get involved in coming up with a "solution that works for everyone," but the narrow scope of the authorized study means the options you'll be given are going to be limited. Even so, don't just accept what the staff presents for discussion purposes. |
Anonymous
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0457_0202_ZO.html |
Anonymous
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13:52 again - last comment to Lemon Road parents (assuming some of you are responsible for the comments in question) is to strongly urge you NOT to repeat the silly argument that the proposed redistricting is some piece of social engineering intended to improve Freedom Hill's test scores/AYP performance.
It's a totally spurious argument. Their school is over-crowded, yours is under-enrolled, and you're lucky your neighborhood school isn't being closed down like Clifton. The requirements of NCLB get more rigorous every year and no one really pays that much attention to AYP any more. And, in your heart of hearts, you probably won't end up minding some "social engineering" at all, if at the end of the day the result is to keep your school open and achieve a balance that isn't too different from what exists today. |
Anonymous
| Currently Lemon Road is in need of PTA volunteers. Will we get any with the new families Freedom Hill? I'm guessing not because those parents tend to be too busy and/or don't speak english. The fact that FCPS is only looking at two schools to me means that they aren't serious about making sure all of their schools are of high quality and a good diversity. |
Anonymous
| FCPS seems to want to concentrate all the poor kids and low test scores in certain elementary schools |
Anonymous
Eventually the answer clearly will be "yes.". But if the first group of kids reassigned are from the area off Pimmit Drive and Los Pueblos, the parents are less likely to be the involved types for the reasons you mentioned - job demands and limited English skills. Fairfax has never tried to make sure all of their schools are diverse, but they've usually tried not to change the demographics at a particular school radically with a single redistricting. That's why they usually supply charts with pre- and post-redistricting projections before seeking final approval of a proposal. They want to show that the short-term impacts are fairly incremental. |
Anonymous
| FCPS would NEVER molest the more affluent elementary schools in mclean. I wonder why, is it because most lawmakers live in the affluent areas? |
Anonymous
Fail, i think. How do you "molest" the most affluent elementary schools in McLean (very poor word choice, by the way, to describe the reassignment of young kids to a new school) when they aren't near low-income garden apartment complexes? Plus, a fair number of students currently at Lemon Road are zoned for McLean HS, so this proposal ultimately impacts that school as well if people start pulling their kids out of Lemon Road. All we should be discussing here, without hyperbole, is how to meet capacity needs in a balanced manner. |
Anonymous
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Also, many of the existing "haves" at the school are pupil placed. That's the unique thing at lemon road right now that those unfamiliar with the school do not realize. The pupil placement will not continue, it is not even clear if kids already at the school will be able to stay. I think there are about 80 kids pupil placed, without these kids the existing demographics of the school are impacted.
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