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Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)
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Anonymous
You didn’t mention Paul Bartkowski. He struck me as a conservative Catholic with traditional values, but he was also a local parent who had a clue about conditions in some of the local schools. Despite having worked at Chantilly for years, Robyn Lady seemed clueless to me, and we’ve been watching that play out recently as she’s been all over the place when it’s come to how FCPS should approach boundary changes. |
Anonymous
I’m skeptical. Do you think that there are enough low-SES on the east side of Tysons to balance out the loss from Timber Lane? I don’t think anyone N of 29 is going to be zoned for Falls Church. |
Anonymous
DP. I just read this to mean “deserve to attend” the HS they were already attending or expected to attend. Enough with the constant insinuations - it just makes you and the School Board members you are shilling for look like nut jobs. |
Anonymous
I haven’t been too active in this thread, but I just can’t get around the question: When would redistricting be appropriate? It seems like an opinion among many here is never. |
Anonymous
If I understand it, your premise is they can’t or won’t reassign that area because it would reduce the FARMS rate at McLean. You may be right, but in that case it would have made a lot more sense to build an addition to McLean than to expand Falls Church to 2500 during its ongoing renovation. There’s a bit of growth within the Falls Church district, such as the Graham Park townhouse project, but overall there isn’t nearly as much growth expected in the Falls Church district as in the McLean district. They could have expanded Falls Church with the expectation that it would pick up part of Justice, but it appears they were worried about moving the single-family areas zoned to Justice that are closest to Falls Church, so they are now expanding Justice as well. There may be a small area of Glasgow/Justice that they move to Poe/Falls Church in connection with the Glasgow boundary revisions, but it won’t have a huge impact on Falls Church’s enrollment. The other possibilities, I suppose, might be to move Mantua from Woodson to Falls Church or just leave Falls Church under-enrolled once its expansion is finished. Ultimately, there’s going to be a tension between prioritizing the elimination of attendance islands and split feeders and maintaining current levels of diversity at some schools. That issue is not limited to McLean, and will be a bigger issue at some elementary schools that currently have attendance islands. |
Anonymous
When a school is so overcrowded that a sizable percentage of the parents at the school are asking for relief or so under-enrolled that its ability to offer a suitable curriculum to its students is meaningfully compromised. That’s effectively been the rule of thumb for decades and, while it’s been abused by some School Board members, it’s generally worked OK. No one knows exactly what they plan to do now; the only thing that is clear is that when a School Board that has never met a dime it wouldn’t spend and has approved wasteful capital projects such as Dunn Loring ES claims it is being driven by considerations of “efficiency” (which parrots language in the state legislation) they may have other things in mind as well. |
Anonymous
It’s appropriate to get rid of most of the attendance islands and split feeders at the ES level. Look at a map, I’m sure a few will jump out at you. It’s appropriate when there’s a school that’s overcrowded next to an underenrolled school that can take on some more students. WSHS’s boundaries are compact and not gerrymandered, so the first one doesn’t apply. There are some attendance islands and strange borders at the ES level, but those do not affect WSHS. The second one is ehhhh. People at WSHS have reported that there are empty classrooms, and they’ve recently had an expansion and renovation so it’s not as though kids are in trailers. However, another point is if boundaries needed to be redrawn in that area, Lake Braddock and South County are also both under enrolled and could pick up quite a few students between the two schools. South County in particular would be a much shorter commute vs. Lewis for the kids on the southern end of WSHS’s boundary. Sangster could easily become a feeder just for LB (it is currently split) and that would jettison students from WSHS as well. Changing some ES boundaries in that area would also work to alleviate crowding at the elementary level, which is significant at Orange Hunt Elementary. There are still however issues to work through with regards to AAP centers touched on a few pages back. Summary, there is room for change in the elementary schools that feed to WSHS. But those changes would not need to involve Lewis, which is a physically farther away school. |
Anonymous
The reality is that most of the over crowded schools asked for relief in the form of an expansion, they did not want to shift boundaries. And this is not always because they didn’t want to move to a high FARMs or high ELL school. McLean has been asking for an expansion and resisted moving kids to Langley from McLean. The two schools are similar in a lot of ways but the McLean families wanted to stay at McLean. Expansions have been approved and completed in the last 10 years or so. Shifting from expansions to whoever asks to shift boundaries and use available seats is a shift in recent policy. I don’t think those expansions should be have been approved, I think they should have shifted boundaries. The school board didn’t want to deal with the mess that boundary shifts causes, see this 417 page thread as evidence. They used the argument that it wasn’t too expensive to do so while schools were going through renovation. I really don’t understand the out of queue renovations and expansions that were authorized. As a parent in an area that was shifted to SLHS, I get it. I would prefer Oakton to SLHS. My child would do better with AP, he is a STEM kid and I think the AP course offerings in math and science would be better for him than IB. I am not excited by the school within a school aspect of SLHS. That said, I am not so unhappy with SLHS that we are looking at private schools. We might look at placing at Oakton for AP and Japanese but that will my kids choice. He might prefer to stay with his friends at SLHS and we will be fine with that. The kids we know at SLHS have been happy there and have gone some really strong schools. |
Anonymous
Nice neighborhoods and houses are still nice. Fairfax has some pretty scenery too. |
Anonymous
Nothing worse than a mom who believes in liberty. Especially in America. |
Anonymous
Bit of an exaggeration. The schools won’t actually be bad, just mediocre. Until they roll out SBG countywide. THEN, they will all be bad. |
Anonymous
Are Alexandria schools bad? Why? |
Anonymous
He did not have a clue — he was going on false information about what was taught in schools. |
Anonymous
| People on here really do treat Lewis like it is full of the untouchables. Sad. |
Anonymous
Some McLean families welcomed the 2021 boundary change with Langley. Others opposed it. The biggest predictor was whether a family already had kids at McLean or instead only had younger kids at an ES that primarily fed to Langley. The former tended to oppose the boundary change. The latter tended to support it. The approach to that boundary change was fairly crude. McLean was over-crowded and Langley was under-enrolled, so only boundary changes that would move McLean kids to Langley were considered. (As opposed to taking a broader look at the boundaries). In comparison, the more recent boundary changes to address the overcrowding at Kent Gardens ES took a different approach. They did not just consider options that would only move kids out of Kent Gardens to other ES in the McLean pyramid, but instead looked at creating new boundaries in the pyramid that would make sense longer-term. So a bunch of kids were moved out of Kent Gardens, but then also out of the school (Franklin Sherman) that received the most kids from KG. In the process they were able to eliminate the split feeder at FS so that kids who were headed to Cooper/Langley could attend Churchill Road ES instead. |