FCPS HS Boundary

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the extreme political backlash would only happen if the School Board goes for massive changes across the county under the banner of equity.

If, for example, they only moved students from overcrowded WS to under utilized Lewis, I don't think you would get much political support outside of WS. There is a legitimate justification to make this change. The county board certainly would not get involved. And voters across the county wouldn't rally to elect a bunch of conservatives because of proper space and resource utilization.

There is no justification for this change.

Other people's kids are not your pawns.

Stop being obtuse. There is plenty of justification as has already been discussed ad nauseam. Zones are not guaranteed, and everyone agrees the existing zones and associated policies are outdated. Your anger should be directed at the past school boards who failed to manage the situation properly.

Maybe these words will make sense to you: Where is your personal responsibility for buying a house in a district you like?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the extreme political backlash would only happen if the School Board goes for massive changes across the county under the banner of equity.

If, for example, they only moved students from overcrowded WS to under utilized Lewis, I don't think you would get much political support outside of WS. There is a legitimate justification to make this change. The county board certainly would not get involved. And voters across the county wouldn't rally to elect a bunch of conservatives because of proper space and resource utilization.

There is no justification for this change.

Other people's kids are not your pawns.

Stop being obtuse. There is plenty of justification as has already been discussed ad nauseam. Zones are not guaranteed, and everyone agrees the existing zones and associated policies are outdated. Your anger should be directed at the past school boards who failed to manage the situation properly.

DP. What an obvious gas light attempt you are making here. In fact very few people agree with you that “existing zones and associated policies are outdated”. You might agree with Kyle McDaniel, but last time I checked two people is not “everyone”.

It’s ironic that in this post you call the PP obtuse.

[Anonymous]

We live in a neighborhood where the boundary runs down the center of it. Makes no sense to separate the kids like this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the extreme political backlash would only happen if the School Board goes for massive changes across the county under the banner of equity.

If, for example, they only moved students from overcrowded WS to under utilized Lewis, I don't think you would get much political support outside of WS. There is a legitimate justification to make this change. The county board certainly would not get involved. And voters across the county wouldn't rally to elect a bunch of conservatives because of proper space and resource utilization.

There is no justification for this change.

Other people's kids are not your pawns.

Stop being obtuse. There is plenty of justification as has already been discussed ad nauseam. Zones are not guaranteed, and everyone agrees the existing zones and associated policies are outdated. Your anger should be directed at the past school boards who failed to manage the situation properly.

Before we start moving a bunch of WS kids around, why don't we transition Lewis to AP, add a STEM lab there and stop kids WHO ARE ZONED FOR LEWIS from getting pupil placed at other schools. You could have 15 elementary schools rezoned for Key and Lewis but you still wouldn't be able to fill it up. You need to add something to that school that kids would find useful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the extreme political backlash would only happen if the School Board goes for massive changes across the county under the banner of equity.

If, for example, they only moved students from overcrowded WS to under utilized Lewis, I don't think you would get much political support outside of WS. There is a legitimate justification to make this change. The county board certainly would not get involved. And voters across the county wouldn't rally to elect a bunch of conservatives because of proper space and resource utilization.

There is no justification for this change.

Other people's kids are not your pawns.

Stop being obtuse. There is plenty of justification as has already been discussed ad nauseam. Zones are not guaranteed, and everyone agrees the existing zones and associated policies are outdated. Your anger should be directed at the past school boards who failed to manage the situation properly.

Before we start moving a bunch of WS kids around, why don't we transition Lewis to AP, add a STEM lab there and stop kids WHO ARE ZONED FOR LEWIS from getting pupil placed at other schools. You could have 15 elementary schools rezoned for Key and Lewis but you still wouldn't be able to fill it up. You need to add something to that school that kids would find useful.

+1. Much better idea than just dumping neighborhoods of kids who wouldn’t actually attend Lewis now into its catchment area.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the extreme political backlash would only happen if the School Board goes for massive changes across the county under the banner of equity.

If, for example, they only moved students from overcrowded WS to under utilized Lewis, I don't think you would get much political support outside of WS. There is a legitimate justification to make this change. The county board certainly would not get involved. And voters across the county wouldn't rally to elect a bunch of conservatives because of proper space and resource utilization.

There is no justification for this change.

Other people's kids are not your pawns.

Stop being obtuse. There is plenty of justification as has already been discussed ad nauseam. Zones are not guaranteed, and everyone agrees the existing zones and associated policies are outdated. Your anger should be directed at the past school boards who failed to manage the situation properly.

Before we start moving a bunch of WS kids around, why don't we transition Lewis to AP, add a STEM lab there and stop kids WHO ARE ZONED FOR LEWIS from getting pupil placed at other schools. You could have 15 elementary schools rezoned for Key and Lewis but you still wouldn't be able to fill it up. You need to add something to that school that kids would find useful.

Agree.

Start with simple, effective, non controversial changes that close the loopholes allowing zoned Lewis students to transfer to other high schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also, the Springfield district folks were fools in the past school board election when they voted Schultz out of office over national issues.

Schultz was the one who helped and supported the Daventry parents with their split feeder elimination. She worked diligently with them, even though they were mostly not from her political party, because she treated them as her constituents even though they were from opposing political groups. She worked for her constituents on school issues, and would have been counted on to fight like a bobcat if the school board started pushing to rezone her neighborhoods out of the pyramid to use the kids as political pawns. She was awfully trumpy, but on school issues, particularly rezoning issues, Schultz put constituency over party. Fighting political rezoning was one of her issues.

Now they lost that kind of representation on the school board, followed by redistricting thanks to McKay and the board of supervisors, that split their representation from Springfield district to Providence, where the primary school board representation is on Lewis and not their zoned high school, West Springfield.

I think many in that part of West Springfield are going to end up regretting the day they voted on local offices because of national politics. They basically voted against their own interests, particularly with regards to school rezoning.

Fair enough, but, just to reiterate:

Not a single school board candidate ran on a redistricting platform. That they feel they somehow have a mandate to do this is very misplaced.

No school board candidate anywhere would get elected by running on a redistricting platform. It is a necessary evil that school boards loathe to do - everywhere. FCPS punting it down the road for so many decades, it is now needed. An overall comprehensive change makes the most sense. It will not be popular - they never are.

We should ask Terry McAuliffe how successful your line of thinking is: Parents and constituents don’t want redistricting? Well, I’m smarter than they are and I know better than they do, so I’m just going to do it anyway.

Also, you say redistricting is now needed. Your view is in the extreme minority in the county.

Let's assume that parents keep stuffing their kids into West Springfield (already over capacity). Should we expand WS again before using the available
Space at Lewis? That is not a reasonable thing to do and parents don't get everything they want.

Surely you have this all figured out. I bestow on you the title of FCPS emperor to do your will over the objection of any and all FCPS parents and constituents.

You sound exactly like McAuliffe.

It's just simple logic and fiscal responsibility. Would you have a cap on how big WS could become?

Since you aren't zoned for West Springfield, it doesn't really matter or affect you as to how big the school is.

It is weird to have a fixation on the size of a school you are not zoned for, which doesn't affect you in any way, and where parents of students actually attending the school are not complaining aboht the size or asking to be rezoned.

At some point, your obsession with that school sounds a lot like vengeance and wanting to stick it to people who made other choices with their housing purchases, as well as wanting to disrupt the lives of other people's kids for something that does not affect you one iota.

It impacts taxpayers and neighboring schools. Perhaps your selfish views don't see that. Utilization of existing capacity is supposed to be one of the reasons to change boundaries - specifically so you don't build space you don't need at taxpayer expense. This is why the West Potomac boondoggle was so blatantly wrong. There was plenty of room at Mt. Vernon.

Perhaps your selfish views can't expand to understand that FC residents settled into the neighborhoods that they did based on the schools they were districted to.

Citizens of Fairfax are of course free to make those personal decisions and have opinions about where they believe they should attend, but FCPS is very clear that they do not make any guarantees. Straight from their boundary website:
"Please note that school boundaries are reevaluated each year and may be adjusted by the School Board. FCPS provides no guarantee that any residential address will continually be served by the same elementary, middle, and/or high school(s) or AAP center(s)."

FCPS is tasked with educating the public at large and pyramids certainly don't exist in isolation. This isn't about WS vs. Lewis or Langley vs. Herndon. If certain policies are harming the ability to run a good system then that needs to be addressed. And again this entire 'holistic' review isn't only about boundaries but also program placement and availability which undeniably needs to be evaluated.

Exactly. If you buy a house in FC, you need to read "the fine print" quoted above.

Alright FC can upend the current school boundaries if they want to, but shuffling students around does not change human behavior. The parents with means will relocate to higher performing public schools or send their kids to private. dramatically changing the school boundaries risks creating a death spiral for FC Schools. Wealthy parents leaving public schools will create a decline in average academic performance which will encourage even more parents to withdraw their kids from public school. The county will lose significant funding and have trouble paying for existing facilities.

+1. Exactly this. And you can’t put the cat back in the bag once it’s begun.

They get paid the same if they wreck the schools. Look at Baltimore.

[Anonymous]

According to the FCPS, there are 226 students who transferred out of Lewis this past year.

226 students.

Let that sink in.

Rezoning Daventry or part of any other WSHS neighborhood to Lewis will not match the sheer numbers of students transferring out of Lewis. It would only be a spite rezoning to appease a small subset of people who are upset with their home purchase and want to stick it to someone else's kids.

Before FCPS even thinks about rezoning kids to Lewis, they need to close every loophole that is allowing hundreds of zoned to Lewis families to transfer out of their zoned school.

Start there.

Not with spite rezoning adjacent schools and disrupting students attending their neighborhood schools who are not complaining about wanting to be redistricted.

Here is the link to the dashboard for Lewis:

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/fcps.fts/viz/SY2023-24StudentTransfersDashboard/ReadMe

Membership 1653
Transfer in 17
Transfer Out 226
Net transfers 209 loss of students.

Rezoning mom is barking up the wrong tree.

She needs to start advocating to make changes to Lewis that close the transfer loop holes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:According to the FCPS, there are 226 students who transferred out of Lewis this past year.

226 students.

Let that sink in.

Rezoning Daventry or part of any other WSHS neighborhood to Lewis will not match the sheer numbers of students transferring out of Lewis. It would only be a spite rezoning to appease a small subset of people who are upset with their home purchase and want to stick it to someone else's kids.

Before FCPS even thinks about rezoning kids to Lewis, they need to close every loophole that is allowing hundreds of zoned to Lewis families to transfer out of their zoned school.

Start there.

Not with spite rezoning adjacent schools and disrupting students attending their neighborhood schools who are not complaining about wanting to be redistricted.

Here is the link to the dashboard for Lewis:

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/fcps.fts/viz/SY2023-24StudentTransfersDashboard/ReadMe

Membership 1653
Transfer in 17
Transfer Out 226
Net transfers 209 loss of students.

Rezoning mom is barking up the wrong tree.

She needs to start advocating to make changes to Lewis that close the transfer loop holes.

This argument is a bit disengenous. If you dig into the Tableau data, you'll see most (all?) of the HS have more students transfer out than in, and that's bc they are counting TJ attendance as transfer outs.

Annandale HS and Mount Vernon HS have even higher loss of students than Lewis.

But I agree, the easiest way to stop the bleeding from some of these high schools is to make all of the FCPS HS AP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:According to the FCPS, there are 226 students who transferred out of Lewis this past year.

226 students.

Let that sink in.

Rezoning Daventry or part of any other WSHS neighborhood to Lewis will not match the sheer numbers of students transferring out of Lewis. It would only be a spite rezoning to appease a small subset of people who are upset with their home purchase and want to stick it to someone else's kids.

Before FCPS even thinks about rezoning kids to Lewis, they need to close every loophole that is allowing hundreds of zoned to Lewis families to transfer out of their zoned school.

Start there.

Not with spite rezoning adjacent schools and disrupting students attending their neighborhood schools who are not complaining about wanting to be redistricted.

Here is the link to the dashboard for Lewis:

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/fcps.fts/viz/SY2023-24StudentTransfersDashboard/ReadMe

Membership 1653
Transfer in 17
Transfer Out 226
Net transfers 209 loss of students.

Rezoning mom is barking up the wrong tree.

She needs to start advocating to make changes to Lewis that close the transfer loop holes.

This argument is a bit disengenous. If you dig into the Tableau data, you'll see most (all?) of the HS have more students transfer out than in, and that's bc they are counting TJ attendance as transfer outs.

Annandale HS and Mount Vernon HS have even higher loss of students than Lewis.

But I agree, the easiest way to stop the bleeding from some of these high schools is to make all of the FCPS HS AP.

Lewis is not sending 200+ kids to TJ

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:According to the FCPS, there are 226 students who transferred out of Lewis this past year.

226 students.

Let that sink in.

Rezoning Daventry or part of any other WSHS neighborhood to Lewis will not match the sheer numbers of students transferring out of Lewis. It would only be a spite rezoning to appease a small subset of people who are upset with their home purchase and want to stick it to someone else's kids.

Before FCPS even thinks about rezoning kids to Lewis, they need to close every loophole that is allowing hundreds of zoned to Lewis families to transfer out of their zoned school.

Start there.

Not with spite rezoning adjacent schools and disrupting students attending their neighborhood schools who are not complaining about wanting to be redistricted.

Here is the link to the dashboard for Lewis:

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/fcps.fts/viz/SY2023-24StudentTransfersDashboard/ReadMe

Membership 1653
Transfer in 17
Transfer Out 226
Net transfers 209 loss of students.

Rezoning mom is barking up the wrong tree.

She needs to start advocating to make changes to Lewis that close the transfer loop holes.

This argument is a bit disengenous. If you dig into the Tableau data, you'll see most (all?) of the HS have more students transfer out than in, and that's bc they are counting TJ attendance as transfer outs.

Annandale HS and Mount Vernon HS have even higher loss of students than Lewis.

But I agree, the easiest way to stop the bleeding from some of these high schools is to make all of the FCPS HS AP.

It is the only legitimate first step to take at Lewis.

Rezoning kids from other schools when there are over 200 students transferring out of Lewis (and NOT to TJ) is unacceptable.

Start first the kids who actually live in the Lewis zone.

Give it a few years to see if bringing more kids (who actually are zoned to Lewis) into Lewis changes the school from low performing to high performing.

If you are going to distupt kids, start with the ones that are supposed to be attending Lewis to begin with. There are more of them than there are Daventry kids.

[Anonymous]

The solution for Lewis is to make it a CTE trade school and allow everyone who wants a more academic path to transfer out. That’s basically what’s happening now, but they need to stop even attempting to make Lewis fit all types of students when it’s so heavily FARMS and 1st gen. Put the resources there to serve that population and let those who don’t fit go elsewhere.

[Anonymous]

The transfer data is always a bit hard to read. There are a number of reasons that students transfer including some for special education purposes I believe. It would be nice if it was more clear cut on who us voluntarily using the pupil placement policy to transfer for AP/IB or foreign language. Maybe they have improved that data as I have not looked for a while.

No doubt that if you only close the AP/IB loophole by making all schools AP, suddenly a bunch of students will develop an affinity for a language that is only offered at another school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The solution for Lewis is to make it a CTE trade school and allow everyone who wants a more academic path to transfer out. That’s basically what’s happening now, but they need to stop even attempting to make Lewis fit all types of students when it’s so heavily FARMS and 1st gen. Put the resources there to serve that population and let those who don’t fit go elsewhere.

You do have to ask though - How did it get to this point? Why was it allowed to happen? Why were decisions made that hastened the demise?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The transfer data is always a bit hard to read. There are a number of reasons that students transfer including some for special education purposes I believe. It would be nice if it was more clear cut on who us voluntarily using the pupil placement policy to transfer for AP/IB or foreign language. Maybe they have improved that data as I have not looked for a while.

No doubt that if you only close the AP/IB loophole by making all schools AP, suddenly a bunch of students will develop an affinity for a language that is only offered at another school.

Still, if over 200 students are transeferring out of a high school, then removing those loopholes needs to be the first step, way before rezoning.

I will also add that schools at capacity need to do a residency check using utility bills over the summer to confirm that students registered actually are zoned for the school.

Everyone knows families who live out of zone but lie so thrir kid can attend our crowded school.