FCPS Early Release Mondays

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

Wrong. I want my kids to have the type of education I had growing up in a similarly affluent suburb in a state that did not have county size districts. There are multiple things FCPS does that makes it harder than it needs to be for teachers to deliver that including: not ability grouping classes, over inclusion of kids who need separate placements for SPED or ESOL, the new excessive retest to 100 policy, discipline handling, etc etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

Wrong. I want my kids to have the type of education I had growing up in a similarly affluent suburb in a state that did not have county size districts. There are multiple things FCPS does that makes it harder than it needs to be for teachers to deliver that including: not ability grouping classes, over inclusion of kids who need separate placements for SPED or ESOL, the new excessive retest to 100 policy, discipline handling, etc etc.

So to be clear. You moved to a GIANT school district and are mad it doesn’t function like a small district.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

Wrong. I want my kids to have the type of education I had growing up in a similarly affluent suburb in a state that did not have county size districts. There are multiple things FCPS does that makes it harder than it needs to be for teachers to deliver that including: not ability grouping classes, over inclusion of kids who need separate placements for SPED or ESOL, the new excessive retest to 100 policy, discipline handling, etc etc.

FCPS has an enormous FARMS percentage - it can't behave like a tiny rich New England suburb with borders drawn to exclude poor kids

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The parent/teacher divide within FCPS is wide and bitter from all sides, not to mention snarky. I don’t know how FCPS can ever be more successful as a system with this animosity.

The issue that I see is that parents want what is best for their child. However, we teachers simply cannot provide anything approaching this. We can only provide the very basics. There are too many children and many of the children are coming to school unprepared.

One way to help parents understand this is to think about school lunch. Consider the nutrition and quality of the food offered. What the exception of a few years during the Obama presidency, the food is low nutrition and at best low-medium quality. The fresh fruit is a small and mealy red delicious apple. The pizza is full of sugar. Chocolate milk is the exception.

Breakfast is almost entirely without a source of protein. The food the children are served by the school is safe and will keep them alive. It’s essentially prison-level quality food. It is not what an involved parent who cares about the nutrition of their child would choose for them. The child that comes to school with a packed and nutritious lunch from home will be miles ahead in nutrition than their peers who are eating the school lunch.

It is the same with what occurs in the classroom. The child that has had plenty of reading and enrichment at home will come to school miles ahead of the student who has gotten all of their education from FCPS. The child that has outside tutoring will master the concepts while the child that only had exposure during the school day will only have a rough appreciation for what was taught.

Continuing

The faster parents who care about education realize this hard truth, the quicker the anger will go away. Do not expect FCPS to provide what is impossible for them to execute. Teachers are doing their best, but we cannot do more than the basics.

Early release Mondays should be seen as an opportunity for you to educate your child. Book tutoring or plan an educational outing. This is what your child deserves from you as their parent. Embrace this mindset and the anger goes away.

The anger would go away if they wouldn’t expect them to be in school Monday morning— three day weekends provide a lot more scope for enrichment than a Monday afternoon. But when parents keep their kids out we’ll hear all the sobbing about how there’s an absenteeism issue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

I think parents want the “qualities and privileges” that come commensurate with how incredibly expensive FCPS is for taxpayers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

Wrong. I want my kids to have the type of education I had growing up in a similarly affluent suburb in a state that did not have county size districts. There are multiple things FCPS does that makes it harder than it needs to be for teachers to deliver that including: not ability grouping classes, over inclusion of kids who need separate placements for SPED or ESOL, the new excessive retest to 100 policy, discipline handling, etc etc.

So to be clear. You moved to a GIANT school district and are mad it doesn’t function like a small district.

NP and DH and I are 1980s graduates of FCHS (different HS) and have the last of our DC graduating HS this year.

Even the current FCPS is unrecognizable to what DH and I experienced as students so long ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

I think parents want the “qualities and privileges” that come commensurate with how incredibly expensive FCPS is for taxpayers.

Can you explain?

I find our property taxes to be quite reasonable, relative to other places we've lived.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

Wrong. I want my kids to have the type of education I had growing up in a similarly affluent suburb in a state that did not have county size districts. There are multiple things FCPS does that makes it harder than it needs to be for teachers to deliver that including: not ability grouping classes, over inclusion of kids who need separate placements for SPED or ESOL, the new excessive retest to 100 policy, discipline handling, etc etc.

So to be clear. You moved to a GIANT school district and are mad it doesn’t function like a small district.

Plenty of the choices FCPS makes could be done differently. The issues I cited above are not small vs large issues.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

I think parents want the “qualities and privileges” that come commensurate with how incredibly expensive FCPS is for taxpayers.

Can you explain?

I find our property taxes to be quite reasonable, relative to other places we've lived.

Taxes are extremely low in this area. I just looked up a 2.5 million home in Vienna and they paid $9,693 in 2023. In my hometown a 1 million home paid $24,134 in taxes in 2023.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

Wrong. I want my kids to have the type of education I had growing up in a similarly affluent suburb in a state that did not have county size districts. There are multiple things FCPS does that makes it harder than it needs to be for teachers to deliver that including: not ability grouping classes, over inclusion of kids who need separate placements for SPED or ESOL, the new excessive retest to 100 policy, discipline handling, etc etc.

So to be clear. You moved to a GIANT school district and are mad it doesn’t function like a small district.

NP and DH and I are 1980s graduates of FCHS (different HS) and have the last of our DC graduating HS this year.

Even the current FCPS is unrecognizable to what DH and I experienced as students so long ago.

Things changed in 40 years? More news at 11.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

I think parents want the “qualities and privileges” that come commensurate with how incredibly expensive FCPS is for taxpayers.

Can you explain?

I find our property taxes to be quite reasonable, relative to other places we've lived.

+1, we’ve lived in 5 other states and the property taxes have been very similiar.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

Wrong. I want my kids to have the type of education I had growing up in a similarly affluent suburb in a state that did not have county size districts. There are multiple things FCPS does that makes it harder than it needs to be for teachers to deliver that including: not ability grouping classes, over inclusion of kids who need separate placements for SPED or ESOL, the new excessive retest to 100 policy, discipline handling, etc etc.

So to be clear. You moved to a GIANT school district and are mad it doesn’t function like a small district.

Plenty of the choices FCPS makes could be done differently. The issues I cited above are not small vs large issues.

Is that other location still accepting enrollments? You could move there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

I think parents want the “qualities and privileges” that come commensurate with how incredibly expensive FCPS is for taxpayers.

Can you explain?

I find our property taxes to be quite reasonable, relative to other places we've lived.

Taxes are extremely low in this area. I just looked up a 2.5 million home in Vienna and they paid $9,693 in 2023. In my hometown a 1 million home paid $24,134 in taxes in 2023.

Different jurisdictions offer different services, even within the county. We live in Vienna, have a house worth less than $1 million, and paid far more than you are quoting (& not in Town of Vienna where other services come with the taxes) in 2023. We'll pay more this year.

Bottom line, FCPS do not use our taxes wisely. They waste it on consultants, excess administrators, and programs that don't benefit most students. The curtain really came down during COVID. And that's just the school system; other county programs are also a waste of taxpayer funds.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

I think parents want the “qualities and privileges” that come commensurate with how incredibly expensive FCPS is for taxpayers.

Can you explain?

I find our property taxes to be quite reasonable, relative to other places we've lived.

Taxes are extremely low in this area. I just looked up a 2.5 million home in Vienna and they paid $9,693 in 2023. In my hometown a 1 million home paid $24,134 in taxes in 2023.

Different jurisdictions offer different services, even within the county. We live in Vienna, have a house worth less than $1 million, and paid far more than you are quoting (& not in Town of Vienna where other services come with the taxes) in 2023. We'll pay more this year.

Bottom line, FCPS do not use our taxes wisely. They waste it on consultants, excess administrators, and programs that don't benefit most students. The curtain really came down during COVID. And that's just the school system; other county programs are also a waste of taxpayer funds.

Everyone in Fairfax County pays the same county property tax rate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who post here want the qualities and privileges that come with a small private school education at their giant FCPS public and will never accept that that isn’t going to happen.

Kids in other countries have far less per pupil spending than FCPS and outperform. Particularly if you are from those countries you questioning why FCPS standard is low.

The difference is that many smaller counties do not have the ESOL, SPED, and FARMs rates that FCPS does. A lot of the money goes to those three programs. I do think far too much is spent on Administrators and in areas that could be cut so that we could afford more teachers and to pay higher wages to keep teachers.

One of the benefits to a large school district is that it should be able to provide better services for kids in need but FCPS fails at this. We could take some of the under-enrolled HS and use them to create specialized programs, think a Vo-tech Magnate school or an ESOL school or a SPED hub, to centralize services for the kids most in need but we don't do that. ESOL kids in ES are placed in a regular classroom regardless of their educational background or language skills. How is that good for a 3rd grade, non-English speaker, with limited time in school in their home country? The regular classroom does nt have the needed supports for that child but the Teacher is expected to get that child up to grade level. We have kids with high SPED needs and not enough programs for them. Kids are mainstreamed with serious issues and cannot be moved to appropriate programs because there is no space. We have teens who effectivly drop out, they miss hundreds of days, but we pass them on in HS and let them graduate. Academies require far too much work to attend if you are not at that school and are disruptive to a students schedule, why not have a Vo-Tech school or two so that kids interested in the academies can attend those schools and have all of their programs in one place?

FCPS is not providing the benefits of being in a larger school district. It needs specialized programs for students with specific needs. It needs tracking. It needs accountability for staff and students but we won't do any of that because god forbid people look in a classroom and see the reality that more kids in ESOL and FARMs who need additional supports are not white or Asian. It is an optics issue that is preventing us from setting up programs that would help more kids who are struggling while at that same time providing the education needed by kids who are on grade level or even ahead.