Cunningham Park ES

[Anonymous]

It looks like we'll be moving to Cunningham Park ES district. Can anyone tell me good/bad about it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It looks like we'll be moving to Cunningham Park ES district. Can anyone tell me good/bad about it?

It can't be that important to you if you're only asking now, right

The good news is that it has a nice playground and it's fairly small. The test scores do tend to be at the bottom of the Vienna elementary schools, as there are more kids for whom English isn't a first language attending Cunningham Park than other Vienna schools. If you don't like it, you might look into Green Hedges.

[Anonymous]

I don't have children at that school but at another Vienna elementary school so I'll just let you know what I have heard. I have many friends there who are happy with the school. As the PP mentioned, it is a small school, which has both pros and cons. It's in a nice, residential area. The test scores are lower than other Vienna elementary schools. I don't think it's because of poor teaching necessarily but because it draws students from one apartment complex that houses mostly lower-income Hispanic residents for whom English is not their first language. One of my good friends has a son at that school and she commented about the relatively large Hispanic population at the school. The rest of the neighborhood that feeds into that school is made up of older homes that are slowly getting replaced with large knock-down homes. I can imagine that this will only increase the wealth of this school and will probably bring up their test scores. I wouldn't hesidtate to move into a neighborhood that feeds into this school.

[Anonymous]

Cunningham Park parent here. The 3/3 poster gives a pretty good thumbnail of Cunningham. The only clarification I'd make is that the tear downs probably won't do much for the test scores, as they're knocking down $500k single family homes to put up million dollar homes. Much of CP's lower income population (presumably the difference in its test scores vs less income diverse Vienna schools) is drawn from apartments on Cedar Lane, which aren't going away anytime soon. We're very happy there, with our second child starting there this fall.

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure how the replacing 500k homes with 1m homes will affect things. Odds are, the 500k homes have some empty nest couples moving out, or maybe some younger families where wife decides to be a SAHM.

They are being replaced with (I'm guessing) parents with high HHI. The Vienna Park apartments could start generating more kids, or there could start being more "20 people to a SFH" homes popping up in far SE Vienna to increase the number of low-income/ESOL kids. If that doesn't happen, test scores should improve by a little or a lot, depending on how many of the kids go to private school.

I live near the Vienna/CP border; if I got rezoned to CP, I'd at least give it a chance, and so should OP (I sense given the date she's already sending her kid there.)