Reply to Challenge: Can someone explain the Arlington school zoning issues to us w/o being mean?

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Reply to "Challenge: Can someone explain the Arlington school zoning issues to us w/o being mean? "

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[quote=Anonymous]There is also a wide reaching boundary change that will impact most of South Arlington because a new elementary school, "Fleet ES", is opening in 2019 right next to Jefferson Middle School.  At the same time, the Montessori program currently at Drew Elementary is moving to take over the current Patrick Henry ES building which is down the street from the new school.  This will cause a huge shift of boundaries across the south and extending somewhat into the northeast since they want to address the ASFS issue at the same time.  And, Long Branch's boundary currently extends across 50 with planning units that are in the walk zone for Fleet.  Moving those to Fleet could potentially open up some space to relieve ASFS.

Many families currently zoned for Patrick Henry are under the impression that they were guaranteed that the whole current Henry population would move together to Fleet but that is highly unlikely to happen.  So, they are angry about that.

Complicating the moves is that the Reed ES in Westover will open a couple years later which will also cause a boundary shift and APS has a policy that they will not move the same planning unit for a certain number of years so anything touched in this 2019 change will be off the table for the 2022 change.

Adding to the mix is that APS has done a poor job with recent boundary adjustments for middle and high school.  The administration/school board tends to give in to the loudest/richest voices in the room.  For Middle school, that meant they didn't move as many units as they should in the Stratford MS adjustment, leaving Williamsburg under capacity and Swanson still well over capacity.  For high school, units that made sense to move to Wakefield flipped out about staying at W-L (because Wakefield is poorer and browner).  So that boundary adjustment didn't do all it could to balance enrollment, leaving W-L still much more crowded than it needs to be and making the economic disparity between the HS's even worse than it was to start with.[/quote]

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