Reply to Places to Sign Recall Petitions

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Places to Sign Recall Petitions - Tholen/Omeish/Cohen"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No reason why you should.

Just as GF would be upset at a decision that shoved them out of Langley when all the school board had to do was expand McLean in the first place.

The board reneged on its promises (to expand McLean) and obfuscated to MCA instead of being upfront. Go watch the work session I’m which they shoot down Strauss’ attempt to rezone some apartments to Langley due to their efforts to rewrite boundary policy so that they could nuke the boundaries and remake every school with demographics as the number one consideration.  She said to the board about McLean “I have to tell them *something*” because it was unreasonable not to adjust boundary with McLean overcrowded and Langley’s expansion nearly completed.

She even pointed out that this change was “what everyone wanted” (altering demographics) and that she didn’t want to “miss the opportunity”

And here we are.

All because the school board, whom we elect, loves to prevaricate, dissemble, and poorly steward our tax dollars.[/quote]

Yep.  So at the end of the day the planning was bad, the implementation was worse, and Tholen would rather make Platenberg look better and Great Falls feel more secure than look out after her other constituents.

* FCPS staff and Janie Strauss both told McLean they planned to build an addition to the school back in 2014 and 2015.

* The plans were sketched out and Strauss told McLean no one would get moved to Langley until after an addition was built.

* Then Platenberg decided it would be cheaper/easier/whatever to expand Langley more than originally planned (every CIP issued between 2014 and 2017 said LHS would be expanded to 2100 seats; only in 2018 did they disclose it was being expanded to 2350, and then 2370, seats).

*  Meanwhile, Platenberg budgeted additions at Justice, Madison, and West Potomac outside the renovation queue (none of those schools was otherwise in the queue for a renovation).

* Part of the FCPS staff justification for expanding Langley to 2370 seats, at a time when Langley had 1922 students, was that Langley could then take on part of Tysons.

* Strauss then proposed a boundary change in late 2018/early 2019 that would do just that, and her colleagues stiff-armed her and said there needed to be county-wide boundary changes "through an equity-based lens" instead.

* The School Board eventually authorized a boundary study in September 2019, just before the election, because they knew the Republicans otherwise were going to win Dranesville and at least one if not two of the at-large seats.

* Tholen got elected and then decided to push ahead with a boundary study during Covid, even though FCPS was losing students and no longer had any confidence in its ability to project future enrollments.

* She then ignored a staff recommendation that, consistent with the original rationale for expanding Langley to 2370 seats, would have moved part of Tysons to Langley, and instead supported an option that capped the number of housing units moved to Langley, consistent with the stated preferences of the Great Falls Citizens Association, which wants to avoid overcrowding Langley at all costs.

* Despite the prior delay in a boundary study because of "equity considerations," the option that Tholen pushed through moved housing units to Langley, the county's wealthiest high school, that on average cost twice as much as the housing units in the area that staff had proposed to move to Langley, and had only half as many URMs.

* This was justified on the grounds that it eliminated an existing split feeder at Colvin Run ES, which it did, yet no action was taken to address other, more lopsided split feeders in the Langley and McLean pyramids.

* Shortly before this happened, the School Board also approved a change to the TJHSST admissions policy, which Tholen and others have acknowledged will add over 100 more students to each of Langley and McLean in the coming years, as fewer students are admitted to TJ from Cooper and Longfellow MS.

* Fast forward, and McLean's enrollment is now at an all-time high, Langley remains hundreds of students below capacity, McLean and Marshall remain on the hook to accommodate all the anticipated growth in Tysons (which FCPS has separately calculated could add hundreds of additional students to each of Marshall and McLean, both of which have fewer permanent seats than Langley), and Tholen has been unable or unwilling to get McLean slated for a permanent addition like Justice or Madison.

It is a series of screw-ups that collectively are an epic failure of good FCPS planning or sound oversight, and Tholen and her School Board cronies should be reminded of that failure until they either get their act together,  are replaced on the School Board, or resign.   [/quote] +1000. An excellent summary of the tragedy that is unfolding in front of our eyes at MHS.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics