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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We moved but missed old town so much we moved back and just bite the billet and pay for private. It makes me sad that Alexandria throws all of this money away on a disastrous public school system that seems to be getting worse and worse and sad for the kids who have no choice and are stuck in systemic failures. [/quote]

T[b]his is one of my fears. It's hard to beat the lifestyle in Old Town, particularly walkability with young kids. Unfortunately private isn't an option for us due to one of our kids being in special Ed. So it looks like moving is the only path. It's such a ridiculous situation. Agree that it seems to be worsening every year.[/b][/quote]

Moved over 20 years for the exact same reason. Not sure if the situation is worsening, looks the same to me.[/quote]

Covid probably exacerbated what was already wrong with the school system. That’s why it seems more hopeless now. Someone on here said that George Mason ES is emptying out, since there are no longer enough families to sustain it[/quote]

George Mason ES was highly rated about 10 years ago bc the families living in the neighborhood were sending their kids to the school. There isn't tremendous turn over in the neighborhood and those families kids are now in middle school, high school or college and there won't be neighborhood kids to replace them in the schools.

George Mason has a strange boundary and includes a part of Arlandria that is not contiguous to the neighborhoods of the school. That area has more apartments and much higher turn over of families with a larger number of school age kids. It's also an large ELL and low income population so going forward it will face the challenge that so many other similarly situated ACPS elementary schools.[/quote]

While some of this is true, its not the full picture. GM wasn't ever "highly rated" by any scale in the last 10 years. No ES in ACPS could be considered this if you look at proficiency levels. Certainly, It was a better school 10 years ago but its reputation came from the neighborhood parents convincing themselves that ACPS was fine for elementary. Some of whom didn't find out what was happening in the school until covid. Many knew and paid for private tutoring in reading and math.

The building is representative of the school. Looks adorable from the outside but it's literally rotting on the inside. Math instruction is known to be disastrous, the previous principal supported no homework, no day to day tests or work going home, he allowed teachers to refuse to help struggling kids in the name of equity, every teacher had a different definition of the grading scale. Currently there are parents complaining at PTA meetings that their kids cannot read or write despite there being a number of specialists in the building.

During and post covid, many neighborhood families left. Some were in kinder at that point. The biggest departures were in the grades before 5th. This is evident not only by the numbers - GM lost the most students during the covid period, over 100 kids and it isn't recovering the way other ES in the district are. They are losing an additional two classrooms in the fall and the space is being filled in by an ACPS special needs program. The principal claims that they are losing kids at the same rate at the other schools. It's simply isn't true if you look at the numbers.

The PTA isn't raising the same money it was before covid. Not by a long shot. They are still coasting on PTA money that was raised before covid. All of that money came from the neighborhood families. They are currently raising a fraction of what used to be raised.

The new building is slated to be more than 120,000 square feet (it will take over much of the lot starting at the tennis courts and going over the sports fields) and the school board has been discussing since December to either add a middle school to it (this makes a lot of sense). 
[/quote]

Sounds like closing schools for two years really worked out then.[/quote]

True. A lot of kids got out of that disaster of a school or will never have to go there. [/quote]

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