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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]1) why not Hamm?

2) look closely at WL and how they are adding 600 student seats to an already overcrowded campus via office conversions[/quote]

W-L’s not overcrowded now and the trailers will disappear. W-L will be close to the size of the larger Fairfax County high schools as the new addition fills up. Wakefield is currently the most overcrowded school. Yorktown was accepting transfers from the W-L zone without preconditions, and that may have been extended to the Wakefield zone. But I’m not sure. [/quote]

[b]W-L will have the POPULATION of a large Fairfax school (2600) in a building built for 2000 students plus the office addition (some small lunch room, etc) on a campus that is a fraction of the size of a Fairfax school.[/b]

Yorktown doesn’t take WL transfers, and least not in last 2 years when our neighbor tried. [/quote]

Arlington citizens have been pushing for the dense urban concept schools for years. The new HB/Heights school in Rosslyn, the W-L addition, Career Center redevelopment, etc.. At least the W-L addition has a planetarium and doesn’t feel like an office building—like the ones in Ballston. I think it blends into the campus nicely and it overlooks the athletic fields. The building itself is very distinctive. [/quote]

That is utter BS.  There are zero citizens pushing for dense urban concept schools except county boards who want to save land for their developer buddy/campaign donors.  There have active requests for a 4th comprehensive high school for at least 6 or 7 years, with ideas at Kenmore or the VHC site on Carlin Springs Rd, or even Career Center (albeit with a smaller neighborhood high school which is NOT wanted).

The WL addition was simply a stop gap because the students have to go somewhere, and [b]WL had the adjacent office building they could repurpose.[/b]

The New HB/Heights urban school was made in to HB precisely because most neighborhood parents/citizens did NOT want their neighborhood middle school in Rosslyn and preferred the suburban style Hamm campus.  HB was given the urban location precisely because it was an option school so parents/students would have the right to opt out.[/quote]

APS planned and proposed to tear down the administrative offices and planetarium and build a more expensive new school addition but the community was outraged the historic structure would be demolished. So APS was forced by the community preservationists to preserve the building facade and planetarium, and to design and construct the educational spaces inside without altering the historic building exterior.

For a new low rise suburban style high school with surface parking lot, swimming pool, and stadium, the Kennore site is the only one that could work, but the community there was outraged at the idea and blocked it as I recall. [/quote]

Well yeah, basically you have young parents begging for more high school seats for this kids while paying crazy amounts for housing, and the boomers are complaining about traffic and 70s "historical preservation".   I think everyone was fond of the planetarium, but honestly if they had rebuilt that office building they likely would have just made WL even bigger given the opportunity.[/quote]

Yes. It's a "catch-22" with the generational divide, but there have been some success stories. The problematic high-rise urban concept middle school did not get built. And the beautiful Dorothy Hamm Middle School and adjacent sports facilities opened to wide acclaim. Unfortunately the other middle schools like Williamsburg, etc., now feel very old fashioned by comparison. [/quote]

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