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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You may be interested to know that the size of the grade actually drops when they move from Longfellow to McLean.
Up until about 5 years ago, Longfellow was an AAP school and Cooper was not.  So there were something around 50-100 kids who went from Longfellow to Langley rather than McLean.  In addition, around 50 -100 kids per year go to TJ or private school.  
So unlike areas where 2 or 3 middle schools combine to double the size of the grade moving from 8th to 9th, the 9th grade at McLean was regularly 150 or so kids smaller than the grade at Longfellow. Now that AAP kids from Langley district go to Cooper, the drop in class size isn't as significant but it still happens.  Longfellow is a huge MS.[/quote]

There have been different factors at play at different times.

The biggest drop off in the number of 8th graders at Longfellow who attended McLean as freshmen the following year was back in 2013-14 to 2016-17.  There were two years in that four-year period in which the drop-off was over 150 kids, due to the AAP kids from the Langley pyramid going back to Langley and kids going to TJ and privates.

Then the number went down when the AAP kids from the Langley pyramid went to Cooper and now it's going down more because of the TJ admissions changes, which mean fewer Longfellow kids are going to TJ.  So now it's about 50 fewer freshman at McLean than 8th graders at Longfellow the prior year.  However, the number of kids at Longfellow is also down slightly because of the Cooper/Longfellow (and Langley/McLean) boundary change adopted in early 2021.

In general, Longfellow has more kids in a grade than McLean, but it's also less overcrowded because the school was expanded when it was renovated in 2012.  At the time it was renovated they hadn't yet decided they would move the AAP kids from the Langley pyramid back to Cooper, so the expansion was based on the assumption those kids would continue to attend Longfellow. The main driver of moving the kids from the Langley pyramid back to Cooper wasn't overcrowding at Longfellow, so much as overcrowding at Kilmer (about 1/2 the middle school AAP kids in the Langley pyramid had been going to Kilmer, and the other half to Longfellow).  In comparison, McLean's last renovation had been about 7-8 years earlier, and they hadn't done as much to expand MHS at the time, which is why it's more overcrowded now even with fewer kids per grade than Longfellow. [/quote]

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