Reply to Holding APS Leadership, Staff and School Board Accountable for the Boundary Mess

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Holding APS Leadership, Staff and School Board Accountable for the Boundary Mess"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Contiguity is important, as is making schools be close to people's homes.  Look at the Rosslyn island for middle school highschool -- there's a reason it was removed for middle school this past go around.  Those kids have a very hard time getting to and from school without school buses.  This makes it so they can't do after school activities and parents can't be as engaged in the school.  These are not things that as a community we should be ignoring because of a need to establish desirable demographics.  There has to be a middle ground.  [/quote]

The Rosslyn island disappeared because of the new middle school and adding some W-L neighborhoods to Yorktown, not because being a few miles from Williamsburg and Yorktown was such a BFD.  The need to balance demographics is far more important than your dismissive comments suggest.[/quote]

DP, but no. The whole purpose of the island originally was to bring more diversity to Yorktown and Williamsburg and balance demographics. On the high school boundaries, the island was very much viewed as a problem for people living there, for whom W-L is significantly closer and more accessible. Families there argued that the longer bus rides required cut into studying, extracurricular and family time for those students, and being sent to a school that's not just further away but also less accessible by mass transit made it harder for parents in the island (who are far more likely to be car-free than elsewhere in NA) to participate in school activities. Because of the number of communities fighting to get into W-L and out of Wakefield and issues with moving western PUs from W-L to Yorktown, the SB dismissed the island and moved a couple of planning units from W-L to Yorktown for the sole purpose of creating technical contiguity so they didn't have deal with the legitimate concerns of that community.

As for the middle school boundaries, the island was zoned to Williamsburg even though it was closer to both Swanson and Jefferson (especially Jefferson, Williamsburg is twice as far away) because again, diversity. When the latest round of middle school boundaries were drawn, the white UMC people around Williamsburg were not the ones arguing to get rid of the island, they were perfectly happy to keep it, it was the lower-income/minority families in the island who wanted a change (because again, long bus rides and logistics). Stratford wasn't the motivation for the change, it was just the opportunity.[/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