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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We need to a better job of focusing on economic development and housing policy to combat SES-based segregation.  You can do some modest level of redistricting and bussing to improve balance at schools wherever reasonable/feasible, but unless you address the underlying root issue you're just going to have to contort these strategies farther and farther over time to achieve some semblance of balance or equity, and we're already basically at the point where the costs begin to outweigh the benefits in many cases.

This is a long-term issue, and instead we're debating over which band-aids are the right ones to apply. That's not to say you can't have both long-term AND short-term strategies, but overall the policy focus for addressing these challenges seems terribly myopic and neglecting the changes we'd need to make for sustainable solutions.[/quote]

Face it, most of the really needy kids are a result of our lack of border control.  There were lots that came in when Obama ordered DACA.  Those were unaccompanied.  Do you really think Fairfax should be providing condos for them?[/quote]

PP... I am open to "facing that" if someone can show me some stats to support the assertion... but my instinct is that disparity amongst schools based on SES segregation is a far, far larger issue than whatever volume of kids have been / are entering the country (and settling in Fairfax County, VA). Furthermore the geographic segregation has been going on for decades, and while it's not like we need to strive to attain some strawman notion of perfectly even distribution, there's certainly some common sense things we can be doing such as policy to direct new AH developments proximal to areas with >median income (rather than locating new AH in areas that would exacerbate already-concentrated povery / low-income), etc.
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I have a friend who teaches at one of the high FARMS ESL schools in FCPS. He/She will tell you all about the fact that the kids coming from Honduras struggle in school for a variety of reasons. 1) They tend to start school later then we do in the US so they are being put in a higher grade then they would have been at home 2) Most of the kids have missed a lot of school while traveling to the US and are not in a position to do well in the grade they would have been at their home ES, never mind a grade a head. 3) Most of the kids are in a certain degree of shock from having to leave their country, come to a new country and start school. And He/She says most of the new kids at his/her school are seeking to legally stay in the US based on a refugee case.

So while there has been a history of economic segregation, the increasing number of ESL kids coming from Latin America is an issue and one that schools are trying their hardest to address.

I get that the above is anecdotal in nature and not hard facts but the increase in the number of students in the high FARMS/ESL schools compared to other schools is pretty stark.

And I don't think that the solution is busing kids. I don't know what the solution is but I seriously doubt that redrawing boundaries will provide the solution that some people think that it will. There might be a small uptick in the percentage of FARMS/ESL kids that end up in the low FARMs/ESL schools but it will not be close to an even distribution. And I don't think that it is a problem that is solved by throwing money at it. And it is a problem that we are going to have to deal with because no one on the School Board or in the local governments is going to be able to change Federal Policy. [/quote]

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