Reply to Should FCPS Reassign New Affordable Housing from Marshall to Langley?

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Reply to "Should FCPS Reassign New Affordable Housing from Marshall to Langley?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous].

This is simple.  FCPS can decide whether [b]the Langley pyramid, which has more capacity than others near Tysons[/b], should take on these additional students, or not.  If not, they should budgeting now to add capacity to schools in other pyramids. The fact that you're so overwrought about it doesn't make it any more complicated.   [/quote]

If you are talking about future capacity (which is the only thing relevant to a discussion of future development), Madison is projected to have much more capacity than Langley post-renovation.[/quote]

The area in question is contiguous to Langley's boundaries, not Madison's.  [/quote]

The area in question is actually contiguous to McLean's boundaries, not Langley's, thanks to Tholen's boundary shift switcheroo last year.[/quote]

This is correct. The development abuts McLean’s boundary, which is on the other side of Route 7. It is close to both Madison’s boundary (about 1/2 mile away, on the other side of Old Courthouse Road) and to Langley’s boundary (on the other side of the Toll Road, about 1/4 mile away). However, it only supports PP’s straw man to focus on the Langley boundary. [/quote]

There’s no impediment to extending Langley’s boundaries across the Toll Road down to Spring Hill Road. In fact, the new buildings will be much closer to Langley than many current Langley-zoned neighborhoods on the other side of the Toll Road.

Your efforts to manufacture reasons why assigning these buildings to Langley would somehow be illogical border on the absurd. For all your cheap talk about how Langley would have no problems with kids living in apartments, your posts make clear you’d go to extreme lengths to try and derail it.  [/quote]

I do not think anyone is manufacturing reasons.  I also think that the argument that Langley parents would have any issue with these students (or FARMS students generally) attending Langley is contrived.  The problem with your line of argument is that you appear to be intentionally ignoring the geographical and practical reasons suggesting strongly that Langley is a less logical option than (a) Marshall (where the geography is presently assigned and which is the closest school to the development) or (b) Madison, which will have lower utilization than Langley (or Marshall or McLean) when the development opens and which is also closer to the development than Langley.

If your point is that the school board should ignore all of those factors and make boundary decisions based primarily on equity, that's fine.  It's a fair position, even if it's unlikely to be one that is ultimately the primary driver for boundary decisions -- setting boundaries based primarily on equity would open a big can of worms and likely require lots of difficult decisions and significant redistricting county-wide.  Whatever the school board might say about equity, it is not likely to have the stomach for that approach because it would lead to lots of angry parents.  That's not a recipe for political success.

I also get the impression that much of your argument is driven by some desire to "stick it" to Langley.  That's odd.  Again, I don't think most people in the Langley boundary care.  It also isn't necessarily consistent with what is in the best interests of the kids who will live in that development.  Maybe it's in their best interest to go to Langley.  Maybe it's in their best interest to go to a closer school with a better georgraphic connection to the area.  I have no idea and I'm clearly not qualified to make that determination (and likely no one who posts on this board is qualified).  But the decision must necessarily consider a far broader range of factors than Langley's diversity and whether these kids would add to diversity at Langley . . . that argument suggests that the kids are being used as pawns in a bigger debate.  Regardless of the best school choice, that is not a decisional process focused on anyone's best interests.[/quote]

Langley was expanded to almost 2400 kids based on the assumption at the time by FCPS staff that it would enable Langley would take on some of the growth in Tysons.  That hasn't happened yet; in fact, it was stymied by a School Board member who lives in Great Falls when FCPS staff proposed to assign part of Tysons to Langley.  But the additional, new housing that's being built in a previously commercial area of Tysons adjacent to a part of Vienna that was just reassigned to Langley warrants a fresh look.

There are no logistical impediments to assigning the area to an ES and MS that feed primarily or entirely to Langley, and the schools in question are less likely to end up overcrowded than Kilmer MS and Marshall HS if FCPS keeps adding more new housing in Tysons to those schools.  The area is closer to Cooper and Langley than the areas that the School Board reassigned to Cooper/Langley last year, and much closer to those schools than other neighborhoods that have been assigned to those schools for decades.  It's not like students in this area in Tysons will be walking to any of the schools in question, so the trope about how terrible "busing" is don't come into play here.

You are correct that Madison is being expanded, but [b]the area in question could not be assigned to Madison without creating an attendance island[/b], which the School Board previously has said is something to be avoided.  In addition, the expansion of Madison positions the school to take on additional kids from Oakton, one of FCPS's perennially most overcrowded schools, if necessary.  Perhaps you envision a scenario where Marshall's most expensive neighborhoods in Vienna are reassigned to Madison, so that Marshall can be turned into the de facto Tysons HS, complete with a growing volume of affordable housing and a 30-35% FARMS rate, while Langley sits at 3% and Madison and McLean at 10% FARMS?

To the extent that you imply that lower-income kids might be ill at ease and unable to thrive at a wealthy school like Langley, the experience at other schools suggests otherwise.  There are low-income kids who live near Blake Lane zoned for Oakton, in the Cedar/Park area of Vienna zoned for Madison, and in the Timber Lane area of Falls Church zoned for McLean. By most accounts, those students fare well at those schools.  Why should Langley be any different?

As several have noted, this seems like a good opportunity to address some of the capacity imbalances in the Tysons area in a manner that is consistent with the county's commitment to One Fairfax.  If you feel that it's an unacceptable exercise in gerrymandering, then surely you should also support a county-wide boundary review that also takes a fresh look at the appropriateness of sending kids who live in western Great Falls, as well as pockets of Herndon and Reston, to Langley, which is much further from their homes than Herndon, South Lakes, and Marshall. [/quote]

You could easily assign it to Madison without creating an island.  [b]You would move the entire "panhandle" section of Marshall's boundary over to Madison (the area mostly covering the northern tip of Vienna that extends west from Tysons to Difficult Run.  Madison would have the capacity to absorb that post renovation and that would also provide broader capacity relief to Marshall, which would help it take further Tyson's development in the future.[/b]  Even with that change, Madison would also still have capacity to relieve Oakton if needed.[/quote]

The "panhandle" section includes the wealthiest neighborhoods zoned to Marshall along with the small part of Tysons that is being discussed on this thread for potential reassignment to Langley.

The impact would be to foreclose Madison from taking on kids from Oakton in the future (which especially might be necessary in the future if part of Chantilly needs to move to Oakton), reduce the FARMS rate at Madison, and drive up the FARMS rates at Marshall to over 30%,  That doesn't seem right.  It would create a big divide between (1) Langley and Madison and (2) every other FCPS high school.  [/quote]

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