Reply to school board work session on enrollment and transfers in options schools(and also a new high school)

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "school board work session on enrollment and transfers in options schools(and also a new high school)"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why not make clusters (with some minor boundary changes), and give everyone within the boundary four choices: immersion, Montessori, STEAM, or traditional/neighborhood. Then take three buildings and have an immersion/Montessori building, a STEAM building, and a neighborhood building. Everyone in the three-school boundary would rank their three choices and hopefully everyone would get their first or second choice. A good number of kids should be able to walk and APS would provide busing to all three but it wouldn't have to be cross-county. It wouldn't help diversity a ton if you wanted the boundaries to be contiguous but you could do east-west clusters and cross 50 where possible. Possible clusters could be Tuckahoe/McKinley/Ashlawn, Nottingham/Reed/ATS, Discovery/Glebe/ASF, Jamestown/Taylor/Key, Carlin Springs/Campbell/Barrett, Claremont/Abingdon/Drew, Barcroft/Randolph/New ES, and Long Branch/Patrick Henry/Hoffman Boston/Oakridge. [/quote]
Why are we pushing immersion and montessori so much? We don't need 8 immersion options!  What you're proposing is really confusing -- what the SB proposed is actually really easy to follow except for the fact that they changed ASFS to a neighborhood school without telling anyone.  I was one of the previous posters who was pushing for having ASFS switch buildings with Key since that makes more sense if you look at the boundaries, but the arguments here have convinced me that its not really that strange to have a neighborhood school with no walk zone until they redo boundaries in a few years.  Does anyone have a good feel for the level of grandfathering that they'll do for current students?  Are all the Taylor students in ASFS going to be asked to transfer back or is the county going to stop providing transportation (which might cause a lot of them to transfer back anyways)?

I actually really like the layout that the school board came up with.  The proposed options are nice because in general neighborhood schools are good quality, and other than a few county wide options that are difficult to access (ats), it allows for seemingly equitable access.  It seems like the majority of hesitation here has been that Reed could be better utilized as a non-option school.  Why not have it be like the IB middle schools where there are a certain number of seats for an IB program, but the majority of the school is a neighborhood school?  [/quote]

I like the basic concept too.

I think people are freaking out way too much about this.  They didn't "changed ASFS to a neighborhood school without telling anyone" -- this is a very early concept put out as a thought/discussion starter about what a long range plan could look like.  People want transparency into discussions/decisions but then freak out that decisions have been already made when that is not what is happening.  This is an idea to think about and keep in mind for several years out but having a long-range plan in mind is important as new schools come on line over the next few years.  e.g. if the plan down the road would be to make Randolph a IB option school then perhaps that piece of the plan should be taken care of when the Montessori/Henry move prompts all the S. Arlington ES boundaries to be redrawn.

I appreciate that APS is, for once, thinking about a long-term plan and getting input early in the process.[/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