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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reading the region 6 comments it is clear no one wants to attend Lewis. Even some folks off the parkway next to Greenspring Village are pushing for West Springfield.

I wonder if they could find a way to shut it down and spread the students elsewhere. Might save some operating expenses for the new western high school.[/quote]

I do feel like they should explore closing nearby Edison as a neighborhood school - it’s on the worst physical site you can pretty much imagine, on a very busy corner of a 6 lane and a 5 lane road. It has no room to expand, yet the nearby area is slated for a bunch of development. It also holds a good number of vocational programs with the specialized equipment needed, so that’s stuff that can’t easily be moved to another school. If they kept Edison as a vocational HS for the whole county or at least the eastern and middle portions - they could nicely renovate and expand Lewis and combine their enrollments, and the end result would probably be about as large as Chantilly is now. The lower income and mixed income schools do better when they are larger enrollment, because they need more kids to be able to offer a lot of advanced and specialty classes and to compete in HS sports (ACHS is a prime example). And it wouldn’t be a stretch in terms of commute for many of Edison’s neighborhood kids to go to Lewis instead, although it might make more sense to send a few neighborhoods on the edges to Hayfield or West Potomac.

Closing Lewis was on the table maybe 10-12 years ago when it was in danger of losing full accreditation, but then the rules changed and now it’s apparently fine. I remember a few “Gatehouse insider” posts about it and how the ES feeders would have been divided up between all the surrounding schools. [/quote]

I’ve never understood this argument, which has shown up a few times on this forum.  Edison has a decent amount of acreage (43 acres), the location near Franconia and Van Dorn means it’s easily accessible, and it was renovated in 2013.  I don’t think Edison families want to move to Lewis, and it would cost a ton of money to renovate and expand Lewis to accommodate the 3000 or so students you have mind (and even that number assumes some kids getting moved to Hayfield or West Potomac).

At some point Lewis will get renovated again, but logically only after Annandale and McLean, and there will be a limit as to how much money they can plow into any one of these renovations. [/quote]

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