Reply to HB Woodlawn -- High School Only

Forum Index » VA Public Schools other than FCPS

Reply to "HB Woodlawn -- High School Only"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Look, Arlington Public Schools is big on magnet programs at all levels, and HB is considered the jewel among them.  They're not about to throw out the baby with the bathwater.  As another poster has noted, HB does a lot of things to make the model work, and they can't just change it into a 4th high school.  I get it -- you're jealous of its existence.     [/quote]

Let me be VERY clear. Arlington has ZERO magnets. All schools are lottery.[/quote]

Thank you! This is what drives me most crazy about all the option school conversations in Arlington. In an ideal world, a school district would offer option schools that are readily available to all students who would most benefit from those alternative environments. That is *not* what we have in Arlington. It is a random lottery. Sure, there are kids getting HBW spots who are doing much better there than they would at the traditional high schools. But there are also kids at HBW who would do just fine at YT, WL, WF, etc. And there are a lot of kids who are REALLY struggling in the large high schools who would benefit from HBW, but they didn't even get a chance to make their case for a spot because it is a lottery.

Even if you bumped the middle school kids out and made HBW 9-12, it would still be considerably smaller than the other three high schools. More kids deserve a chance to access that smaller environment, especially at the high school level when college and career opportunities are on the horizon. Blowing up WL to be a 3,000 person high school is only going to make the current disparities even worse.

[/quote]

+100
I love you!
[/quote]

Posters are splitting hairs.  Lottery schools, magnet programs, whatever you want to call them -- the bottom line is that APS has long supported alternative programs that have been highly successful and isn't about to and shouldn't be expected to shut down programs that have been successful for decades simply because of overcrowding issues.  This isn't the first time the schools have been overcrowded, either.

The only reason HB shifted to a lottery, by the way, is that in the past it awarded seats on a first-come, first-served basis, and rich families with the flexibility that poorer families didn't have would literally camp out in line all night.  There's no perfect answer here.

I mean, c'mon.  [b]Jamestown for example has very high test scores.  Does that mean that every student in the county should have the right to send their kid to that school?[/b]  How about Fairfax County?  TJ is awesome -- why can't every student in Fairfax County go there?  Not fair!  Or School Without Walls, a lottery school in DC.  Such a great school -- shut it down unless every DC kid can go.

You're all being ridiculous.[/quote]

Why not?
Ranked choice admissions countywide.
Plus eligibility requirements for special programs to help ensure students who need them have priority over students who don't really need them.[/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