Reply to could West Potomac become a Marshall in 10 years?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Side topic, but how could the school board redistrict to make Woodson a school with a 10% FARMS and Annandale a 54% FARMS rate, 2nd lowest in the county???[/quote]

The changes at Annandale started when FCPS turned Thomas Jefferson into a magnet school and sent everyone who'd previously been at Jefferson to Annandale. That meant Annandale ended up overcrowded and with two concentrations of low-income apartments off Route 236: one west of Landmark that had gone to Jefferson and another right inside the Beltway that had always been at Annandale. Then, to deal with the overcrowding, FCPS started moving other single-family neighborhoods to other schools: Falls Church, Lake Braddock, Woodson and Edison.  It still has some single-family areas, but they don't have as many kids as the apartments. Meanwhile, Woodson, to the west, has always had almost exclusively single-family neighborhoods, although it's become somewhat more diverse since FCPS moved the Fairfax Villa area from Fairfax HS there a few years ago.  Add to the mix the fact that AHS is IB, so kids can pupil place out to Woodson and other AP schools, and you end up with two schools that are close to each other but have very different demographics.[/quote]
[b]
It just feels like FCPS and even the supervisors are moving in the opposite direction of diversity of income within each school district. Shouldn't they be trying to even the demographics and incomes up between high schools[/b].[/quote]

And it is a very liberal, one sided school board doing this too.

They talk a good talk, but are happy to distract people by school names in the name of benevolence while they purposefully  shuffle the same kids off to a segregated, low achievement school.[/quote]

The stratification of American society is something that has happened under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and while both Republicans and Democrats have controlled the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.

As to recent FCPS school boards controlled by Democrats, there have been situations where the School Board has made a very deliberate decision to change boundaries to increase the number of higher SES students at certain schools (see South Lakes HS in 2008) and other situations where, through inattention and a series of decisions over time, they have changed the boundaries in ways that have concentrated lower SES students in certain schools (see Annandale HS and Poe MS).

You would be hard pressed to argue that the discussion about school names was an effort by the School Board to divert attention from such matters.  That matter was raised by students and community members in the first instance, not by School Board members.  Sandy Evans took it up eventually, but she is also one of the School Board members who opposed redistricting Annandale students to Woodson precisely because of the anticipated effects on Annandale and Poe.

If you believe that more conservative School Board members would lead to schools in FCPS with more balanced demographics, it's easy enough to test that hypothesis.  Ask Elizabeth Schultz, who represents the Springfield District, to advocate for redrawing the West Springfield HS and Lee HS boundaries.  West Springfield is in her district, so other members would undoubtedly listen to her arguments in favor of reducing the FARMS percentages at Lee by moving part of Lee to West Springfield and vice versa.[/quote]

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