Reply to APS Elementary Location Working Group 4/12

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "APS Elementary Location Working Group 4/12"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The grief against Cherrydale wanting to have ASFS as its neighborhood school are ridiculous.  Almost every single opinion on all of these threads regarding boundary changes are by people who want walk walkable neighborhood schools. Why should some people in the Cherrydale and Virginia Square and parts of Lyon Village neighborhoods not want the same.  They live within walking distance of ASFS,not too  long ago easily were able  to attend it or at least had a chance but are now shut out. Many bought houses when it was still an option for them. They want what the rest of us want.[/quote]

[b]Walkable is code [/b]for wanting your kids to go to the school that you think you "bought" into.

I agree with others that ASFS should be countywide. There's no reason that any choice school should only be for part of the county. It smacks of this whole North/South thing that DCUM perpetuates. [/quote]

It's not code.  With the exception of a few lottery schools, the APS system is based on neighborhood schools.  Although no one is ever promised that they won't be rezoned elsewhere, [b]it is not an unreasonable expectation of people who have bought in Arlington over the last 50yrs that their child will be attending the school that is probably closest to their home. [/b] Might still mean a bus ride, but the closest.

Right now APS is working from presumptions that option schools still have a place in Arlington, and that any hint of putting them where there is space but that is more difficult to access by lower SES families is problematic.  That certainly rules out options.  Put them where there's actually space in NW, and you're too far from poor people.  Put all choice in S Arl and you're taking away poor people's access to neighborhood schools.  Put the lottery schools in the largest elementary schools and hope that enough families will want to lottery in when the smaller neighborhood schools are filled, and you're presuming that lottery schools should take precedence over neighborhood communities.

This process is so whacked right now.[/quote]

In the case of ASFS, that is [b]an unreasonable expectation. You aren't losing your walkable neighborhood school. It has not been a neighborhood school for decades now.[/b] So if they aim to make neighborhood schools MORE walkable, it makes prefect sense to make Key the neighborhood school because they have had a neighborhood boundary (so the expectation already exists), and because the population of school-aged children is denser there. Because of the nature of Chereydale's exclusionary zoning, it's never going to have as high a density of students. Never. So it's a good candidate for an option program. Also, it has had a program of some sort for many, many years now, and there has not been an expectation from the nearest neighbors that their children would be guaranteed to attend. This is going to be less upsetting than "taking" another community's long-standing neighborhood school. Also, if your first priority is wanting your kids to walk to school, you can always apply to the lottery for whatever program may be located at ASFS.

[/quote]

BS.  It takes me about 1 minute to count 41 kids within 3 blocks of my house in Cherrydale and ASFS who were zoned for Taylor but attended ASFS in the past decade.  It may not have been our official neighborhood school but it might as well have been.[/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