Reply to Boundary Review Meetings

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Boundary Review Meetings"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My heart breaks for the 859 elementary students, 364 middle school students, and 474 high school students who are being forced to move as part of this messed up review.

I hope that they find happiness after their mental health has been sacrificed on the altar of Sandy Anderdon’s misguided comprehensive review, and may we have the wisdom to shutdown the ongoing five-year reviews before they can do further harm to thousands and tens of thousands of additional students.[/quote]

I feel upset because the process was a disaster that did nothing to fix the larger issues in the county and ended up being controlled by the parents with the loudest voices because the school board refuses to do what they think is actually best for the county. The moves don’t address any of the real issues and are pretty much happening only because the school board can’t afford to throw up their hands and say “Well, that accomplished nothing.”

I am not worried about the mental health of the kids moving, they are moving with friends and will be just fine. Kids move every day for a variety of reasons. Most don’t move with another group of kids that they know.

But the School Board needs to actually make choices that might be unpopular to address over crowded schools. They won’t but that really is their job. I don’t think their original motives for starting this made sense. They should have started by looking at every school that was over  crowded and made adjustments to move kids from over crowded schools to decrease that issue. That is it. And some families would not have been happy with the moves, which sucks, but if it makes sense to move SPAs from an over crowded school to the school next door that has space, then that is what should have happened. [/quote]

WRONG!  The mental health of kids and a high quality education is the biggest issue.  Just because small neighborhoods are moving doesn't mean kids are moving with friends.  At least in middle and high school friends at school come from neighborhoods outside of where a student lives.  Families do move everyday but that is their choice / necessity not driven by political hacks and loud voices that don't actually know what is best for the system as whole.[/quote]
+1. These posters and school board members pushing bigger boundary changes have always just been in it for themselves. Turns out they don’t give a crap about the emotional harm that they cause to students.[/quote]

The emotional harm by pitting neighborhood against neighborhood is terrible for Fairfax County.
[/quote]

Are you all saying that school boundaries should NEVER change?  If you are worried about your child’s mental health because they might get moved to a different school, and -gasp- will have to make new friends, then sign them up at a preK-12th gr private school. Oh, but wait, even kids at private schools transfer in and out. Dang, I guess your best bet might just be thereapy for your kids or homeschooling at this point. [/quote]

There are two ways to look at it:  (1) boundaries should never change (not realistic); and (2) when boundaries need to change, the process needs to be structured in a way that doesn't invite an auction.

This boundary study fell into the second category and, for that reason, was a debacle.  Karl Frisch is responsible for structuring a process that called for a third-party consultant to do the work that FCPS staff had done better and more efficiently in the past.  Reid then hired a completely inept consulting firm.  When the incompetence of that consultant became obvious (typically proposing to "fix" problems by creating new problems), things spiraled out of control because Reid then started looking to parents to tell her what to do and auctioning off school boundaries.  If you put everything up for grabs, you get the loudest parents both shouting down boundary changes they don't want and shouting for boundary changes they do want.  The most obvious example was the complete mess in Vienna involving the Marshall/Madison boundaries (compounded by the fact that they apparently were working with incorrect information about the capacity of Kilmer MS).

The School Board owes the entire Fairfax community an apologize for their role in perpetrating or tolerating this garbage. [/quote]
+1

The idea that the school board receives a CIP year after year and then doesn’t really do anything with it, wasn’t an outlandish point. Doing a comprehensive review to monitor utilization, programming, and transportation isn’t a bad thing. Especially when they’ve struggled with school start times and buses for over a decade.

Where they lost the plot was thinking they could implement sweeping changes using an outside firm in a year and everyone would be fine with it. Then they kept on throwing additional variables mid way through the process.

The comprehensive review should be used to flag specific sites and programs. That way they can give each community proper focus instead of trying to listen to the entire county at once. They can also scope changes in a way that allows for grandfathering with transportation.

The uncertainty and chaos they put the county through over the last 18 months should not be the norm. [/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