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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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.
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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]

100% agree.

The one thing I will add is that the parents of kids at over crowded schools have asked for that to be addressed, they just want it done through expansions and not moving kids. They like their school and don't want to leave but they don't like how crowded it is or the trailers.

The County is in a Catch-22. If they move kids from over crowded schools, that parents agree are over crowded, people get upset. If they expand schools, people get upset because that disrupts the CIP and then we end up with unused seats in the future. If kids are moved, the school board turns it into a battle zone, which is awful. If they expand, schools who are having much needed renovations pushed back are justifiably angry. Then the school community is upset if they don't an expansion because other schools got expansions out of turn.

Trying to keep everybody happy has led to schools needing repairs, over crowded schools, under crowded schools that have been expanded, and everyone being unhappy. [/quote]

I don't think this is quite the Catch-22 you think it is.  All we need is a School Board with the intelligence and confidence to hire a competent superintendent and then tell her or him to come up with a sensible plan to deploy capital resources in an efficient manner that avoids, wherever possible, the need for future boundary changes.  County residents have spoken up consistently that they prefer stability when it comes to school assignments.

We don't have that now because the School Board is a bunch of cowards.  They slavishly adhere to an outdated renovation queue developed almost 20 years ago because it allows them to avoid paying attention. If any private business was making decisions about investments in property, plant, and equipment based on an obsolete business plan developed in 2008, there would be a shareholder revolt and management would be kicked out.  But this is what the School Board does because the politicians on the board don't want to step up and make hard but sensible decisions.  Then we end up with unnecessary additions slapped on schools that didn't need them simply because they were in the queue, while schools that need additional capacity get ignored.
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