Reply to Powerful Letter to the Arlington County School Board about Diversity

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[quote=Anonymous]This is very sobering excerpt from one of the comments posted in response to the original article:

'The County forecasts a 27%, 60,000 person population increase by 2040, https://projects.arlingtonva.us/data-research/ but the School Board says enrollment growth is a “bubble” that will reverse even though children under 5 and adults entering parenting age are growing faster than the population as a whole. The School Board just approved a lease for all Ed Center staff to move to Syphax–a location few private sector firms would want– with no public discussion, no RFP to see if any of the many metro accessible empty office buildings in Rosslyn would offer a better deal with less traffic impact. No cost estimates whether refurbing the space and only leasing incremental growth space would have been cheaper. Sheer contempt for taxpayers and a breach of fiduciary duty. Moving staff to Rosslyn would at least reduce traffic and support the restaurants and shops needed to attract other commercial tenants. School Board members tell concerned citizens that the Ed Center, a fraction of the size of the Wilson lot, is the fait accompli home of 1000 to 1300 additional high school seats, blowing out the W&L campus to 3500, with no designs or alternate sites by fancy NYC architects before the decision is made, like happened for HB, Stratford and Discovery.

We have almost 8800 kids in grades 1-4. For over a decade, APS grad class sizes have grown by 12% from 7th to 10th grade. These already born and enrolled kids will grow to be 9,700 students in 8 years, but we will only have 7,200 seats at the three high schools and HB. APS and the School Board have issued a forecast that assumes unprecedented numbers of rising 6th graders disappear (almost 9% in 2025 when this year attrition was below 1%), counted adult ed seats at Langston and Arlington County High towards the future 9-12 need, and claimed they can take the 157 seat Career Center to a magnet tech program for 800-1000 for $12M when they can’t successfully add 240 seats to an elementary school for $20M. Many of us in the Yorktown zone who supported the chosen boundary plan did so because Yorktown has the smallest campus and building and were solely focused on the overcrowding impact. We want more diversity in our schools, but fear that the lack of a sound capacity plan will mean that Yorktown zone kids will opt for neither an underfunded ARLTech nor a 1300 seat office tower magnet on a 3500 seat W&L campus, and classes with 35 kids each will be the result.

The County Board approves 5-7000 new housing units per year, student yields from high rise apartments are rising, single family redevelopment is attracting larger families with more kids. No new land is being acquired for schools. The plan is in place to completely destroy the quality of Arlington middle and high schools outside of HB. What an outrage."[/quote]

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