Reply to Show me the law that says school boards cannot change boundaries.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]The disparity between poor and rich is ridiculous in fcps. It's time for the school board to stand up to the interests of the rich and draw boundaries in an equitable way.
[/quote]

I'd love to know what you think is "equitable."

Seriously, I'd like to know what you think will be resolved.   I only know Langley from when we went there for sporting events.  I understand that it is a wealthier school.  But, what difference does that make?  I think it ridiculous that kids are coming from the county line with Loudoun, but there really is not presently another alternative.

I taught in a school that was bused.  This is not a good model for lots of reasons--the main one being that the lower income people lived further away and had a hard time getting to the school.  And, then you have "bused" and "local."  That does not work well either.   Community based schools work much better.  I speak from experience.

So, where are the low income kids for Langley going to come from?  Herndon? Reston? Falls Church?

I am not for socio-economic divisions.  But, you cannot legislate it.  There are a number of successful schools in Fairfax County that are well mixed.  But, the kids live in the communities.

Busing does not work.[/quote]

DP here.

You asked, rhetorically, what difference it makes that Langley is a wealthier school.   It makes a difference in that students at Langley have access to a lot of extra-curricular activities that students at other schools do not have.  It has also meant that Langley convinced FCPS to allow the school to offer a much wider range of foreign languages than FCPS offers at other schools.

The term "busing" typically is only used pejoratively, and when it means that kids travel by bus from a lower-income neighborhood to a school in a higher-income neighborhood, or vice versa.  But as you note at the beginning of your post, FCPS is currently putting kids on buses for long distances to get them from Great Falls, near the Loudoun border, to Langley, near the Arlington border.  This also involves "busing" and its own form of social engineering.

If FCPS were committed to increasing the diversity at Langley, there are any number of things it could do.  The easiest would be to redistrict some of the Tysons-area apartments zoned for McLean and/or Marshall to Langley, which has excess capacity and no apartments.   That would be quick and expedient, and the kids moved to Langley from those neighborhoods would still have shorter bus rides to Langley than the kids in Great Falls who attend Langley.

The more complicated approach would involve larger redistricting involving more schools.  For example, Forestville and Great Falls could be moved out of Langley to Herndon, Aldrin and Armstrong could be moved out of Herndon to South Lakes, and Forest Edge could be moved out of South Lakes to Langley along with some of the Tysons apartments.  Most of the students affected in this scenario would end up with shorter bus rides than they currently have, or slightly longer bus rides that would still be much shorter than the current bus rides of students from Great Falls to Langley.[/quote]

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