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[quote=Anonymous]Lemon Road and Freedom Hill are both pretty good schools that are very diverse.

What's at issue is that FCPS proposes to reassign an area that includes a large number of low-income, non-English speaking students from Freedom Hill to much smaller Lemon Road.   Because Lemon Road is much smaller, doing so will have a far bigger impact on the student profile at Lemon Road than it will on the student profile at Freedom Hill.  At one level, it's not the least bit irrational.  Students need to be educated, Freedom Hill is over-crowded, Lemon Road is under-enrolled, the area in question is closer to Lemon Road than Freedom Hill, and there's room to build an addition at Lemon Road.  From a purely logistical perspective, it's almost a no-brainer, but it will have a huge effect on Lemon Road.

FCPS wants to do this in two tranches.  In the first instance, some part of the study area with approximately 100 students will be carved out to reassign to Lemon Road.  Then, after the Lemon Road addition is built, the staff wants to do another boundary study that pulls in additional students from, at a minimum, Shrevewood and Westgate.  As a result, there will be a lot of attention as to exactly which 100 students from Freedom Hill get reassigned to Lemon Road first.  The area that is closest to Lemon Road is the area with the most students with special needs and consists largely of low-income, heavily Hispanic garden apartments off Pimmit and Los Pueblos Drives and some apartment complexes that have seen better days.  The remaining part of the study area consists primarily of moderately to very expensive townhouses near Marshall HS and a more expensive apartment complex.  On the one hand, you could argue that sending the lowest-income area to Lemon Road first makes the most sense, because it's closest to the school and those students may get more attention at Lemon Road while it is still small.  On the other hand, doing so would probably turn Lemon Road overnight into something close to a Title I school, which will send parents from some of the nicer neighborhoods assigned to Lemon Road neighborhoods running for the exits.  That's why I think many Lemon Road parents will beg FCPS to send kids from the nicer area to Lemon Road first, and only send the other kids to Lemon Road at the same time as additional students from the Pimmit Hills and Idylwood areas assigned to Westgate and Shrevewood get reassigned to Lemon Road.  If the latter were to occur, Lemon Road's demographics wouldn't bounce around quite as much, and you'd likely see more people sticking with the school.

I don't know what FCPS will ultimately do.  One has the sense that the School Board is somewhat overwhelmed by the growing enrollment and just looking for places to find seats for students.  At the same time, they have to deal with the perception that their every move is taken to address the growing, often low-income, Hispanic population (i.e., the recent Annandale HS redistricting, the announced plans to build more schools near Baileys' Crossroads) and that they take middle and upper-income families, whose children typically attend classes with more students and often are themselves reassigned to new schools at the staff's whim, for granted.   Hopefully, the new Board will actually listen to what people have to say as the study unfolds, and not just do whatever Dean Tistadt recommends.  [/quote]

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