Reply to Western High School Boundary Map options (A/B/C/D)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Are you from SLHS, Westfield, or are you from Chantilly. Which one of the school is better than Oakton?

One thing for sure is that your kids is going to KAA and you are upset to hear that KAA can not be better than Oakton.

I think you are expecting a KAA to be the only top tier school in west part of fcps. The only way KAA can be the top tier is to become a magnet school. [/quote]

I was asked why people have a problem with the Oakton families pitch, and the issue is you sound like elitists who think that the other kids being moved to the new school are going to be beneath you.

You do realize that there are people with kids at SLHS who wouldn't want to be moved to Oakton, right? Different people value different things. SLHS has a strong community and lots of kids have had a great experience there. The families are not worried about the rating and there are plenty of kids going to strong colleges. There are even people who love IB. The SLHS families I know worried about being moved are concerned about the lack of programs in the first bunch of years but mainly feel like they are a part of a strong community. They know that will build over time but the genuinely love their school.

The difference is when they talk about their school, they don't sound like elitists who are hoping and praying that their kids are not moved from the school to a school that is beneath them.  Oakton families that don't want to move sound like they are going to be punished by having to go to a HS with kids from Oak Hill, Floris, and Coates. Great Falls families have the same problem. They sound like snobs. The argument that your kids should be at a school that is a 30-40 minute bus drive when there is a school 10 minutes away is kind of ridiculous. And your logic for why you should stay there is that the other schools aren't as good and you don't want to go there.

If you can't understand why that sounds bad, then I don't know what to tell you.[/quote]
Great Falls families sound like snobs because they don’t want their kids to go to Herndon High which had a student recently murdered in a drive-by after receiving death threats at Herndon High from fellow students?

Call me crazy, but that doesn’t sound snobby to me. Sounds like great falls families want their kids to be safe from violence.
[/quote]

There's something exploitative about wealthy Great Falls families who are almost exclusively White and Asian invoking the recent killing of a Hispanic student from Herndon, which did not occur at Herndon, as a basis to avoid HHS.

They had other arguments before this tragedy.  They'll have other arguments in the future when this incident has receded from public attention.  They know these incidents at Herndon and other schools involve low-income Hispanic kids and these incidents, while horrifying, don't pose a safety threat to their own children, but they don't care.

An Oakton graduate killed two Oakton students due to his reckless driving, but we don't hear parents citing that as a reason why their kids shouldn't attend Oakton.  A Langley graduate shot and killed his best friend, also a Langley graduate, a few years ago, and another Langley graduate who apparently was high on drugs was shot and killed by Park Police a few years ago, but we don't hear parents citing that as a reason why their kids shouldn't attend Langley.  But if those same incidents had involved Herndon students, the Great Falls folks would be citing them obsessively on a daily basis as justification for why they should never be reassigned to Herndon.

In any event, their clock is ticking given the upcoming boundary changes that will move kids into Cooper and Langley.    [/quote]

That ticking clock is up against the ticking clock of significant residential developments that have broken ground in and around the town of Herndon.  It actually seems like one of the reasons they might not have been too keen to move anyone into Herndon high this round.[/quote]

The problem is that, for every new development in or around the Town of Herndon, there are twice as many in the Marshall and McLean districts and FCPS has no plans to expand either of those schools.  Plus some of the new development planned in the McLean-zoned area will get moved to Langley next January.

So there may be several ticking clocks, but the alarm won't go off first in the Town of Herndon. [/quote]
What new development is going to be added in January? I’ve only heard of the Spring Hill split feeder being moved.[/quote]

The Spring Hill area that's going to move to Langley unless Great Falls pulls a last-minute Houdini is a part of Tysons bounded by the Dulles Toll Road to the north, Route 495 to the east, Route 7 to the west, and Westpark and Galleria Drives to the south.

FCPS has a "Residential Developments Applications Dashboard" that tracks developments for which approvals are required in various stages of development (approved, pending, and under construction) and the potential student yields associated with those developments.  Only some of these yields are reflected in the enrollment projections in the annual Capital Improvement Programs, because FCPS more conservatively only factors in students from new developments after a developer has broken ground.

If you search that tool by pyramid, the two pyramids with the greatest potential yields of high school students are Marshall (804) and McLean (629).  If you then look at the developments (again, approved, pending, and under construction) in the McLean pyramid, the bulk of those 629 students reside in the Spring Hill area teed up to move from McLean to Langley.

To be fair, you or another poster made reference to potential growth in the Town of Herndon, and the "Residential Developments Applications Dashboard" does not track potential developments in the Towns of Herndon and Vienna or the City of Fairfax, because those jurisdictions have their own approval processes.  So there's no data on that dashboard for the Herndon pyramid, but it's unlikely the potential yield is any higher than the yield for South Lakes (587 students), which includes the bulk of Reston.

So, yes, development in the Town of Herndon could add kids to the Herndon pyramid, but not as many kids as potentially could be added to the Marshall and McLean pyramids, and FCPS has no plans to expand either of those high schools.  Great Falls has had a great deal of success over the years avoiding redistricting out of Langley, and there are still some things Langley can do to reduce its future enrollment (shut down the current pupil placement pipeline) or accommodate future growth (pushing for a modular addition).  But unless Herndon's enrollment increases quite a bit, or student enrollments in FCPS start declining significantly, FCPS is setting things up to move part of Langley to Herndon during the next five-year review now scheduled for 2030.

Had FCPS not purchased KAA, then the additional capacity at Herndon could have been used as part of a larger redistricting involving Westfield, Chantilly, and perhaps Centreville and South Lakes, but now the most obvious source of kids to fill vacant seats at Herndon will be the western-most part of the Langley area.  While motivations may vary, the opposition from some Great Falls residents to the KAA purchase and the school's future use as a traditional high school reflects this.  [/quote]

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