Reply to FCPS Ready to Screw Poorer/GenEd Kids Again

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How many of those on here that are against this move will be at the hearing on the 22nd when this will be voted on?  Raise your hands please..[/quote]

Not living in the area, I may not show up. I know the school board has read these threads and have talked to them personally about the issues. I have also talked to facilities. It's their responsibility to make a sound decision. I do not feel obligated to show up just to make sure they do the right thing. I cannot show up to every hearing and it is not my responsibility. What if I was sick or had an obligation? These are the people we elected. The responsibility is on their shoulders.[/quote]

But you are not the only one carrying the weight of the opposition on your shoulders, pp (or are you?).  I thought there were a few hundred based on the length of this thread.

While I get your point about the county needing to worry about this vs us, they cannot make any decisions if they have to worry about 3rd and 4th order consequences of every decision.

The issue they are addressing is overcrowding at LJ.  
Potential solutions - Move kids to Thoreau (which has overcapacity).  I'm sure parents were involved in pushing for this solution (OES and the other two schools).   
Move kids to Poe - Where are the parents asking for this?  If not them, who else will?   You will not find OES parents asking for this.  In fact, if someone had proposed this, they would have vehemently shot it down because the school is just too far away!

I don't think it's fair for someone to pontificate on this when they are not personally involved.

Other issues you and other bring up such as :LJ will become a "poor people" school, performance will decrease, property values will decrease, etc are second/third order issues that FCPS just doesn't have the mental bandwidth/capacity/ability to address.  Once you bring those issues in you will not be able to change anything.[/quote]

You are ridiculous.  I hope you don't work for FCPS because, if you do, we are completely doomed.

Some options that merited discussion:

1) Turning Thoreau into an AAP center (similar to the recent decisions to turn Cooper and Lanier into AAP centers) without changing the base boundaries.  That would increase enrollment at Thoreau and reduce enrollment at Jackson.

2) Moving Kilmer/Madison students to Thoreau.  That would increase enrollment at Thoreau.

3) Moving Camelot and/or Woodburn students to Poe.  That would increase enrollment at Poe, which has more excess capacity than Thoreau, and also reduce the ESOL/FARMS rates at Poe, while reducing enrollment at Jackson.

Instead, FCPS proposed to move the highest-income areas zoned for Jackson to Thoreau, ignore Poe, and continue to give Thoreau AAP families the option to send their kids to Jackson for AAP or Thoreau for LLIV.   The losers in all of this will be the Gen Ed population at Jackson and, over time, the entire Falls Church HS pyramid.  To suggest that FCPS doesn't have the ability or bandwidth to consider such effects is completely ludicrous, because they are sitting on a ton of data that shows exactly what has happened to the Annandale and Lee HS pyramids after they start making incremental boundary changes that drive up ESOL/FARMS rates at schools like Jackson.

When FCPS decided to start moving single-family neighborhoods out of Poe MS/Annandale HS to Lake Braddock SS and then Frost MS/Woodson HS a few years ago to address temporary overcrowding at Annandale HS, FCPS predicted modest increases in the ESOL/FARMS rates at those schools, and the planned reduction in enrollment.  Instead, what happened was a huge spike in the ESOL/FARMS rates and major declines in enrollment, because people took the decision as a signal that FCPS was more than happy to accommodate the wishes of higher-income families and concentrate poverty in select schools.  If the FCPS Facilities staff doesn't know that happened, and will happen again under this proposal, they are beyond incompetent.  In fact, they do know what happened at Poe/Annandale, but they don't care, because they just want to move bodies as soon as possible while ruffling the least feathers.  And we all know that wealthier parents and the parents of AAP children consistently make more noise than lower-income parents and the parents of Gen Ed students.[/quote]

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