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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Former classmate of accomplished VA politician Hung Cao.

Cautiously optimistic about this new TJ principal.[/quote]

“Accomplished VA politician”

As long as you don’t count actually winning elections. Attending TJ was Cao’s greatest accomplishment.[/quote]

Really?
Retired US Navy Captain.
Naval Academy grad and served with Special Operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
He also received his Master’s degree in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School, and fellowships at MIT and Harvard.

I don't think he ever had much of a chance at beating Kaine but I thought he did well in the debate and I thought he did better than he should have in the Virginia election against a relatively popular incumbent.[/quote]

I agree and he clearly has an impressive record.

It is really saddening to repeatedly encounter a few people on DCUM who harbor so much open hatred and hostility toward TJ students, past and present.  To those people:  what is your problem and why are you even on these threads?

I mean, I am the parent of a current TJ student; can you say the same?    [/quote]

NP.  I'm a bit of an FCPS historian and my understanding is that TJHSST was created because of temporary low enrollment in the mid-1980s that led the School Board at the time to conclude that one of Annandale, Stuart (now Justice) or Jefferson (now TJHSST) should be closed.   Jefferson was geographically in the middle of that area, and a newer school with less vocal parents, so it got the short end of the stick and was converted to a magnet.

The school obviously has some good qualities, but three things about it make me wish they'd just had a bit more patience and kept "old" Jefferson open.

1.   If they'd kept Jefferson open, we could now have multiple schools (Annandale, Edison, Jefferson, Justice, and Woodson) with lower enrollments; instead, we ended with a number of schools with higher than desirable enrollments and multiple boundary changes.

2.   Closing Jefferson meant concentrating poverty along Route 236 (Little River Turnpike) that had previously been shared between Annandale and Jefferson  at one school - Annandale - instead. Over time, this led to overcrowding at Annandale, and multiple single-family areas redistricted out of Annandale to other schools (Falls Church, Lake Braddock, Woodson, and Edison) while Annandale retained most of the poverty.  Net result - TJHSST benefitted at the expense of the surrounding neighborhoods and AHS, which have declined.

3.   TJHSST sucks up a disproportionate amount of FCPS time and resources, and its existence sends the message that as long as there is one "flagship" or "crown jewel" whose achievements FCPS can herald, it really doesn't matter what happens at the rest of FCPS's 25 high/secondary schools.  In a school system that claims to prioritize "equity," TJHSST students get access to resources that are denied to over 95% of FCPS students; the only development of note is that, with the recent admissions changes, those resources are allocated slightly more evenly to students who attended every FCPS middle school.  That doesn't change the fact that less than 1 in 20 FCPS high students derives any benefit from TJ's existence.  Even now, you can see that the appointment of a new principal at TJ gets a lot more attention than, say, the recent appointments of the new principals at Langley and Justice.

The larger TJ community is very good at making the case that it's essential to the county, the state, the nation, etc.  The people associated with the school are often incredibly self-promoting to the point of being vain.  Any critic of the school is harshly attacked and marginalized by people who enjoyed their TJ experience or derive a lot of their self-worth from having (or having had) a kid at TJ.  So I've no illusion that it will get wound down, but I still wish it had never come into existence. [/quote]
You have complete misunderstanding of why TJ was created in the first place. [/quote]

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