Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Any neighborhood along the orange line that you like will have good schools. If your DH's office is near the VRE station in DC (Union Station?) than you have even more options.

Best schools along Orange Line are in East Falls Church (Yorktown), West Falls Church (McLean and Marshall) or Vienna (Madison).

Since when in Yorktown in EFC?

Ever since Reston became an easy commute to D.C.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Any neighborhood along the orange line that you like will have good schools. If your DH's office is near the VRE station in DC (Union Station?) than you have even more options.

Best schools along Orange Line are in East Falls Church (Yorktown), West Falls Church (McLean and Marshall) or Vienna (Madison).

Since when in Yorktown in EFC?

I have no idea what JKLM is - the letters of the alphabet? Yes, FFX Co. schools do teach this.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reston might be an excellent option with that budget

Reston?!?! Isn't that West Virginia? I doubt someone considering a move from the District would like to move so far away.

Drop your attitude or don't bother to cross the river hill rats

Anonymous wrote:Any neighborhood along the orange line that you like will have good schools. If your DH's office is near the VRE station in DC (Union Station?) than you have even more options.

Best schools along Orange Line are in East Falls Church (Yorktown), West Falls Church (McLean and Marshall) or Vienna (Madison).

Anonymous wrote:Reston might be an excellent option with that budget

Reston?!?! Isn't that West Virginia? I doubt someone considering a move from the District would like to move so far away.

Reston might be an excellent option with that budget

Arlington Science Focus, Mckinley, Taylor, and Ashlawn also serve the neighborhoods between Ballston and Rosslyn. All are excellent schools.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Any neighborhood along the orange line that you like will have good schools. If your DH's office is near the VRE station in DC (Union Station?) than you have even more options.

I don't know about this. Are the schools in Rosslyn, Courthouse, and Clarendon so good?

Yes. Schools like Key and Long Branch are very strong. They're zoned for W&L for high school, which is an outstanding high school.

Anonymous wrote:Any neighborhood along the orange line that you like will have good schools. If your DH's office is near the VRE station in DC (Union Station?) than you have even more options.

I don't know about this. Are the schools in Rosslyn, Courthouse, and Clarendon so good?

Any neighborhood along the orange line that you like will have good schools. If your DH's office is near the VRE station in DC (Union Station?) than you have even more options.

OP here. Thanks to those who responded. I am very new at trying to sort this out so even the answers that were very sarcastic were actually helpful. And to be clear, I'm not a troll. We don't know anyone with kids who lives in VA (clearly, we need to get out more but that aside) so I was trying to figure out how to even start the learning that we need to do about schools in Arlington/Fairfax counties and came up with the JKLM question. We have about $800K to put towards a house and would like it to be metro-accesible as husband works in DC and I work from home. We'd like this to be our last move - that is, get us through high school. DCPS is such a different beast but it's a fairly easy beast to get your head around or seems that way since I've now had several years to figure it out. Arlington and Fairfax is hard to me because of sheer number of schools involved. And for those who this matters to, we're coming from Capitol Hill.

I appreciate your input- about schools and even how to frame the question -

OP, you're using the language of apples in a world of oranges.

Anonymous wrote:
If anything, I think in Fairfax the "top 5 HS clusters" is what most here seem to aspire to and is probably our equivalent of JKLM. I would personally argue that it all comes down to SES when you're comparing HS's, as almost all the HS's in Fairfax are nationally ranked. As far as elementary schools go, there aren't many that people would just outright avoid and as someone already pointed out, there are 137? of them (the number keeps fluctuating since they closed one last year, but they are opening another one or two next year).

I agree with this. I think that, in the suburbs, the "JKLM"-type talk is mostly at the high school level. In Mongtomery County, it's the "three Ws" - Whitman, Wootton and Winston Churchill. In Fairfax, some claim they'd only send their kids to one of five schools - Langley, McLean, Woodson, Madison or Oakton - other than TJHSST. But the reality is that there are plenty of other schools in the suburbs that are equally good, so the idea of a "JKLM equivalent" doesn't make much sense.

Anonymous wrote: So, OP, if you would like to define what it is you are truly looking for in a neighborhood and school, we can help you. Otherwise, we are just speculating...and assuming you are a troll.

This. OP, the reason that the saying JKLM is thrown around so much is that there truly are limited options in the DC public school system that are considered very good or outstanding. By contrast, there are probably dozens of schools across Arlington and Fairfax that fit that definition.

Start with the type of neighborhood and house budget that you have to work with, as well as general areas you want to live and you might get help in narrowing down neighborhoods and schools, but to get a realistic response across over 150 elementary schools and 50(?) high schools is a nonstarter.