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Anonymous wrote:For the Kilmer / Thoreau issue they need to modify so that Wolftrap splits at the middle school level - those assigned to Madison go to Thoreau and those assigned to Marshall go to Kilmer. They would then move the <5 percent group you reference at Kilmer to Thoreau and those students would feed into Madison.

Why? They did what you said and also eliminated the split at middle school. All of Wolftrap now goes to Thoreau then Madison, which addresses your point about Thoreau to Madison consistency. Why do you say they need to split Wolftrap? That community is clearly very against the middle school split, as opposed to the Town of Vienna people at Westbriar who like their split.

I live in the community and have students attending Marshall and there has been no outreach to gather input from the community - push by current Wolftrap families is not the same as community input that involves those with students at other levels, not in school yet, or previously had students there.

People with kids already at Marshall won’t bad-mouth it but families with younger kids jumped at the chance to attend Madison. They live in Vienna, the Madison-bound parents constantly talk up Madison, and it’s a slog to get to Marshall from the Wolftrap area (unless you go well out of the way you have to go through the heart of Tysons).

Both Madison and Marshall can be challenging to get to during rush hour from the Buehlah / Clarks Crossing / Meadowlark area - with a few minutes time difference on average with outliers here and there. What is occurring is vocal families that have moved into the area over the last five to 10 years want a school that is less socio-economic diverse (Marshall: 15.89% English Learner versus Madison 6.11%; Marshall: 20.78% Free/Reduce Fee Lunch versus Madison 10.26%; Marshall: 39.95% White (Not Of Hispanic Origin) versus Madison: 58.11%). There is strong pride for Marshall by those that are attending and have attended Marshall from impacted neighborhoods and those families are, for the most part, happy they ended up there instead of Madison. Marshall is a great school and unfortunately families with children at Wolftrap ES currently have become confused with the constant chatter about Madison being so great. There will always be a few families that want to go to Madison as it is more a sports oriented school and their AP program but those are outliers.

Nah, this is nothing new. Given a choice, most families at Wolftrap long would have opted for Madison over Marshall given a choice, but for years Marshall's enrollment was so low that it never entered anyone's mind that they would move kids from Marshall to Madison. Also, Madison had not been expanded, so it didn't have the 2500 seats it now has (and which, to some degree, FCPS needs to justify, since it expanded Madison outside the renovation queue and ignored other schools like Annandale and McLean).

So it's not like those who moved into the Wolftrap/Kilmer/Marshall over the last 5-10 years behave any differently than their predecessors. They just see an opportunity that wasn't previously available.

People with kids there are generally satisfied with Marshall, but it's in Falls Church rather than Vienna, it has IB (less popular), traffic through the heart of Tysons is still worse than Maple Avenue (as congested as Maple can also get) and its sports teams aren't the same caliber. That's not irrelevant in Vienna, which is a very sports-oriented area.

In "real life," Madison and Marshall families generally are respectful of each other's schools, but more than one Madison family from the Wolftrap area asked us if our kids felt safe at Marshall. It's seemed passive-aggressive, since they'd sent their kids to Kilmer, and about 85% of Kilmer feeds to Marshall.

My kids go to Madison, and we do joke that it's a jock school. The upside to Marshall, though, is that you don't have to have been playing a sport with VYI since kindergarten to make even the JV teams. There are a lot more opportunities for kids who just want to play competitively without the overinvested sideline parents. Madison also has an outstanding music performance program. We looked at houses in the Marshall zone, and my only hesitation with Marshall would have been that it's IB instead of AP - a couple of my kids' friends who live just on the other side of Cedar Ln. but were zoned for Cunningham Park did an academic transfer from Marshall to Madison for AP. Most people we know who go to Marshall are very happy with it. I find the handwringing of the "demographics" to be a bit much, but I also let my kid go to Jackson without losing a minute's sleep over it (and, other than the inexcusably decrepit building, they had a great experience there).

Looking at the new maps, I do wonder who 1901 ticked off to stay zoned to Marshall when the entire rest of that run just got rezoned to Madison. I assume I'd see them picked up by whatever school is in the light green or teal right next to it, but, right now, it looks like they just created another attendance island (and a nightmare for the transportation department).

SPA 1901 is the current "Westbriar island," zoned to Westbriar, Kilmer, and Marshall. Most of Westbriar is further east near Tysons.

The area to the south proposed to move to Madison feeds to Wolftrap ES, not Westbriar.

In earlier proposals, FCPS floated the idea of moving the island (SPA 1901) to Wolftrap, and moving part of Wolftrap to Westbriar. This got pushback from Wolftrap families who didn't want to move to Westbriar, and families in the Westbriar island who wanted to move to Colvin Run. Then, at some point, FCPS proposed to move all of Wolftrap to Madison and all of Westbriar to Marshall, and there was resistance from the Westbriar families zoned to Madison about moving to Marshall. Meanwhile, you had folks from the Langley area shooting down any proposal to move the Westbriar island into Colvin Run and the Langley pyramid, because they knew that increases the odds that part of Langley would get moved to Herndon.

So they ended up trying to please the Wolftrap people who wanted to move to Madison, the Westbriar people who didn't want to move to Marshall, and the Langley people who didn't want kids from the Westbriar island moving into the Langley pyramid. That leaves the Westbriar island even more isolated, because now it's not just an island at Westbriar, but also at Kilmer and Marshall.

FCPS is kind of stuck now because if they also move the Westbriar island (SPA 1901) to Thoreau/Madison, it skews the enrollments. If they move the island to Colvin Run and the Langley pyramid, they've got Great Falls screaming about overcrowding Cooper and Langley. If they undo the move of the Wolftrap families to Thoreau/Madison, they are leaving Kilmer overcrowded and not taking advantage of the Madison expansion. The big mistake was giving in to the Westbriar/Town of Vienna folks who made such a fuss about moving to Marshall. Policy 8130 states that the creation of new attendance islands should be avoided, but Reid's proposal ends up aggravating the current Westbriar island by making it an island at Kilmer and Marshall as well.

Great Falls parents are a bunch of elitist a holes

They advocated for what they saw to be in their interests like everyone else.

If you disagree with the current proposals, the fault lies with Reid and her staff who crafted them. They aren't required to defer to any one group of parents, but they frequently do, and sometimes it ends up affecting others to whom they accord less deference.

How foolish.

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Anonymous wrote:For the Kilmer / Thoreau issue they need to modify so that Wolftrap splits at the middle school level - those assigned to Madison go to Thoreau and those assigned to Marshall go to Kilmer. They would then move the <5 percent group you reference at Kilmer to Thoreau and those students would feed into Madison.

Why? They did what you said and also eliminated the split at middle school. All of Wolftrap now goes to Thoreau then Madison, which addresses your point about Thoreau to Madison consistency. Why do you say they need to split Wolftrap? That community is clearly very against the middle school split, as opposed to the Town of Vienna people at Westbriar who like their split.

I live in the community and have students attending Marshall and there has been no outreach to gather input from the community - push by current Wolftrap families is not the same as community input that involves those with students at other levels, not in school yet, or previously had students there.

People with kids already at Marshall won’t bad-mouth it but families with younger kids jumped at the chance to attend Madison. They live in Vienna, the Madison-bound parents constantly talk up Madison, and it’s a slog to get to Marshall from the Wolftrap area (unless you go well out of the way you have to go through the heart of Tysons).

Both Madison and Marshall can be challenging to get to during rush hour from the Buehlah / Clarks Crossing / Meadowlark area - with a few minutes time difference on average with outliers here and there. What is occurring is vocal families that have moved into the area over the last five to 10 years want a school that is less socio-economic diverse (Marshall: 15.89% English Learner versus Madison 6.11%; Marshall: 20.78% Free/Reduce Fee Lunch versus Madison 10.26%; Marshall: 39.95% White (Not Of Hispanic Origin) versus Madison: 58.11%). There is strong pride for Marshall by those that are attending and have attended Marshall from impacted neighborhoods and those families are, for the most part, happy they ended up there instead of Madison. Marshall is a great school and unfortunately families with children at Wolftrap ES currently have become confused with the constant chatter about Madison being so great. There will always be a few families that want to go to Madison as it is more a sports oriented school and their AP program but those are outliers.

Nah, this is nothing new. Given a choice, most families at Wolftrap long would have opted for Madison over Marshall given a choice, but for years Marshall's enrollment was so low that it never entered anyone's mind that they would move kids from Marshall to Madison. Also, Madison had not been expanded, so it didn't have the 2500 seats it now has (and which, to some degree, FCPS needs to justify, since it expanded Madison outside the renovation queue and ignored other schools like Annandale and McLean).

So it's not like those who moved into the Wolftrap/Kilmer/Marshall over the last 5-10 years behave any differently than their predecessors. They just see an opportunity that wasn't previously available.

People with kids there are generally satisfied with Marshall, but it's in Falls Church rather than Vienna, it has IB (less popular), traffic through the heart of Tysons is still worse than Maple Avenue (as congested as Maple can also get) and its sports teams aren't the same caliber. That's not irrelevant in Vienna, which is a very sports-oriented area.

In "real life," Madison and Marshall families generally are respectful of each other's schools, but more than one Madison family from the Wolftrap area asked us if our kids felt safe at Marshall. It's seemed passive-aggressive, since they'd sent their kids to Kilmer, and about 85% of Kilmer feeds to Marshall.

My kids go to Madison, and we do joke that it's a jock school. The upside to Marshall, though, is that you don't have to have been playing a sport with VYI since kindergarten to make even the JV teams. There are a lot more opportunities for kids who just want to play competitively without the overinvested sideline parents. Madison also has an outstanding music performance program. We looked at houses in the Marshall zone, and my only hesitation with Marshall would have been that it's IB instead of AP - a couple of my kids' friends who live just on the other side of Cedar Ln. but were zoned for Cunningham Park did an academic transfer from Marshall to Madison for AP. Most people we know who go to Marshall are very happy with it. I find the handwringing of the "demographics" to be a bit much, but I also let my kid go to Jackson without losing a minute's sleep over it (and, other than the inexcusably decrepit building, they had a great experience there).

Looking at the new maps, I do wonder who 1901 ticked off to stay zoned to Marshall when the entire rest of that run just got rezoned to Madison. I assume I'd see them picked up by whatever school is in the light green or teal right next to it, but, right now, it looks like they just created another attendance island (and a nightmare for the transportation department).

SPA 1901 is the current "Westbriar island," zoned to Westbriar, Kilmer, and Marshall. Most of Westbriar is further east near Tysons.

The area to the south proposed to move to Madison feeds to Wolftrap ES, not Westbriar.

In earlier proposals, FCPS floated the idea of moving the island (SPA 1901) to Wolftrap, and moving part of Wolftrap to Westbriar. This got pushback from Wolftrap families who didn't want to move to Westbriar, and families in the Westbriar island who wanted to move to Colvin Run. Then, at some point, FCPS proposed to move all of Wolftrap to Madison and all of Westbriar to Marshall, and there was resistance from the Westbriar families zoned to Madison about moving to Marshall. Meanwhile, you had folks from the Langley area shooting down any proposal to move the Westbriar island into Colvin Run and the Langley pyramid, because they knew that increases the odds that part of Langley would get moved to Herndon.

So they ended up trying to please the Wolftrap people who wanted to move to Madison, the Westbriar people who didn't want to move to Marshall, and the Langley people who didn't want kids from the Westbriar island moving into the Langley pyramid. That leaves the Westbriar island even more isolated, because now it's not just an island at Westbriar, but also at Kilmer and Marshall.

FCPS is kind of stuck now because if they also move the Westbriar island (SPA 1901) to Thoreau/Madison, it skews the enrollments. If they move the island to Colvin Run and the Langley pyramid, they've got Great Falls screaming about overcrowding Cooper and Langley. If they undo the move of the Wolftrap families to Thoreau/Madison, they are leaving Kilmer overcrowded and not taking advantage of the Madison expansion. The big mistake was giving in to the Westbriar/Town of Vienna folks who made such a fuss about moving to Marshall. Policy 8130 states that the creation of new attendance islands should be avoided, but Reid's proposal ends up aggravating the current Westbriar island by making it an island at Kilmer and Marshall as well.

Great Falls parents are a bunch of elitist a holes

They advocated for what they saw to be in their interests like everyone else.

If you disagree with the current proposals, the fault lies with Reid and her staff who crafted them. They aren't required to defer to any one group of parents, but they frequently do, and sometimes it ends up affecting others to whom they accord less deference.

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Anonymous wrote:Who is politically connected and lives in the tiny area moved from FHS to overcrowd CHS even more? How bizarre.

+1,000 adding more kids to Chantilly?? Totally ridiculous.

I went to chantilly and regretted it.

That's why I'm fighting the Western High School fight with parents who want to move.

Chantilly was awful, and despite being a community, the staff have loose lips and are not afraid to throw other staff under the bus; students were constantly involved in drama, with some dramas being so severe they required administrative intervention; organizational challenges at the school level were prevalent, and abusive staff are extant at the school even with staffing changes in occurrence.

I had some of the laziest staff I could possibly have, where community is just a front.

Chantilly is a sinking ship much like the Titanic, with an obvious distinction between Franklin and Rocky Run kids.

I have dealt with split feeders from K-8, having attended Oak Hill, and I found that they really do come at a detriment to a student's social-emotional development.

Hear it from someone who has lived overcrowding and split feeders first hand, it was not fun.

In regards to the overcrowding:

It was not fun having to zigzag around other kids to avoid injury.

It was not fun having to face delays in the halls from severe backups.

It was not fun having to wait in the bathroom for a toilet or sink to open up, when everyone went in there at once.

It was not fun being crammed into a class of 30 people, and not receiving the specialized attention from the teacher students deserve.

It was not fun being crammed into spaces that were not built to accommodate the amount of people it had to hold from enrollment pressures.

In regards to the split feeder situation:

It was not fun making friends with people you knew would be heading in a different direction as you.

It was not fun having to say goodbye to those you grew to love, appreciate, and cherish.

It was not fun knowing that students were going to a better or worse school than you, with a pervasive feeling of angst and envy knowing that our overall experience at the next level would not be the same.

It was not fun attending schools with people so vastly dissimilar from you that you felt like you couldn't maintain a proper social standing, and stuck with who was familiar.

It was not fun leaving people I had known for the past seven years, and then having to do the same with people you knew for the past two years.

It was certainly not fun knowing that cross-school parties exist, where artificial ethnocentrism at the high school level created social rifts, with students from one school being uninvited in order to maintain a feeling of community with people you may never see again in life, not to mention fights that would occur if students from other schools showed their face.

And most importantly, it was not fun having relationships be strained from defective and awfully drawn school boundary lines.

Chantilly was overcrowded, socially difficult to navigate, a safety hazard (there was one time I was stuck in the building during a fire drill), and a discombobulated mess that faced neglect over many years, where now the county comes up with a solution, that then they try to make problems with by considering turning it into an aerospace academy.

That's the truth behind what was felt as someone who has lived through FCPS' concocted BS that they have to clean up when they shot themselves in the foot and walked into this mess through chronic incompetence, gerrymandering, and misappropriation of taxpayer funds, if not straight up embezzlement and fraud.

Parent here of one introvert and one extrovert. One excellent student and one who could have been, but did not want to be bothered. Both thrived at Chantilly.

I'm sorry PP did not have a decent experience.

One thing, I don't understand was the leaving friends of 7 years, and then 2 years.
Also, FWIW, the number of kids in the classroom has very little to do with the number in the school. 30 is pretty normal.

See you just selfishly jump to share your experience without asking what I was alluding to, but I will share anyway.

The Special Education Department Chair let it slip that Academy Resource Teachers are paid to support academy students with IEPs and 504s, but often construct accommodations to add hours so that they are able to keep their jobs.

There was poor sportsmanship with members of sports teams thinking that were better than other members.

There was domestic violence amongst students, and I was there when one student badly beat another student up when his child was brought up (that fight was filmed by the way).

Fights in the parking lots would occur as students had to fight their way out.

The “barstool” account published defamatory videos and memes of me and other students, one so bad the girl wanted it taken down but it was left up anyway.

I hate the concept of Barstool accounts anyway as they are mass grounds for lawsuits because of their nature of harming, embarrassing and defaming people in vulnerable or vulgar moments they would rather keep private, but are exploited for views.

The staff at Chantilly did nothing for the SA claims a girl expressed to both her counselor and the school psychologist, with it being disproven and written off.

There was a pervasive environment of abuse, bullying, and harassment amongst students.

Vandalism (while to a lesser degree than at other schools) was significant enough that bathrooms were closed.

So yeah, while your experience is great with your kids (who most likely are lying to your gullible and umempathetic face), mine was shrouded in legal grey areas.

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Anonymous wrote:For the Kilmer / Thoreau issue they need to modify so that Wolftrap splits at the middle school level - those assigned to Madison go to Thoreau and those assigned to Marshall go to Kilmer. They would then move the <5 percent group you reference at Kilmer to Thoreau and those students would feed into Madison.

Why? They did what you said and also eliminated the split at middle school. All of Wolftrap now goes to Thoreau then Madison, which addresses your point about Thoreau to Madison consistency. Why do you say they need to split Wolftrap? That community is clearly very against the middle school split, as opposed to the Town of Vienna people at Westbriar who like their split.

I live in the community and have students attending Marshall and there has been no outreach to gather input from the community - push by current Wolftrap families is not the same as community input that involves those with students at other levels, not in school yet, or previously had students there.

People with kids already at Marshall won’t bad-mouth it but families with younger kids jumped at the chance to attend Madison. They live in Vienna, the Madison-bound parents constantly talk up Madison, and it’s a slog to get to Marshall from the Wolftrap area (unless you go well out of the way you have to go through the heart of Tysons).

Both Madison and Marshall can be challenging to get to during rush hour from the Buehlah / Clarks Crossing / Meadowlark area - with a few minutes time difference on average with outliers here and there. What is occurring is vocal families that have moved into the area over the last five to 10 years want a school that is less socio-economic diverse (Marshall: 15.89% English Learner versus Madison 6.11%; Marshall: 20.78% Free/Reduce Fee Lunch versus Madison 10.26%; Marshall: 39.95% White (Not Of Hispanic Origin) versus Madison: 58.11%). There is strong pride for Marshall by those that are attending and have attended Marshall from impacted neighborhoods and those families are, for the most part, happy they ended up there instead of Madison. Marshall is a great school and unfortunately families with children at Wolftrap ES currently have become confused with the constant chatter about Madison being so great. There will always be a few families that want to go to Madison as it is more a sports oriented school and their AP program but those are outliers.

Nah, this is nothing new. Given a choice, most families at Wolftrap long would have opted for Madison over Marshall given a choice, but for years Marshall's enrollment was so low that it never entered anyone's mind that they would move kids from Marshall to Madison. Also, Madison had not been expanded, so it didn't have the 2500 seats it now has (and which, to some degree, FCPS needs to justify, since it expanded Madison outside the renovation queue and ignored other schools like Annandale and McLean).

So it's not like those who moved into the Wolftrap/Kilmer/Marshall over the last 5-10 years behave any differently than their predecessors. They just see an opportunity that wasn't previously available.

People with kids there are generally satisfied with Marshall, but it's in Falls Church rather than Vienna, it has IB (less popular), traffic through the heart of Tysons is still worse than Maple Avenue (as congested as Maple can also get) and its sports teams aren't the same caliber. That's not irrelevant in Vienna, which is a very sports-oriented area.

In "real life," Madison and Marshall families generally are respectful of each other's schools, but more than one Madison family from the Wolftrap area asked us if our kids felt safe at Marshall. It's seemed passive-aggressive, since they'd sent their kids to Kilmer, and about 85% of Kilmer feeds to Marshall.

My kids go to Madison, and we do joke that it's a jock school. The upside to Marshall, though, is that you don't have to have been playing a sport with VYI since kindergarten to make even the JV teams. There are a lot more opportunities for kids who just want to play competitively without the overinvested sideline parents. Madison also has an outstanding music performance program. We looked at houses in the Marshall zone, and my only hesitation with Marshall would have been that it's IB instead of AP - a couple of my kids' friends who live just on the other side of Cedar Ln. but were zoned for Cunningham Park did an academic transfer from Marshall to Madison for AP. Most people we know who go to Marshall are very happy with it. I find the handwringing of the "demographics" to be a bit much, but I also let my kid go to Jackson without losing a minute's sleep over it (and, other than the inexcusably decrepit building, they had a great experience there).

Looking at the new maps, I do wonder who 1901 ticked off to stay zoned to Marshall when the entire rest of that run just got rezoned to Madison. I assume I'd see them picked up by whatever school is in the light green or teal right next to it, but, right now, it looks like they just created another attendance island (and a nightmare for the transportation department).

SPA 1901 is the current "Westbriar island," zoned to Westbriar, Kilmer, and Marshall. Most of Westbriar is further east near Tysons.

The area to the south proposed to move to Madison feeds to Wolftrap ES, not Westbriar.

In earlier proposals, FCPS floated the idea of moving the island (SPA 1901) to Wolftrap, and moving part of Wolftrap to Westbriar. This got pushback from Wolftrap families who didn't want to move to Westbriar, and families in the Westbriar island who wanted to move to Colvin Run. Then, at some point, FCPS proposed to move all of Wolftrap to Madison and all of Westbriar to Marshall, and there was resistance from the Westbriar families zoned to Madison about moving to Marshall. Meanwhile, you had folks from the Langley area shooting down any proposal to move the Westbriar island into Colvin Run and the Langley pyramid, because they knew that increases the odds that part of Langley would get moved to Herndon.

So they ended up trying to please the Wolftrap people who wanted to move to Madison, the Westbriar people who didn't want to move to Marshall, and the Langley people who didn't want kids from the Westbriar island moving into the Langley pyramid. That leaves the Westbriar island even more isolated, because now it's not just an island at Westbriar, but also at Kilmer and Marshall.

FCPS is kind of stuck now because if they also move the Westbriar island (SPA 1901) to Thoreau/Madison, it skews the enrollments. If they move the island to Colvin Run and the Langley pyramid, they've got Great Falls screaming about overcrowding Cooper and Langley. If they undo the move of the Wolftrap families to Thoreau/Madison, they are leaving Kilmer overcrowded and not taking advantage of the Madison expansion. The big mistake was giving in to the Westbriar/Town of Vienna folks who made such a fuss about moving to Marshall. Policy 8130 states that the creation of new attendance islands should be avoided, but Reid's proposal ends up aggravating the current Westbriar island by making it an island at Kilmer and Marshall as well.

Great Falls parents are a bunch of elitist a holes

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For the Kilmer / Thoreau issue they need to modify so that Wolftrap splits at the middle school level - those assigned to Madison go to Thoreau and those assigned to Marshall go to Kilmer. They would then move the <5 percent group you reference at Kilmer to Thoreau and those students would feed into Madison.

Why? They did what you said and also eliminated the split at middle school. All of Wolftrap now goes to Thoreau then Madison, which addresses your point about Thoreau to Madison consistency. Why do you say they need to split Wolftrap? That community is clearly very against the middle school split, as opposed to the Town of Vienna people at Westbriar who like their split.

I live in the community and have students attending Marshall and there has been no outreach to gather input from the community - push by current Wolftrap families is not the same as community input that involves those with students at other levels, not in school yet, or previously had students there.

People with kids already at Marshall won’t bad-mouth it but families with younger kids jumped at the chance to attend Madison. They live in Vienna, the Madison-bound parents constantly talk up Madison, and it’s a slog to get to Marshall from the Wolftrap area (unless you go well out of the way you have to go through the heart of Tysons).

Both Madison and Marshall can be challenging to get to during rush hour from the Buehlah / Clarks Crossing / Meadowlark area - with a few minutes time difference on average with outliers here and there. What is occurring is vocal families that have moved into the area over the last five to 10 years want a school that is less socio-economic diverse (Marshall: 15.89% English Learner versus Madison 6.11%; Marshall: 20.78% Free/Reduce Fee Lunch versus Madison 10.26%; Marshall: 39.95% White (Not Of Hispanic Origin) versus Madison: 58.11%). There is strong pride for Marshall by those that are attending and have attended Marshall from impacted neighborhoods and those families are, for the most part, happy they ended up there instead of Madison. Marshall is a great school and unfortunately families with children at Wolftrap ES currently have become confused with the constant chatter about Madison being so great. There will always be a few families that want to go to Madison as it is more a sports oriented school and their AP program but those are outliers.

Nah, this is nothing new. Given a choice, most families at Wolftrap long would have opted for Madison over Marshall given a choice, but for years Marshall's enrollment was so low that it never entered anyone's mind that they would move kids from Marshall to Madison. Also, Madison had not been expanded, so it didn't have the 2500 seats it now has (and which, to some degree, FCPS needs to justify, since it expanded Madison outside the renovation queue and ignored other schools like Annandale and McLean).

So it's not like those who moved into the Wolftrap/Kilmer/Marshall over the last 5-10 years behave any differently than their predecessors. They just see an opportunity that wasn't previously available.

People with kids there are generally satisfied with Marshall, but it's in Falls Church rather than Vienna, it has IB (less popular), traffic through the heart of Tysons is still worse than Maple Avenue (as congested as Maple can also get) and its sports teams aren't the same caliber. That's not irrelevant in Vienna, which is a very sports-oriented area.

In "real life," Madison and Marshall families generally are respectful of each other's schools, but more than one Madison family from the Wolftrap area asked us if our kids felt safe at Marshall. It's seemed passive-aggressive, since they'd sent their kids to Kilmer, and about 85% of Kilmer feeds to Marshall.

My kids go to Madison, and we do joke that it's a jock school. The upside to Marshall, though, is that you don't have to have been playing a sport with VYI since kindergarten to make even the JV teams. There are a lot more opportunities for kids who just want to play competitively without the overinvested sideline parents. Madison also has an outstanding music performance program. We looked at houses in the Marshall zone, and my only hesitation with Marshall would have been that it's IB instead of AP - a couple of my kids' friends who live just on the other side of Cedar Ln. but were zoned for Cunningham Park did an academic transfer from Marshall to Madison for AP. Most people we know who go to Marshall are very happy with it. I find the handwringing of the "demographics" to be a bit much, but I also let my kid go to Jackson without losing a minute's sleep over it (and, other than the inexcusably decrepit building, they had a great experience there).

Looking at the new maps, I do wonder who 1901 ticked off to stay zoned to Marshall when the entire rest of that run just got rezoned to Madison. I assume I'd see them picked up by whatever school is in the light green or teal right next to it, but, right now, it looks like they just created another attendance island (and a nightmare for the transportation department).

SPA 1901 is the current "Westbriar island," zoned to Westbriar, Kilmer, and Marshall. Most of Westbriar is further east near Tysons.

The area to the south proposed to move to Madison feeds to Wolftrap ES, not Westbriar.

In earlier proposals, FCPS floated the idea of moving the island (SPA 1901) to Wolftrap, and moving part of Wolftrap to Westbriar. This got pushback from Wolftrap families who didn't want to move to Westbriar, and families in the Westbriar island who wanted to move to Colvin Run. Then, at some point, FCPS proposed to move all of Wolftrap to Madison and all of Westbriar to Marshall, and there was resistance from the Westbriar families zoned to Madison about moving to Marshall. Meanwhile, you had folks from the Langley area shooting down any proposal to move the Westbriar island into Colvin Run and the Langley pyramid, because they knew that increases the odds that part of Langley would get moved to Herndon.

So they ended up trying to please the Wolftrap people who wanted to move to Madison, the Westbriar people who didn't want to move to Marshall, and the Langley people who didn't want kids from the Westbriar island moving into the Langley pyramid. That leaves the Westbriar island even more isolated, because now it's not just an island at Westbriar, but also at Kilmer and Marshall.

FCPS is kind of stuck now because if they also move the Westbriar island (SPA 1901) to Thoreau/Madison, it skews the enrollments. If they move the island to Colvin Run and the Langley pyramid, they've got Great Falls screaming about overcrowding Cooper and Langley. If they undo the move of the Wolftrap families to Thoreau/Madison, they are leaving Kilmer overcrowded and not taking advantage of the Madison expansion. The big mistake was giving in to the Westbriar/Town of Vienna folks who made such a fuss about moving to Marshall. Policy 8130 states that the creation of new attendance islands should be avoided, but Reid's proposal ends up aggravating the current Westbriar island by making it an island at Kilmer and Marshall as well.

Anonymous wrote:Did they drop the Sangster split feeder switch to LBSS? Not listed in the slides today.

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Anonymous wrote:For the Kilmer / Thoreau issue they need to modify so that Wolftrap splits at the middle school level - those assigned to Madison go to Thoreau and those assigned to Marshall go to Kilmer. They would then move the <5 percent group you reference at Kilmer to Thoreau and those students would feed into Madison.

Why? They did what you said and also eliminated the split at middle school. All of Wolftrap now goes to Thoreau then Madison, which addresses your point about Thoreau to Madison consistency. Why do you say they need to split Wolftrap? That community is clearly very against the middle school split, as opposed to the Town of Vienna people at Westbriar who like their split.

I live in the community and have students attending Marshall and there has been no outreach to gather input from the community - push by current Wolftrap families is not the same as community input that involves those with students at other levels, not in school yet, or previously had students there.

People with kids already at Marshall won’t bad-mouth it but families with younger kids jumped at the chance to attend Madison. They live in Vienna, the Madison-bound parents constantly talk up Madison, and it’s a slog to get to Marshall from the Wolftrap area (unless you go well out of the way you have to go through the heart of Tysons).

Both Madison and Marshall can be challenging to get to during rush hour from the Buehlah / Clarks Crossing / Meadowlark area - with a few minutes time difference on average with outliers here and there. What is occurring is vocal families that have moved into the area over the last five to 10 years want a school that is less socio-economic diverse (Marshall: 15.89% English Learner versus Madison 6.11%; Marshall: 20.78% Free/Reduce Fee Lunch versus Madison 10.26%; Marshall: 39.95% White (Not Of Hispanic Origin) versus Madison: 58.11%). There is strong pride for Marshall by those that are attending and have attended Marshall from impacted neighborhoods and those families are, for the most part, happy they ended up there instead of Madison. Marshall is a great school and unfortunately families with children at Wolftrap ES currently have become confused with the constant chatter about Madison being so great. There will always be a few families that want to go to Madison as it is more a sports oriented school and their AP program but those are outliers.

Nah, this is nothing new. Given a choice, most families at Wolftrap long would have opted for Madison over Marshall given a choice, but for years Marshall's enrollment was so low that it never entered anyone's mind that they would move kids from Marshall to Madison. Also, Madison had not been expanded, so it didn't have the 2500 seats it now has (and which, to some degree, FCPS needs to justify, since it expanded Madison outside the renovation queue and ignored other schools like Annandale and McLean).

So it's not like those who moved into the Wolftrap/Kilmer/Marshall over the last 5-10 years behave any differently than their predecessors. They just see an opportunity that wasn't previously available.

People with kids there are generally satisfied with Marshall, but it's in Falls Church rather than Vienna, it has IB (less popular), traffic through the heart of Tysons is still worse than Maple Avenue (as congested as Maple can also get) and its sports teams aren't the same caliber. That's not irrelevant in Vienna, which is a very sports-oriented area.

In "real life," Madison and Marshall families generally are respectful of each other's schools, but more than one Madison family from the Wolftrap area asked us if our kids felt safe at Marshall. It's seemed passive-aggressive, since they'd sent their kids to Kilmer, and about 85% of Kilmer feeds to Marshall.

My kids go to Madison, and we do joke that it's a jock school. The upside to Marshall, though, is that you don't have to have been playing a sport with VYI since kindergarten to make even the JV teams. There are a lot more opportunities for kids who just want to play competitively without the overinvested sideline parents. Madison also has an outstanding music performance program. We looked at houses in the Marshall zone, and my only hesitation with Marshall would have been that it's IB instead of AP - a couple of my kids' friends who live just on the other side of Cedar Ln. but were zoned for Cunningham Park did an academic transfer from Marshall to Madison for AP. Most people we know who go to Marshall are very happy with it. I find the handwringing of the "demographics" to be a bit much, but I also let my kid go to Jackson without losing a minute's sleep over it (and, other than the inexcusably decrepit building, they had a great experience there).

Looking at the new maps, I do wonder who 1901 ticked off to stay zoned to Marshall when the entire rest of that run just got rezoned to Madison. I assume I'd see them picked up by whatever school is in the light green or teal right next to it, but, right now, it looks like they just created another attendance island (and a nightmare for the transportation department).

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:Who is politically connected and lives in the tiny area moved from FHS to overcrowd CHS even more? How bizarre.

+1,000 adding more kids to Chantilly?? Totally ridiculous.

I went to chantilly and regretted it.

That's why I'm fighting the Western High School fight with parents who want to move.

Chantilly was awful, and despite being a community, the staff have loose lips and are not afraid to throw other staff under the bus; students were constantly involved in drama, with some dramas being so severe they required administrative intervention; organizational challenges at the school level were prevalent, and abusive staff are extant at the school even with staffing changes in occurrence.

I had some of the laziest staff I could possibly have, where community is just a front.

Chantilly is a sinking ship much like the Titanic, with an obvious distinction between Franklin and Rocky Run kids.

I have dealt with split feeders from K-8, having attended Oak Hill, and I found that they really do come at a detriment to a student's social-emotional development.

Hear it from someone who has lived overcrowding and split feeders first hand, it was not fun.

In regards to the overcrowding:

It was not fun having to zigzag around other kids to avoid injury.

It was not fun having to face delays in the halls from severe backups.

It was not fun having to wait in the bathroom for a toilet or sink to open up, when everyone went in there at once.

It was not fun being crammed into a class of 30 people, and not receiving the specialized attention from the teacher students deserve.

It was not fun being crammed into spaces that were not built to accommodate the amount of people it had to hold from enrollment pressures.

In regards to the split feeder situation:

It was not fun making friends with people you knew would be heading in a different direction as you.

It was not fun having to say goodbye to those you grew to love, appreciate, and cherish.

It was not fun knowing that students were going to a better or worse school than you, with a pervasive feeling of angst and envy knowing that our overall experience at the next level would not be the same.

It was not fun attending schools with people so vastly dissimilar from you that you felt like you couldn't maintain a proper social standing, and stuck with who was familiar.

It was not fun leaving people I had known for the past seven years, and then having to do the same with people you knew for the past two years.

It was certainly not fun knowing that cross-school parties exist, where artificial ethnocentrism at the high school level created social rifts, with students from one school being uninvited in order to maintain a feeling of community with people you may never see again in life, not to mention fights that would occur if students from other schools showed their face.

And most importantly, it was not fun having relationships be strained from defective and awfully drawn school boundary lines.

Chantilly was overcrowded, socially difficult to navigate, a safety hazard (there was one time I was stuck in the building during a fire drill), and a discombobulated mess that faced neglect over many years, where now the county comes up with a solution, that then they try to make problems with by considering turning it into an aerospace academy.

That's the truth behind what was felt as someone who has lived through FCPS' concocted BS that they have to clean up when they shot themselves in the foot and walked into this mess through chronic incompetence, gerrymandering, and misappropriation of taxpayer funds, if not straight up embezzlement and fraud.

Parent here of one introvert and one extrovert. One excellent student and one who could have been, but did not want to be bothered. Both thrived at Chantilly.

I'm sorry PP did not have a decent experience.

One thing, I don't understand was the leaving friends of 7 years, and then 2 years.
Also, FWIW, the number of kids in the classroom has very little to do with the number in the school. 30 is pretty normal.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Who is politically connected and lives in the tiny area moved from FHS to overcrowd CHS even more? How bizarre.

+1,000 adding more kids to Chantilly?? Totally ridiculous.

I went to chantilly and regretted it.

That's why I'm fighting the Western High School fight with parents who want to move.

Chantilly was awful, and despite being a community, the staff have loose lips and are not afraid to throw other staff under the bus; students were constantly involved in drama, with some dramas being so severe they required administrative intervention; organizational challenges at the school level were prevalent, and abusive staff are extant at the school even with staffing changes in occurrence.

I had some of the laziest staff I could possibly have, where community is just a front.

Chantilly is a sinking ship much like the Titanic, with an obvious distinction between Franklin and Rocky Run kids.

I have dealt with split feeders from K-8, having attended Oak Hill, and I found that they really do come at a detriment to a student's social-emotional development.

Hear it from someone who has lived overcrowding and split feeders first hand, it was not fun.

In regards to the overcrowding:

It was not fun having to zigzag around other kids to avoid injury.

It was not fun having to face delays in the halls from severe backups.

It was not fun having to wait in the bathroom for a toilet or sink to open up, when everyone went in there at once.

It was not fun being crammed into a class of 30 people, and not receiving the specialized attention from the teacher students deserve.

It was not fun being crammed into spaces that were not built to accommodate the amount of people it had to hold from enrollment pressures.

In regards to the split feeder situation:

It was not fun making friends with people you knew would be heading in a different direction as you.

It was not fun having to say goodbye to those you grew to love, appreciate, and cherish.

It was not fun knowing that students were going to a better or worse school than you, with a pervasive feeling of angst and envy knowing that our overall experience at the next level would not be the same.

It was not fun attending schools with people so vastly dissimilar from you that you felt like you couldn't maintain a proper social standing, and stuck with who was familiar.

It was not fun leaving people I had known for the past seven years, and then having to do the same with people you knew for the past two years.

It was certainly not fun knowing that cross-school parties exist, where artificial ethnocentrism at the high school level created social rifts, with students from one school being uninvited in order to maintain a feeling of community with people you may never see again in life, not to mention fights that would occur if students from other schools showed their face.

And most importantly, it was not fun having relationships be strained from defective and awfully drawn school boundary lines.

Chantilly was overcrowded, socially difficult to navigate, a safety hazard (there was one time I was stuck in the building during a fire drill), and a discombobulated mess that faced neglect over many years, where now the county comes up with a solution, that then they try to make problems with by considering turning it into an aerospace academy.

That's the truth behind what was felt as someone who has lived through FCPS' concocted BS that they have to clean up when they shot themselves in the foot and walked into this mess through chronic incompetence, gerrymandering, and misappropriation of taxpayer funds, if not straight up embezzlement and fraud.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Who is politically connected and lives in the tiny area moved from FHS to overcrowd CHS even more? How bizarre.

+1,000 adding more kids to Chantilly?? Totally ridiculous.

Anonymous wrote:I think they’ll try to sneak those RV-Lewis neighborhoods into WSHS and not move anyone out of WSHS. Then be all shocked and surprised in a few years when this move adds many more students to WSHS than they were originally expecting, because people will stop moving once their kids hit middle school.

Nobody is moving into Lewis at this point but I think they are for sure getting Bren Mar Park from Edison. It might even be in less than 5 years. They need to figure out the middle school situation because BMP is currently a K-5 school that goes BMP-Holmes-Edison. If they want them at Key, they need to get 6th grade in somehow. Or they keep them at Holmes and then Holmes becomes a split feeder between Annandale and Lewis I guess.