Bren Mar Park ES community excluded from FCPS boundary discussions

For the third time in the past few months, Fairfax County Public Schools hosted a meeting on school boundary changes affecting Bren Mar Park Elementary School, and the Bren Mar Park community wasn’t given a real chance to participate.

FCPS is considering moving Bren Mar Park students to Key Middle School and Lewis High School, a plan BMP parents are not happy about. BMP students currently go to Holmes and Edison.

BMP goes up to grade 5. If BMP students are sent to middle school at Key, BMP would have to add grade 6.

The plan to shift BMP students to Key and Lewis surfaced in late 2025, after FCPS had already completed a comprehensive district-wide boundary study, which didn’t give BMP parents enough time to develop a response.

In the face of complaints from the BMP community, Superintendent Michelle Reid agreed to delay changes for their school until the next five-year boundary review.

Now, FCPS wants to start an expedited boundary process for BMP in violation of its own policy on boundary reviews.

Lack of community engagement

“It’s not fair,” says BMP PTA President A.J. Sutton, noting there are better solutions that are being ignored. He also cites the risks of having students cross several lanes of I-495 and I-395

+ to get to school, “an unsafe outcome our families oppose.” 

Mason School Board member Ricardy Anderson calls FCPS administrators’ lack of engagement with the BMP community “indefensible.”

An email from FCPS on May 20 invited families to a June 2 meeting at Lewis High School “regarding potential boundary changes that might affect Bren Mar Park Elementary School, as well as the middle and high schools that Bren Mar Park students attend or feed into.” The email said the meeting is “specifically for Lewis families.” BMP parents weren’t invited until the day before, which meant many couldn’t attend.

“There was no way I was going to be okay with that,” Anderson said. “The process was definitely flawed.”

Other solutions not considered by FCPS

FCPS wants to use BMP to address the under-enrollment at Lewis and decrease enrollment at Edison, which is overcapacity.

“Lewis doesn’t have enough kids to field a baseball team. I’m sympathetic to their concerns,” Anderson said, but she says there are other solutions.

There are two other elementary schools – Coventry and Franconia – that are closer to Lewis High School than BMP, Anderson notes. Those schools currently feed into West Springfield High School, which is significantly overcrowded.

At another recent meeting convened by FCPS that also excluded the BMP community, Anderson asked why those other schools aren’t being evaluated. “I got no answers,” she said, other than “they’re not going to want to go to Lewis.”

Related story: Additional school boundary changes proposed

Once the renovation at BMP is complete, it will have more capacity and will be able to relieve overcrowding at Weyanoke Elementary School in Mason District, she said.

Anderson also doesn’t support adding sixth graders to BMP, and she cites other objections to moving BMP students to Key and Lewis, including the distance and the need to cross the beltway. Also, some BMP families feel more connected to the Annandale area than Lewis, which is in Springfield.

In a June 11 letter to the school board, Sutton asked them to direct FCPS to remove BMP from the expedited boundary review process.

The policy basis for the expedited boundary change cited by FCPS is Edison High School’s overcapacity, Sutton says. But FPCS policy “requires the review to address the over-capacity school’s attendance area – not Bren Mar Park, which is a separate school that meets none of the policy’s thresholds.”

West Springfield operates at 114 percent, which makes it the most overcrowded school in Fairfax County, while Lewis High School, which is nearby, operates at 81 percent and is under-resourced and below staffing thresholds for additional teachers and counselors,” Sutton notes.

That’s why schools in the West Springfield pyramid, rather than BMP, should move to Lewis, he says. “We are not asking for special treatment. We just want the same data-driven process every FCPS community deserves.”

FCPS is shortchanging a lower-income school

Rachell Roll, a Bren Mar Park resident with a daughter in the seventh grade in the Advanced Program at Glasgow Middle School, doesn’t want her daughter to go Lewis High School because it has fewer course offerings than Edison, especially in advanced math, and doesn’t have a full-time music teacher.

Roll says she is an engaged parent who subscribes to FCPS newsletters, went to the boundary study meetings last year, filled out numerous surveys, and is unhappy that the BMP community is being excluded from the current discussions.

Roll expressed her concerns during the public comment period at the most recent school board meeting and in letters to school board members.

“Since November 2025, FCPS officials have neglected their requirements to inform the community in a timely manner, receive feedback, or follow up on any community feedback,” she wrote. “This is in stark contrast to how FCPS treats other communities going through an out-of-cycle boundary review.”

Related story: Bren Mar Park ES parents concerned about last-minute boundary proposal

“This disparate treatment of the BMP community leads to the conclusion that FCPS intends to railroad BMP into Key/Lewis regardless of community sentiment in order to cater to richer communities that have long resisted transferring into Lewis,” Roll says.

She cites “three significant process fouls that indicate that FCPS is not acting in good faith with the BMP community”:

• Arbitrary timelines – During the lengthy districtwide community boundary study last year, the only two options presented for BMP students were staying in the Edison pyramid or moving to the Annandale pyramid. FCPS introduced the proposal to move BMP students to Key and Lewis at the last minute, which prevented the BMP community from giving full consideration to the proposal or providing input.

• Lack of communication – FCPS has repeatedly failed to inform or engage parents in the BMP community about these last-minute changes, preventing parents from providing input. At the April 24 meeting, BMP parents were told that the primary way to provide input is to fill out an online feedback form. However, FCPS never made any effort to provide the link for the form to BMP attendees.

• Disregard for community input – FCPS has made no effort to look into any of the concerns raised about having to navigate across the beltway to get to Key and Lewis or the resulting under-enrollment at Holmes.

“For FCPS to rush to impose a change on a small, lower-income community so quickly after the county-wide boundary review cycle ended implies that FCPS’s promises to make these changes in predictable cycles with community input were made only to wealthy communities,” Roll says. “We are united in our refusal to be railroaded by FCPS.”

Related story: School news roundup – June 2026