More details emerge on new Lacey school

Fairfax County school officials offered new details of the elementary school to be built on the Lacey site at a Dec. 12 meeting sponsored by the Broyhill Crest Community Association.

The Lacey school administration building will be torn down, and construction of the new school is expected to be completed in February 2012, which will give the principal plenty of time to set up and hire staff before it opens in September 2012. The FCPS staff currently working at the Lacey Center will move out in June 2010.

The current building used to house Masonville Elementary School, which closed in 1980 due to declining enrollment. Other than Glasgow Middle School, it will be the only school constructed in the Mason District in the past 40 years, says Mason Supervisor Penny Gross. The school population in the area is seeing “tremendous growth,” she says. Due to the economic downturn, fewer people are moving out of the area, and more people are choosing public schools over private schools.

Several schools in Annandale that have undergone renovations and expansions recently already have trailers. Woodburn Elementary School on Gallows Road has two, and Annandale High School has 29 temporary classrooms. The Lacey site has little extra room for trailers, so we better hope the school planners are correct in their enrollment estimates.

Kevin Sneed, director of design and construction for Fairfax County Public Schools, says the new two-story school will have the same basic design as the seven or eight newest FCPS schools. This school will have one major difference, however: It will be the first county school with a geothermal heating system. Ninety-six 400-foot-deep geothermal wells will be buried under the new school’s athletic field.

Although the blueprint indicates the school will include sixth graders, a final decision hasn’t been made yet. Mason District has some K-5 and some K-6 elementaries, and Poe Middle School, which serves most of the Broyhill Crest neighborhood, has grades 6-8. The new school, built for about 900 students, is likely to be designated a Title I school, which means it would have additional resources and services for students with special needs and smaller class sizes, Sneed says.

The plans call for the new school to have 38 classrooms, including five large rooms for kindergarten. All K-2 classrooms will have bathrooms. It will have a gymnasium, cafeteria with an adjacent music/performance area, two additional music rooms, two art rooms, two large multipurpose classrooms, several rooms for pull-out programs and special services, a media center, a clinic, a parent volunteer room, and various offices. The site will have about 100 parking spaces.

This spring, the school system will start a comprehensive boundary study, which could take as long as a year, Sneed says. A committee will be formed with representatives from all of the schools in the area that could be affected by changing attendance areas, such as Annandale Terrace and Beech Tree elementary schools.

Several Broyhill Crest residents at the meeting expressed some concerns about the impact of the school on nearby roads. Sneed noted that there is some discussion about widening of Wayne Drive. The Virginia Transportation Deparatment requires sidewalks on both sides of the street plus a four-foot strip of grass, he says, and that means a variance might be needed to have the sidewalk on homeowners’ property.

The Broyhill Crest Citizens Association has already asked the county for a study on “traffic calming” measures for Wayne Drive to prevent speeding. Gross noted that once the new school opens, the surrounding streets will be designated school zones and there will be crossing guards.

Some Brookcrest Place residents are concerned about water runoff, but Sneed assured them that a new drainage system will direct stormwater away from their street. The new building will be a bit closer to the houses on Brookcrest, but trees will be planted as a buffer.

In response to questions about where people will vote once the Lacey Center is torn down, Gross said the new school will be used as the Masonville Precinct polling place and a temporary voting site will be used during the construction.