Parents weigh priorities for FCPS boundary study
Parents and community members discussed their priorities for a districtwide boundary review at Glasgow Middle School on Nov. 18.
This is the first time Fairfax County Public Schools is looking at school boundaries in a holistic way in nearly 40 years, Superintendent Michelle Reid told approximately 170 attendees.
The session at Glasgow was the first of six community meetings – one in each FCPS region – to discuss the school boundary study. A meeting at Annandale High School will be held on Dec. 12, 6:45-8:15 p.m.
David Irwin of Thru Consulting, which was hired by FCPS to oversee the boundary study, outlined the four priorities identified by the school board:
- Ensure equitable access to programs and facilities.
- Address the imbalance of over and under-enrolled schools.
- Establish contiguous attendance zones and maintain neighborhood groupings.
- Reduce the amount of time students sit on school buses.
Phase 1 of the boundary study, underway now, includes community engagement and data collection, said Namratha Bharadwaj of Thru Consulting. Data analysis will begin in March 2025.
A 50-member Boundary Review Advisory Committee – with two parents or caregivers from each region – will draft boundary adjustment scenarios considering community feedback and data analysis.
Related story: FCPS schedules community meetings on school boundary changes
During phase 2, starting in summer 2025, there will be additional community meetings and surveys based on the scenarios developed by the committee.
The superintendent will then submit a recommendation to the school board. The school board is expected to approve a new boundary plan in 2026.
The whole process will be “driven by collaboration and community input,” Bharadwaj said.
In the Annandale/Mason District area, there are several schools over capacity and others with split feeders.
The audience was divided into breakout groups to discuss their top priorities, data or other insights that should be considered, their hopes for the outcome of the boundary study, and questions about the next steps.
Here are some takeaways from the breakout sessions:
- The top priority should be equity among schools.
- Promote safer ways to get to school.
- Focus on schools that are over and under capacity.
- Minimize the number of students relocated to another school.
- Students’ proximity to school is a major priority.
- Keep neighborhoods together.
- Avoid having attendance areas divided by a major road, such as Route 50.
- Make middle schools consistent in terms of grades; some have grades 6-8 and others have 7-8.
- Take housing development plans into consideration when projecting enrollment.
- Have transparency around data collection.
- Overcrowding isn’t always a boundary issue; in some cases, it’s due to Advanced Academic Program centers or other special programs.
- Students shouldn’t have to cross major streets.
- Eliminate split feeders.
- Shorter bus times will promote better mental health, improve student outcomes, strengthen communities, and reduce transportation costs.
- Avoid disruption for students. Current students should be grandfathered in, allowing them to stay in the same school.
- Promote more socioeconomic diversity.
- When projecting enrollment, consider single-family homes with multiple households.
- Have meetings in underrepresented neighborhoods, such as Culmore.
- How will the new boundaries be phased in?
- Surveys should be done earlier in the process, not at the end of phase 2.
- The process shouldn’t end up with winners and losers.
4 responses to “Parents weigh priorities for FCPS boundary study”
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I agree regarding survey timing. If Phase 1 is data collection, surveys should be going out now not in, or near, the end of Phase 2 which is data “analysis”. What data are you analyzing if you only have constituent/parent data from those who may be able to attend the community meetings. There should be survey data sent to and collected from all parents/guardians AND students, and teachers and administrators as well. In addition, there should be meeting with local gov’t to collect data and concerns regarding housing, roads, traffic congestion, or other factors they have a stake-in or to gather data regarding population trends pertinent to schools.
This process is tainted from the outright and is not agnostic. The first priority given by the School board is listed as “equity”. Equity is not Equality. The concept of equity is rooted in a desire to compensate for past injustices and making active adjustments to address them in order to drive towards a uniform outcome. However, uniform outcome is not what Fairfax County Schools should be attempting to achieve. FCPS should be attemting to make each student achieve at their highest capability. A strongly Autistic individuial is not going to perform at the same level as a kid with a +140 IQ. Equity would have the Autistic student testing at the same level as the kid with the +140 IQ, which means that katie bar the door, all resources no matter the cost should be thrown at the autistic kid at the expense of cultivating and challenging the +140 IQ kid.
The boundary review should be social engineering agnostic. The priorities are simple and can be summarized as:
1) Contiguous, compact boundaries. This priority is meet with the boundary can be completely drawn without lifting a pen and the ratio of the circumference of a district and its total area should be as small as possible.
2) Bus routes shall not exit a school boundary.
3) Subdivisions, as defined by the Fairfax County Deed Book plats, shall not be divided unless the total population of a subdivision is greater than the school being fed. Example: the Crosspoint community in southern Fairfax.
4) Boundaries shall be drawn in accordance with projected population densities and compositions as well as operational school capacities (to include renovations and future builds) for the year 2034, so that we don’t have overcrowded schools that necessitate off cycle redistricting.
5) School boundaries and pyramids shall be such that a single school board representative represents all students in a given school, excluding AAP feeders, IB feeders and TJ.
The method used to achieve the new boundary definitions is simple. The average of a 10,000 run Montecarlo simulation to define the school boundaries using each school as the starting point for a boundary and growing the boundary until the projected 2034 capacity level of the school is reached.
Politics, social engineering, and especially EQUITY have no business in this simple resource allocation problem. THIS IS SIMPLE SYSTEMS ENGINEERING.
The bullet points are from the community feedback, and not from the School Board. The author of this blog chose to feature “equity” first, but that was just one of many issues identified by community members (I was there) and there was absolutely no consensus that “equity” should be the top priority.
The summary also omits that some noted during the breakout sessions that FCPS should come out with an updated renovation queue before it starts moving kids around (which you appear to allude to), and that there should be clear and objective criteria for changing boundaries.
To quote from the article: “David Irwin of Thru Consulting, which was hired by FCPS to oversee the boundary study, outlined the four priorities identified by the school board:
Ensure equitable access to programs and facilities.”
Equity is FCPS’s priority #1 and this needs to be remedied.