With just a few months to go before they’re expected to vote on new school boundaries, many Fairfax County School Board members say there are still critical information gaps that need to be addressed.
Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is undergoing its first boundary review in nearly four decades, an overhaul that could have a dramatic impact on students and their families.
The review process began last fall, but at a work session yesterday (Tuesday) — their first of the new academic year — school board members said there are still issues about school realignment that need to be addressed.
Hunter Mill District Representative Melanie Meren said there are numerous transportation-related issues that the boundary realignment plans don’t address, particularly for students who attend schools not aligned with their traditional neighborhood placements.
“I see this all the time in Herndon: kids that want [International Baccalaureate programs] come to Langston Hughes Middle School for IB, but they want to stay in South Lakes High School,” Meren said. “They have no bus. What do they do? I thought this boundary review was going to address these things. Where was the discussion of the programs that are going to be involved? I don’t have any sense of whether that’s on the table.”
Meren also called for more clarity on how the redistricting process might affect kiss-and-ride drop-offs.
“What is the cost for changes? Do we have the funds?” she asked. “The only new information is that there are public meetings in October and the board is supposed to make a decision in four months. That’s not wise and does not instill public confidence.”
The update by FCPS staff at yesterday’s work session followed the release of initial boundary scenarios drafted by Thru Consulting in May. The proposals quickly provoked heated feedback from community members during a month-long round of public engagement.
Karl Frisch, who represents Providence District and formerly served as the board chair, said that, in an effort to be transparent, some of the planning process has also been needlessly confusing.
“I echo colleagues’ concerns about where we find ourselves with regard to community feedback to various scenarios,” Frisch said. “There’s this tension we began the conversation with: we have this BRAC committee, which is ostensibly an internal committee, but because [we were] being transparent in sharing that initial work, it created a lot of confusion.”
The current plan is to review draft scenarios for boundary realignment in October followed by a school board vote in January. However, there was some discussion of possibly pushing that process out further.
“This timeline was imposed by the School Board,” said Franconia District Representative Marcia St. John-Cunning. “The question now is: do we want to change that timeline? All of us knew that was going to be a heavy lift and it won’t be easy.”
Part of the boundary review includes consideration of adjustments to school start times. In March, the board approved a pilot program to test later start times for middle schools, starting this fall.
Per the school board presentation:
Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) operates a large network of transportation services supporting a complex pattern of attendance boundaries and staggered school start times. Current boundaries and routing may not fully optimize instructional time, equitable access to programs, or efficient use of transportation resources. In order to assess synergies between School Start Times and the Comprehensive Boundary Review, the team will evaluate the relationship between bell schedules, bus runs, and school boundaries to identify opportunities to align operational efficiency with educational equity and community priorities.
But Superintendent Michelle Reid said approving a plan that both correctly addresses school boundaries and changes start times might be too big a lift.
“With phasing language for boundary work, I don’t think it’s possible to address start times and phasing because we’re not able to compress the bus runs sufficiently to do that,” Reid said.
Some on the school board said FCPS should make healthy start times a bigger priority. Others said FCPS isn’t adequately accounting for the new high school planned in Herndon.
“It took us a very long time to dig this hole we’re in, and I do not anticipate that we’re going to fix every problem this go-around,” Chair Sandy Anderson, who represents the Springfield District, said. “We need to be clear that these are iterative changes over time … Change is uncomfortable, we just have to figure out how we mitigate that change as much as humanly possible.”
