The Northern Region Council voted against a proposed realignment of its four districts on Wednesday at its monthly meeting at Marshall High in Falls Church.
The sponsored motion would have realigned the region’s 30 high schools into new groupings based more on geography and traditional rivalries. The final vote margin was 17-7 with four abstentions and two schools not in attendance, three shy of the necessary 20 votes for passage.
But while the proposal failed, the issue is far from dead, according to principals and activities directors in attendance. Realignment will be revisited again in November, giving region schools in Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun Counties and the city of Alexandria almost six months to receive feedback from their communities and await better information on student populations and any school boundary changes.
“Our goal as a committee was to get this process started and so we went ahead with a proposal,” said McLean principal Paul Wardinski, chairman of the nine-person Redistricting & Reclassification Committee that put together the measure. “We were doing exactly what the region wanted us to do. And if we come back in the fall and this proposal gets voted down again or we can’t find one that everyone likes then that’s fine. We’ll stay the same.”
The proposed changes were in response to lost instructional time, transportation and economic issues, including higher gas prices, and declining attendance at regular season sporting events resulting from spread-out districts in traffic-choked Northern Virginia. According to Wardinski, who takes over as principal at West Springfield on July 1, new district proposals could still pop up as soon as August, the next time the Northern Region Council meets.
