The Northern Region Council today will debate a proposal that would restructure the region’s four districts at its monthly meeting at Marshall High in Falls Church.
The region’s Redistricting & Reclassification committee last week completed an initial proposal that would shuffle the 30 Northern Region high schools into new groupings based more on geography and traditional rivalries than just straight school size.
There is no guarantee the proposal as constructed will pass, according to multiple sources, and it is unlikely to be adopted in time for the upcoming school year. But it is the start of a process that will continue through next spring, when the Virginia High School League begins a state-wide reevaluation of its classification structure.
“At the very least this should give our schools a chance to talk about the issues and hopefully narrow our options,” said Paul Jansen, the coordinator of student activities and athletics for Fairfax County Public Schools. “But a meeting like this can still go in two or three different ways.”
The last major redistricting in the Northern Region — made up of schools in Arlington (3), Fairfax (25) and Loudoun Counties (1) and the city of Alexandria (1) — occurred in 1994 when the Concorde, Liberty, National and Patriot Districts were formed.
Five established schools switched districts in 2005 when the Northern Region opened a new school, South County, and was forced by the VHSL to add two Loudoun County schools — Stone Bridge and Loudoun Valley — that moved up from Group AA to Group AAA. Loudoun Valley is headed to the Northwest Region in the fall.
The latest redistricting proposal places several natural rivals that have been separated into the same district, including Madison and Oakton, Fairfax and W.T. Woodson and West Potomac and Mount Vernon. The R & R Committee based its new groupings on geography partly to cut down on the high transportation and gas costs associated with having spread out districts in traffic-choked Northern Virginia.
“The last time we redistricted the main concern was to put schools of the same size in the same districts,” Jansen said. “That’s still important. But the fallacy in our assumption was that the [school population numbers] would stay the same and that didn’t happen. It isn’t practical to strictly use numbers to decide this issue.”
Ken Tilley, the executive director of the VHSL, will attend the meeting at Marshall. South Lakes principal Bruce Butler will give an update on a major reconstruction effort at his school and possible boundary changes that could increase his student population.
