The Fairfax County School Board will vote tonight on a school redistricting plan that has pitted neighbor against neighbor and demonstrated an unacceptable level of institutional arrogance toward parents and taxpayers. Such a flawed process cannot possibly produce a fair outcome. School board members should reject all three options on the table until the plan’s serious shortcomings are corrected.
The Western Boundary Redistricting Study was skewed from the beginning. In an attempt to reverse declining enrollment at Reston’s South Lakes High School, the study looked at various ways to shift students from five nearby high schools, curiously leaving out overcrowded Langley, whose boundary directly abuts South Lakes. Fairfax County Public Schools staff never explained why neighborhoods that have endured five previous redistrictings in nine years were in the study, but Langley was not.
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Then there was the appalling spectacle of a camcorder-wielding taxpayer being forcibly removed by police officers from two “town meetings,” a “public hearing” in which some members of the public were not allowed to talk, and last week’s cancellation of a scheduled public work session so school board members could meet privately to prepare for tonight’s vote. All of which flew in the face of a Citizens’ Enrollment Project Task Force recommendation that FCPS exert “extra effort” to make the boundary study process as transparent and accountable to the public as possible. If anything, it’s beenless transparent and less accountable than usual, and that’s saying something.
Why is FCPS pushing so insistently for redistricting in the face of sustained public opposition? In this case, past may be prologue. In 2006, a third of Northern Virginia’s widely hailed public schools failed to make annual yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind initiative. Although South Lakes was not among them, the school has been losing a hundred students a year; and Reston’s changing demographics do not bode well for the future. Last year, FCPS demanded an exemption from NCLB requirements that 95 percent of all students be tested in English, including those in the United States for three consecutive years, but quietly backed down when the U.S. Department of Education threatened to withhold $17 million in federal funds. Since school boundaries can be gerrymandered just like political ones to achieve desired results, it appears there is much more behind this latest attempt to transfer hundreds of children to South Lakes than school board members are letting on.
