Arlington County’s new Washington-Lee High School is the only high school in the county that exceeds its enrollment capacity, and it’s stretching at the seams in part because of an honors program that allows students from outside the Washington-Lee school district to enroll in Arlington’s most desirable high school.
Washington-Lee’s International Baccalaureate program is a prestigious honors curriculum for juniors and seniors. But school officials allow students who want to enroll in the IB program to transfer to Washington-Lee as freshmen, a move intended to aid the students’ transition but which also significantly increases the overall number of transfer students attending the already crowded Washington-Lee.
Moreover, if transfer students decide by their junior year at Washington-Lee that they no longer want to take the full IB workload, they do not have to leave the new school. Those students are allowed to remain two more years, until their graduation, as long as they take a drastically reduced number of honors classes — as few as two Advanced Placement or IB courses each year in the junior and senior years.
There are now 211 transfer students participating in the IB program — about 11 percent of Washington-Lee’s total enrollment — and some parents in the Washington-Lee district worry that allowing too many transfer students to attend will make it harder on their children. Sara Hansard, who lives inside the Washington-Lee district, said her daughter, a freshman at the school, has already encountered longer lunch lines, packed school buses and cramped classroom space.
“I hate to see the school system spend still more money, but I think they’re at a point now that they need to consider, if possible, starting IB programs at Yorktown and Wakefield,” Hansard said.
County officials say each of their high school has its own advantages — both Yorktown and Washington-Lee are ranked among the top 100 schools in the nation by Newsweek — but Washington-Lee is the only one offering the IB program, and it’s the only one where students attend a like-new $100 million facility.
Enrollment figures suggest that students who transfer to Washington-Lee are as attracted to the three-year-old facility as they are to the IB courses. Before the new building opened in 2007, about 50 transfer students enrolled in Arlington’s IB program each year. That number doubled when the new school opened, though school administrators capped the number of transfer students it will accept at 84 a year.
Arlington officials have already had to revamp the school after it opened to increase the number of students it could accommodate from about 1,600 to just over 1,900, and there are already plans to bring in mobile classroom trailers as early as next year to make room for booming enrollment.
No one has approached the board about expanding the IB program to all the county’s high schools, said Assistant Superintendent Linda Erdos.
The county did make the transfer policy stricter over the summer to address parents’ concerns so that transfer students now must take three IB classes in each of their last two years at school if they wish to remain at Washington-Lee, though the rule will be grandfathered in. The county is still considering next year’s cap on the number of transfers to the school.
“It’s a shame they don’t offer it at more than just this one high school,” said Phil Klingelhofer, Washington-Lee PTA president. “I am concerned about the effects of overcrowding, but from what I’ve seen, I’m sure that the school and Arlington Public Schools will work together to make sure they have the right limitations set.”
