As Fairfax County Public School students arrive today for the first day of the 2012-13 school year, thousands will be welcomed by their new teachers in supposedly “temporary” trailer classrooms. FCPS officials cite a projected 2 percent increase in student enrollment this year to explain why, even with the opening of two new schools in South County and Annandale, the school system has not been able to keep pace with demand for permanent instructional space.
This explanation would be more credible had FCPS not been saying the same thing for decades. Teachers at Herndon Middle School, for example, have been teaching children in “temporary” trailers for 28 years. After nearly three decades, not only can these outlying temporary structures no longer be considered a short-term solution, many of the trailers that have been in use for a decade or more are literally falling apart at the seams from age and wear.
School officials trotted out the exact same excuse — an unexpected surge in enrollment — two years ago to explain why 713 trailers were needed at 135 schools — hundreds more than were in use in 2007. This year, instead of going down, the number of trailers at Fairfax schools has dramatically risen to an astounding 867, with 578 in use at county elementary schools, 82 at middle schools and 207 at various high schools. How many times does enrollment have to increase before it stops being a surprise?
Even when FCPS builds new schools, it still doesn’t get the capacity right. Westfield High School, which was designed for 2,500 students, was already overcrowded just three years after it opened. And Westfield itself was considered the “solution” to the extensive overcrowding problems at nearby Centreville and Chantilly high schools.
With access to a wealth of demographic data literally at their fingertips — including birth records, real estate transactions, residential construction starts, and employment and unemployment figures — school planners should be able to anticipate the number of students that the county will need to accommodate in permanent classrooms for years into the future. But even though the school system has a $155 million annual construction budget, it doesn’t seem to be making much of a dent in current school overcrowding — and even less progress predicting how much more classroom space will be needed in the future. Fairfax County School Board members should start asking why.
