Parents in Fairfax County are frustrated that school board members are showing up infrequently at community meetings about relieving school overcrowding.
“People want to be able to talk to the school board, have that give and take,” said Emily Slough, an Annandale High School parent and liaison to the board for the ad hoc Annandale Regional Planning Study committee. “I would like to see more school board members come to the ad hoc meetings to see what the community talks about.”
The school board in April approved the panel of parent-teacher organizations to examine enrollment at 21 schools to address overcrowding at Annandale High School and Poe Middle School, as well as a potential new elementary school.
Last fall, the board started the Southwestern Boundary Community Meetings to figure out how to relieve elementary school overcrowding across 23 schools.
School board member Tessie Wilson said she was “really disappointed” that just a few board members were attending the meetings.
“You had two nights that you could’ve done it, even if you ran in for half an hour,” she said. “That was huge frustration for me. It’s hard to debrief a board that hasn’t seen the process.”
Fellow school board member Patricia Reed said she was “under the assumption that that was [the community’s] meeting and that we could be there but we weren’t supposed to be engaging in discussions.”
Slough admitted: “It is supposed to be more active listening.”
Kathy Smith, the school board’s Sully District member, said she was concerned that the mere presence of board members would distract the parents.
“The danger when school board members attend meetings is people stop having meetings and [start] trying to talk to board members, and [the discussion] loses its richness,” she said.
But Wilson maintained that without a strong school board presence, misinformation could spread as the plans move forward.
“It was not a question but a blanket statement that a woman made that they could take all the [learning disabled] kids and move them out of the school,” Wilson said as an example. “Everyone around the table then believed it was true.”
Both groups have identified building additions and rezoning — since some schools are over capacity and others are under — as solutions but are still finessing the best strategy.
In the next few weeks, the school board will release more information about cost and potential effects on the schools.
