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Superintendent to Present Boundary Change Recommendation

by Katie Pyzyk | March 21, 2013 at 2:00 pm | 1,398 views | 25 Comments

Arlington Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Patrick Murphy will present his boundary change recommendation at tonight’s School Board meeting.

The recommended changes are detailed in a memo that also lists two alternative plans. The intent is to ease school overcrowding and to assign students to a new elementary school on the Williamsburg Middle School campus. The shuffle will affect students at seven elementary schools in North Arlington — Ashlawn, Glebe, Jamestown, McKinley, Nottingham, Taylor and Tuckahoe.

The major changes will involve moving around 900 students in the following ways:

Reassign 67 students from McKinley to Ashlawn
Reassign 56 students from Glebe to McKinley
Reassign 164 students from Jamestown to the new school at Williamsburg
Reassign 71 students from Taylor to Jamestown
Reassign 347 students from Nottigham to the new school at Williamsburg
Reassign 146 students from Tuckahoe to Nottingham
Reassign 49 students from Taylor to the new school at Williamsburg

“We went through a process of community meetings starting this past fall. There was lots of input and lots of options,” said APS Transition Facilities Planning Consultant Meg Tuccillo. “The superintendent examined the input he received, and the need to address capacity, and determined that this recommendation met that need.”

The plan also includes recommendations for grandfathering that would also need to be approved by the School Board. The ideas especially apply to fifth graders so they don’t have to move for their final year of elementary school. Siblings of fifth graders also would not have to move immediately. The grandfathering recommendations are as follows:

Rising fifth graders and concurrently enrolled younger siblings (grades K-4 as of June 2015) may choose to remain at their current school for the 2015-16 school year only. Transportation will continue for current bus riders for that year.
A student attending either Immersion School, in grades K-4 as of June 2015, who resides in a planning unit being moved from one Immersion School group to another Immersion School group, may remain at their current Immersion School through fifth grade with transportation provided by APS.
A student attending Arlington Science Focus in grades K-4 as of June 2015, who resides in a planning unit being moved to the New Elementary School #1, may remain at ASFS through fifth grade with transportation provided by APS.

APS reports that its staff has participated in more than 40 community meetings since the beginning of the boundary changing process. Two additional public meetings will take place in April, and the School Board is scheduled to give a final vote on May 16. If approved at that time, the changes will go into effect for the 2015-2016 school year. An exception would be made for students reassigned to McKinley. Those students would be delayed a year and instead would switch schools in time for the 2016-2017 school year, when McKinley’s expansion is expected to be completed.

DeportEmAll

Stand by for combat…
- Not this time
  
  There shouldn’t be much. The option chosen achieves the criteria as defined by parents and agreed to by the school board far better than the other options. And, there really isn’t much to quibble with.
  There’s lots about the overall process that was screwy, but based on what they had to work with they did the best they could.
  - Done with this charade
    
    That’s because those of us who didn’t scream loud enough realize its a losing battle. There’s no point voicing our opinions yet again. No one is listening despite their assurances that it really isn’t who yells loudest. We all know it is.
    - ??
      
      What changes would you make that would make Option B more reasonable. This is actually one that I submitted almost to the T because it fit all the parameters most closely.
Good start, but ….

These efforts only solve half the problem.

The school board and superintendent have been slowly making progress in their efforts to ease overcrowding at the elementary school level, but they’ve done little about overcrowding for the middle schools and high schools. All this new construction for grades K-5 won’t ease overcrowding until 2015, and by then many students will have moved on to secondary schools, which are projected to be just as overcrowded as the elementary schools. The board needs to direct the superintendent to address overcrowding for grades 6-12 by adding capacity in any way possible.
- Guest
  
  Well that’s better than not solving any of the problem.
  
  I’m sure there are other ways to split this up, but I can’t see anything really odd. Except maybe the kids from around Harrison and Patrick Henry go to Nottingham after this. But they were going to Tuckahoe before, so that’s kind of odd to begin with.
  
  I’m kind of sad to see the block I grew up in taken out of Nottingham (1701), but that’s life I guess. They can take down the school zone crossing signals for Williamsburg and Ohio.
Garden City

Let the parental screaming begin….
Just a start

I think it’s good that they are moving forward, but I agree that the middle schools need to be adressed soon! I expect redistricting coming, as well, b/c they can’t add on to Swanson.
- Frenchie
  
  I still think that the only reasonable address of the middle school challenge is to convert H-B back to Stratford and build a brand new non-traditional facility for H-B. Since H-B, as a true alternative program, doesn’t have athletic teams, it doesn’t need all that land. It will never happen, but I think that’s a grave mistake.
Good job APS!

APS got it right. Dr. Murphy recommended the appropriate option- hopefully the school board will accept his recommendation with no changes.

The first two recommended options were bad for a variety of reasons. At the meeting in late Feburary, they listened to the input of the 300-500 parents at the meeting and developed a third recommendation (Recommendation B), that is simply the best from a standpoint of the most important criteria– proximity (it keeps walkers walking at Glebe and Taylor rather than busing them), as well as alignment (none of the moves are counter to the current middle school boundaries).

An added bonus is that in no case are less than 49 students moving to a different school. The other options had groups as small as 10-20 students being split off to a different school where they would know no one. With 50 kids minimum moving, there’s a much stronger likelihood that impacted students will have at least a few friends at their new school.

At the end of the day Option B likely costs APS a few hundred thousand less in transportation costs than the original recommended option, and frankly I can’t think of a criteria upon which the original two options are better than the option the Superintendent recommended.
- Done with this charade
  
  Obviously a Glebe parent who screamed a lot. This whole process was abysmal. How much time and $$ did his staff spend to have their ideas totally ignored? He obviously had a plan going into this process. Why not tell us upfront and we won’t waste out time next time around?
  - Reality check
    
    Whose ideas were ignored? Why would he let his staff come up with several other plans that made even less sense if he was rigging the process. This is the best solution withing the parameters. Should choice schools be put on the table? Sure. Would the process have been better if Taylor’s goofily shaped district were fixed? Sure. But if you are trying to have tight proximity, which 46% of parents who responded to the survey wanted, this is by far the best solution given the parameters they operated under.
- Skeptical
  
  Dr. Murphy, is that you??
  - Good job APS!
    
    Nah, I can’t stand the guy. Far too smarmy for me. But for once he got it right.
- Hope
  
  Actually, they are moving Tuckahoe/Swanson kids to Nottingham. Nottingham didn’t feed into Swanson before. They are going to need to change that or they will have Swanson walkers being bussed to Williamsburg.
APS Parent

The best of three bad choices. The school board hamstrung the planning process by not allowing the “Choice schools” to be looked at. The process ended up pitting neighborhoods against themselves. However, there is an over-crowning issue, and if the school board was serious, they would have made all the options available.
New School Parent

This seems like a reasonable compromise for the Taylor and Glebe walker parents that were trying to hold the whole thing hostage. I’ll casually note the irony that the schools that will be at highest capacity are those that complained the loudest and caused changes from the original plans. You can’t even the numbers and satisfy the desire for proximity.

Interesting result on grandfathering too. I think that’s the most reasonable, but it had few proponents during the group sessions I attended.

Now on to the next five years and the middle school wars. Madison or Bust!
- Reality check
  
  How were the walker parents holding anything hostage? Do you think it’s worth an extra few hundred thousand to bus several hundred more students, when there are other solutions that don’t add those buses? Maybe they can spend that extra money to make New School even nicer instead, rather than wasting putting more buses on the road in N. Arlington for no reason.
  - New School Parent
    
    Reality check? At the mid-point of the process, there were several comments that the process should be shelved until choice schools could be reexamined. The schedule is already tight, so that would have derailed a 2015 opening, pushing Nottingham and Tuckahoe to 1 in 3 kids in trailers. I call that trying to hold it hostage. And who are these “several hundred more students” that were going to be bussed? The PU changes for potential walkers amounts to fewer than 150 kids, but some of those are already on a bus and/or are adjacent to another PU that is on a bus, minimizing effect and cost.
    
    In the end, I think recommended solution was primarily concerned with easing overcrowding – even above proximity. For the final solution, I think the Board and Super did a good job of trying to accommodate parents who indicated they’d rather face a bit more crowding pressure than change schools. In my mind, the process worked, even if it wasn’t pleasant to go through.
info81

Looks good to me and I live in N Arlington with a kid going to school. I would still like to see ATS and/or science focus moved to the south but that is not going to happen.
- sandy
  
  Oh, the rent I’m paying to be in ASFS school zone… I would love for it to be moved to the south.. LOL But you’re right, it’s absolutely not going to happen. Too many of the communities “esteemed” have children there… including a school board member and the US secretary of education.
- Novanglus
  
  Moving ASFS south doesn’t solve anything — all those kids already live in over-capacity school zones.
  
  But they could create a second ATS at the Claremont building, moving the immersion program to the new school next to Carlin Springs. Because of the east-west immersion school split, Claremont is under capacity and Key is over capacity — parents in NW Arlington don’t want to send their kids all the way to Fairlington. But if the “west” immersion school were in a more central location, it would attract more kids from the crowded schools.
  - emanon
    
    re: claremont. My daughter is in 2nd grade there, and for Kindergarten was 29 on the waitlist (she got in a week after school started). they have 6 kindergartens there this year and are planning for 6 again next year. Any under-enrollment is certainly dissolving as I write. And Claremont is not in Fairlington. Not that it’s terribly convenient to North Arlington where it is, but it IS closer than Fairlington. That said, I’d welcome the move! Would make it a whole lot closer! Alas, not in the cards.
Confused Parent

This map is different from either of the two options that were featured in the February ArlNow article: http://www.arlnow.com/2013/02/26/boundary-change-options-down-to-final-two/
For example, 1590 and 1590 are changed, as are 1410 and 1420. Is the one shown here (“Variation b”) the main option or just a backup, as the name implies?
That PDF link in the article isn’t working. Maybe we all crashed the APS server.
willy

This looks like its as good as its going to get. We have to make decisions and move forward. I was involved with this issue during 2004-2005. We at the community level and at the school board level punted then and it has only gotten worse.

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