Dec. 12 was a graduation day of sorts for Arlington’s two departing School Board members.
“Your work has made a real difference,” Board chair Mary Kadera told Cristina Diaz-Torres and David Priddy at the meeting, the body’s final one of the year.
Schools
Arlington School Board members Thursday night (Dec. 12) voted unanimously to implement a bell-to-bell ban on student use of phones in county schools starting Jan. 6.
“Our schools are places of learning,” Superintendent Francisco Durán said just before the vote, saying his recommendation was “a policy that will protect that instructional space.”
A bullet was found in an elementary school classroom yesterday afternoon and it’s unclear how it got there.
Police were called to Arlington Traditional School, at 1030 N. McKinley Road, around 12:45 p.m. Monday after a student reportedly found a bullet in a fourth-grade classroom. So far, the investigation has not revealed where the bullet came from.
A 17-year-old Arlington high school student has been arrested and charged with bringing a loaded gun to school Monday.
The incident happened at Arlington Community High School, which is currently located on Fairfax Drive in Ballston. The school was placed on lockdown after police say a security guard spotted the gun in a student’s backpack.
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With the deadline for School Board action looming, two major advocacy groups are pressing for a blanket ban on student phone use during the instructional day in Arlington.
The Arlington Education Association (AEA) and Arlington Parents for Education (APE) have sent a joint letter to School Board members and Superintendent Francisco Durán, seeking the more restrictive of two options currently being considered.
Arlington’s school system has 13 days built into the 2024-25 schedule to use as snow days or for other unexpected closures.
Whether they will be needed is an open question.
Already nearly at a record high, student enrollment in Falls Church City Public Schools is expected to grow consistently in coming decades.
With 2,711 students as of Sept. 30, the five-school district is currently just 10 students shy of its record 2,721 students in 2016, according to a recent report to the Virginia Department of Education. The report predicts enrollment will pass the 3,000 mark in 2027, before growing to about 3,250 in 2040 and 3,430 in 2050.
A proposal to restrict access to cellphones at Arlington high schools remains up for debate as a School Board decision deadline approaches.
With the decision date set for Dec. 12, Board members have one major decision left to make related to high schools:
Three public high schools in Arlington are stepping up security measures after a trespassing incident at Yorktown last week.
Starting this week, students at Yorktown, Wakefield and Washington-Liberty high schools will need to show a pre-approved ID to staff members to enter school buildings. Accepted forms include school-issued photo IDs, StudentVue accounts and government-issued IDs such as a driver’s license.
Rather than a frontal assault against it, Arlington School Board members may try to win a delay in implementation of the state’s new school-accountability regimen.
School leaders plan to ask the General Assembly to intervene and postpone the Virginia Department of Education’s new School Performance and Support Framework, a two-pronged evaluation and ranking system that is replacing the previous accreditation process.
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Arlington School Board members in mid-November will consider a major overhaul to how the school system tackles boundary adjustments.
If adopted, school leaders will start looking at boundaries on a two-year cycle rather than the current five years, and will apply a new set of criteria to guide how to make them.
Leaders of Arlington Public Schools are getting an early start on health-insurance renewal, while bringing employees into the conversation from the very beginning.
The goal, Superintendent Francisco Durán told School Board members Tuesday (Oct. 29), is to do better than in 2023, when confusion over a change in health-care providers and poor communication with the rank-and-file about it sparked outrage and led to an auditor’s investigation.