Staff Editorial

Lainie Singerman
Oakton HS (Oakton, Va.)

Sour grapes over boundaries anger community

A good high school should be diverse. It should have a large enough student population to offer a variety of higher-level courses and electives without being so crowded that access to extra-curricular activities is impaired.

Because many high schools in western Fairfax are projected to approach one of those two extremes soon  stunted course offerings due to under population or strained resources due to over population – the school board is undertaking a boundary study in order to even out student attendance areas. This is a necessary step, and parents and students should be willing to accept reasonable recommendations from the study.

South Lakes will be nearly a thousand students under capacity in 2011 and Chantilly will still be slightly over capacity. In the process of confronting those attendance incongruities, Oakton’s attendance areas will be altered.

This has caused some strong feelings among some parents and students here. The town hall meetings about boundary changes have apparently drawn enormous crowds of angry Herndon parents who want their children to attend Oakton as previously planned.

One main concern of Herndon parents and students is the quality of South Lakes education in comparison to an Oakton education. It’s true that South Lakes’ test scores are lower than Oakton’s, but South Lakes was still among the top public high schools in the Washington Post’s 2005 Challenge Index listing. It was 63rd and Oakton was 15th. Four other Fairfax County schools scored higher than Oakton, but that does not seem to be a cause for anger among parents and students who are in Oakton’s district instead of Langley’s or McLean’s.

For many parents, Oakton’s reputation is the reason they bought homes in certain neighborhoods. They now fear that their housing prices will drop because South Lakes is perceived as being a worse school.

This concern is understandable but irrelevant; houses are investments. School board members are elected officials empowered by the Code of Virginia to adjust school boundary lines as necessary. Their responsibility is the education of students, not the local housing economy.

While it will be unfortunate if boundary changes cause housing prices in Franklin Farms to drop, homeowners everywhere take a risk when they buy their homes.

Another stated goal of the boundary study is to increase socioeconomic diversity at schools in western Fairfax. Although the higher instance of weapons violations and fights at South Lakes is another concern among parents, gang presence at the school will probably decrease with an influx of more affluent Herndon students.

Further, the boundary change will make better use of the country’s material resources. Herndon students’ bus rides will be significantly shorter, thereby conserving fuel and reducing the amount of money the school system must spend on gas. This is another significant perk for a boundary study that hopes to utilize county resources more effectively.

That being said, boundary changes are only acceptable if they are grandfathered so that current high school students do not have to switch schools. Any changes should be applicable beginning with the class of 2012. Some siblings will attend different high schools; this is inconvenient but unavoidable.

Many students and parents are also concerned about the fact that South Lakes does not offer Advanced Placement (AP) classes but instead offers the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. These students could people place to the nearest AP school, but more students actually people placed to South Lakes last year in order to take advantage of their IB program then people placed to Oakton. The IB program is not a worse program than AP; they’re just different. IB students experience a rich curriculum focused on writing skills.

It is the school board’s responsibility neither to watch out for housing prices nor to genuflect before the Washington Post’s Challenge Index. The benefits of sending students to the school closest to them far outweigh the inconvenience of change.