Virginia’s largest school district is set to vote on a proposal that would change attendance boundaries for the first time in decades.
The vote Thursday comes after Fairfax County Public Schools capped a months-long process of reviewing its maps that determine what schools families can attend based on their address. The conversation drew hundreds of comments from residents who had issues with their current school boundaries; were worried that the schools their children were zoned for might change; or simply had ideas about the best way for the district to handle the massive undertaking.
After hours of public comment periods, dozens of meetings and multiple drafts of changes, Fairfax Superintendent Michelle Reid landed on a list of recommended changes that would cause about 1,700 students to move schools, which is less than 1 percent of students in the district.
A public forum on that proposal will be held at 6:15 p.m. on Thursday, before the school board votes on the proposal and how to implement it during its evening meeting, which begins at 7 p.m.
The most recent proposed changes can be found on the district’s website.
School leaders voted in 2024 to begin reviewing the district’s boundaries every five years, a shift they hoped would help better address challenges caused by changing enrollment, growth and renovations. They started examining the current boundaries shortly after the change.
Fairfax serves more than 180,000 students in nearly 200 public schools. It’s home to some of the state’s — and the country’s — most prestigious public schools. The district’s demographics have also changed in recent decades, with a more diverse population and its students speaking more than 200 languages.
The district’s review set out to study how to address systemic issues such as overcrowding and long commute times. It also tried to reduce the number of “attendance islands,” in which a pocket of homes within a neighborhood is zoned for a different school, and “split feeders,” where students within one elementary or middle school are zoned to progress to different schools at the next level.
The aim, school leaders said, was to prioritize those issues while disrupting as few students as possible.
A perfect solution to all of the district’s issues doesn’t exist, leaders emphasized. Decisions to keep students in one school may neglect to resolve outstanding issues at another. An option to solve capacity issues at one school might remove students from their tight-knit neighborhood community in another. Also to consider are the safety of walking paths and the distances that busses have to travel.
“This process wasn’t perfect, and … my recommendations are not perfect,” Reid told the school board at a Jan. 8 meeting. “A goal I think that I have, and I hope we share, is normalizing this conversation around boundaries. It’s really a best practice just to routinely review these. And I feel like we’ve taken some first good steps, and we’ve got, obviously, more work to do.”
Still, the topic drew vast feedback from communities across the district.
In public comment sessions, parents urged leaders not to bend to the loudest groups. Others voiced concerns about the proposals not going far enough to resolve all the challenges identified. Some felt overlooked and left out. Others felt targeted. School officials have identified certain schools and problems for monitoring and later review, saying that this will be an ongoing effort.
Kris Griffin, 52, has two children who were among the affected students in Reid’s first set of proposed changes presented earlier this month. Under that proposal, her children’s zoned school would have moved from Justice High School to Falls Church High School.
When she and her neighbors found out in December that they might be affected by changes, she said they were confused and frustrated. The community, Griffin said, had received little opportunities for feedback until that point.
Griffin’s husband spoke out against the changes earlier this month, during a Jan. 10 hearing that lasted more than three hours.
After the hearing, Reid updated her proposal — including pausing the changes affecting Griffin’s neighborhood and adding them to a list that needed more time for community engagement. The board will revisit the proposal next year, according to the most recent update.
Griffin said she was elated by the decision, but cautioned that it was important for parents to pay attention to the boundary review. Even if a school is not affected today, she said, it could be down the line, like hers might be next year.
“At the end of the day, these are our kids,” Griffin said. “Not lines on a map.”
The post Fairfax County is redrawing school boundaries for the first time in decades appeared first on Washington Post.
