Back to the Boundary Drawing Board

Both School Plans Rejected at Meeting

By Michael Birnbaum (Contact)

Originally published at 9:14 a.m., April 29, 2009
Updated at 1:27 a.m., May 2, 2009

A controversy over how to redraw high school attendance boundaries in central Loudoun County is back in the hands of the school district's planning staff and probably won't be resolved until the fall.

The Loudoun School Board alternated between two boundary plans during several hours of discussion Tuesday night, before voting well past midnight to reject both options and send the matter back to staff members for further review.

"Both of these plans are so flawed . . . there is no need for us to make a decision now," said School Board member Tom Marshall (Leesburg).

Boundaries must be changed for the 2010-11 school year, when Tuscarora High School is scheduled to open in Leesburg. Loudoun School Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III asked that a decision be made by the fall.

In the coming months, a panel of county supervisors and School Board members will discuss future high school construction in Ashburn and Dulles, and planning staff members are likely to wait until the talks are over before drawing up another boundary proposal.

The joint panel's work will make it clearer whether a new Ashburn area high school will be built in the next few years, a project designed to relieve crowding at schools east of Leesburg. Several School Board members spoke of their desire for a new school at Tuesday's meeting.

The boundary issue has sparked tension between the Lansdowne and Ashburn Farm communities, with one of them likely to be shifted from Stone Bridge High School to another high school when Tuscarora opens. Although boundary changes are nothing new in Loudoun, a switch in high schools can hit hard.

"I went to high school with my sisters, and I would like my children to have the same privilege," Ashburn Farm resident Cathy Dorman said at Tuesday's meeting.

Dorman's older child has attended Stone Bridge. But under the plan that was recommended by the school administration's staff, her younger child, and many other Ashburn Farm residents, would have been sent to Briar Woods, even though some of those students live within walking distance of Stone Bridge. Lansdowne residents, who live a few miles from Stone Bridge, would have remained within its attendance boundaries.

Heritage High School, which has 1,800 students — 200 more than its capacity — would have seen its enrollment plummet to 1,100 in 2010 under the staff plan, and Loudoun County High's enrollment would have dropped by more than 300 as students from both schools moved north to Tuscarora.

Stone Bridge's enrollment would have remained about the same, and Briar Woods' enrollment would have jumped by about 450.

The board defeated that proposal by a vote of 4 to 4, with one abstention.

Marshall and board member Thomas E. Reed (At Large) offered a competing plan that would have split Lansdowne students between Tuscarora and Heritage, moving them out of Stone Bridge. It also would have moved a few students from Stone Bridge to Briar Woods. But the board voted 5 to 3 against that alternative, with one abstention. Reed and Marshall ultimately voted against their own proposal, saying they wanted to devote more time to studying the issue.

Reed said after the meeting that another option to address crowding might be to place trailers at Stone Bridge or Broad Run High School, or at both schools. He acknowledged the difficulty of moving students from one school to another.

"There is so much loyalty to Stone Bridge that some of the kids from Lansdowne, all the way down to the toll road, have dreamed their entire lives that they'd be going" to the school, he said.

The board made some adjustments in high school feeder patterns in Leesburg. Students from Smart's Mill Middle School will attend Tuscarora High in 2010, while the high school assignments for students from Harper Park and J. L. Simpson middle schools will remain unchanged.

In western Loudoun, boundaries will shift for Hamilton, Lincoln, Emerick, Round Hill, Mountain View and Hillsboro elementary schools to accommodate the fall opening of Kenneth W. Culbert Elementary School.

In Ashburn, some students from Legacy and Mill Run elementary schools will be shifted to Creighton's Corner Elementary School.

In southeastern Loudoun, some students will shift from crowded Mercer Middle School to Stone Hill Middle School .

The board voted down a proposal from Reed to shift students within Leesburg\ area elementary schools in order to balance populations of ESOL students. Those boundaries will remain the same.

It also voted down a proposal from board member Priscilla Godfrey (Blue Ridge) to shift students to under-capacity Middleburg Elementary School, which along with three other small schools in the western part of the county had been threatened with closure because of budget concerns.

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