Listen to parent demand!
An oversubscribed school or program is a signal
Fairfax County has a unique opportunity on its hands. When the Saudi government stopped funding a private school in the western part of its boundary, the district stepped in to buy the property at what’s being reported as a large discount. The superintendent described it like this:
This new facility is adding 33 acres and 355,000 square feet to the FCPS portfolio complete with athletic fields, parking and circulation, a main building and two multi-purpose buildings, with state-of-the art lab and collaborative work spaces. This acquisition accelerated the opening of the long-promised Western High School (WHS) by at least a decade, and saved the taxpayers around $350m.
This was pretty quick, smart thinking on the district’s part to snap up the property. But now comes the hard part: What to do with it?
The typical operating business would be to just turn it into a normal comprehensive high school. While the district as a whole has been losing students, the western part of the county has been growing. So the easy route is just to slot this new school into the district’s list of high schools and then assign students who live close by. That appears to be where the district is heading after a vote by the school board last night.
And yet… what an opportunity! Fairfax County happens to be home to one of the best public high schools in the country, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (known locally as TJ). Created in 1985, TJ is a magnet school serving Fairfax and other northern Virginia counties. As you might expect given its strong academic outcomes, TJ is extremely popular. Every year it rejects about 80% of the students who apply, and its screening process is so hotly contested that families asked the Supreme Court to weigh in (they declined). Last year, TJ rejected about 2,055 kids1, and the average GPA of all applicants was 3.91.
In other words, Fairfax is home to a super popular school that can’t serve all of the students who want (and deserve) to get in. It should build another one!
Now, ordinarily this would be a big expense and a big hassle, but the school board had an opportunity fall into their lap. By creating a new TJ, they could create a legacy that would last far beyond them. Even better, the district is currently going through a boundary review process so the timing could not be better.
And yet, they’re about to blow it. Instead of thinking creatively, listening to parent demand, and creating a new TJ (or something else?!), they’re going to follow the normal protocol and just assign kids who happen to live nearby.2 Ugh, how lame.
As I wrote earlier this year, “the best time to open a high-quality public school was last year. The second best time is right now.”
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Coincidentally, the new school will also serve about 2,000 students.
The area where the school is located is one of the 1,000 richest in the U.S., with an average home value of $787,899.
Agreed. A same same but different thing happens in NYC: we've got 8 oversubscribed specialized high schools. Every year we're horrified by the severely lopsided racial demographics of the entering class and then proceed to wring our collective hands about standardized tests and gifted & talented programs and privilege and segregated schools and systemic racism & etc. & etc. An obvious answer is always staring us in our face, as you point out here: Just. Open. Another. Specialized. High. School. It's not as if there's some immutable law of physics that will open wide a black hole in the middle of the Central Park if we try to open another specialized high school.
However. There's also a matter of talent, right? There just are not enough talented teachers and administrators to teach our talented kids. I see this in Title I schools around the city that lack enough AP classes for their bright kids. Selective schools notwithstanding, you could walk into ~any~ school, no matter the neighborhood, no matter their graduation rate, no matter how "good" or poor it is and find that 20-25% of their students are bright, honors-grade kids you could spin gold from. I'm not even talking about exceptionally bright kids that College Board and hyper-selective colleges ~used~ to obsess about plucking from the "ghettos"-- no, I mean just your run-of-the-mill, hardworking bright kid who despite their circumstances could eke out a few respectable but trajectory-changing 3s or 4s on a few AP exams.
Yet they never get the opportunity to take an AP history or math course. I cannot be the only educator who despairs at this wasted resource.
So, yes, open up more schools for bright, hardworking kids. But we also need to make sure we have enough bright, hardworking staff.
We have a similar magnet school in Denver Public Schools, also usually rejects most students. Your point has so much common sense.