Saturday, March 2, 2013
Board members wrestle with community surveys, system expansion as they give nod to staff study, which will be completed in June.
The Fairfax County School Board is continuing to weigh what advanced academics mean in the system, authorizing a scope of study this week that it hopes will provide better information about how and where services are delivered now — both in the county and across the country — and how that might improve in the future. The study was spurred by a discussion last fall on whether the school system should expand its Advanced Academic Program Centers, a move many vocal parents said needed further analysis and community dialogue. While the board voted in January to expand the centers to three additional elementary schools this fall, to relieve overcrowding, they stopped short of expanding across about a dozen and a half more elementary and middle …
Friday, November 30, 2012
In final Fairfax County Public Schools outreach meeting about proposed AAP changes, parents tell officials the process seemed too rushed.
At a meeting Thursday night about a proposed restructuring of Fairfax County Public Schools' Advanced Academic Centers, parents echoed concerns shared by county parents at other input meetings this week: how administrators would ensure the quality of new centers, if the proposal was really a long-term solution for overcrowding and whether schools have enough room to handle an influx of students, among others. But the feeling among parents that the system had already made a decision to restructure the county’s Level IV program in time for the 2013 school year — that they'd been cut out of the process — at times seemed to overwhelm issues within the plan itself. Though school officials reiterated during a brief presentation Thursday that …
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Fairfax County Public School community meetings come after school board members, parents say plan seemed a "done deal."
As Fairfax County Public Schools looks to add more Advanced Academic Program Centers and address overcrowding at some that already exist, it is reaching out to parents and community members impacted by a potential shift — an outreach put in place after parents and some school board members claimed the system was moving forward without a proper engagement process and the restructuring was a "done deal." The primary focus of the meetings is "a readiness check to see if individual schools and their parents are ready for this change for the coming school year, or want to defer the change to the 2014-15 school year," school spokesman John Torre said wrote in an email to Patch. Students in grades 3 through 8 are placed into Advanced Academic …
