The Connection

Arlington Public Schools keep getting bigger. In 10 years, APS is expecting to see more than 30,000 students enroll from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade by 2023.

To meet the demand for more seats, APS has been in the process of getting its Capital Improvement Plan — or More Seats for More Students campaign off the ground for the past two years — a plan that is looking to find additional classroom space for the growing number of students coming into the county’s public schools.

Over the next 10 years, the rising number of elementary school students from Arlington’s 24 elementary schools will start to trickle down to the county’s middle and high schools that are not yet big enough to keep up with this growth.

The more than $420 million 2014 CIP in the works is considering nine different plans that will add about 700 additional seats at the pre-k to kindergarten grade levels, 1,300 more middle school seats and 2,200 high school seats. These 2014 projections of seats needed however could potentially change over time.

“There is a solution in here,” said APS Superintendent Patrick Murphy during a May 8 school board meeting. “And we can work toward that solution … but that’s going to need to be a continuing dialogue here before we arrive at final adoption.”

By June 17, the School Board will need to vote on where they will put all of these new students. But APS officials and the School Board say that timing and funding are the biggest challenges they face moving forward that may affect the CIP process when the seats are needed the most.

In May, the superintendent and his staff presented their list of recommended and preferred options for adding more seats at the kindergarten through 12th grade levels to the School Board.

The superintendent’s preferred options that he left the School Board to consider are: E1 — to build a new elementary school somewhere in south Arlington along with a renovation and addition at Abington Elementary School to make room for about 861 students, M1 — that would build a new 1,300 seat urban middle school on a property along Wilson Boulevard and the last and only option at the high school level, that would add more seats at all of the APS high schools, in addition to the H1 option—that would renovate and add seats at the Career Center and renovate Washington and Lee High School to add 1,600 more high school seats.

Right now, the School Board is in the process of weighing all of the nine total k-12 options that are on the table, which include the superintendent’s preferred options.

“This is our chance to build something great,” said Kris Marceca, an Arlington native and mother of students at Taylor Elementary, H-B Woodlawn and Yorktown High School, who is beginning to feel the effects of overcrowding and will continue to as her youngest child moves through the school system.

Although there is a need to add more seats at all grade levels, one of the greatest concerns among parents and APS staff is finding a solution to overcrowding at APS’ middle schools where current facilities have half of the capacity than APS’ current high school facilities to hold students.

Marceca says the School Board needs more time to consider the middle school options, and is appalled that the county is willing to accept a single middle school that is big enough to hold 1,300 students.

“I think that it’s a short-term crises management fix for something that we should have been talking about a long time ago,” said Marceca.

Taylor Elementary mother of two, Alexandra Voigt, agrees that a middle school on the Wilson site of that size should be built on a bigger property.

“I personally want them to put the round peg in the round hole,” said Voigt.

Voigt thinks that although the Wilson site is a feasible option, the location of the site is not the right space for middle school aged students, who walk or are driven to school.

After the superintendent made his recommended list of options, the School Board began narrowing down the set of options before their June 17 vote. Following the last public hearing on the CIP at the end of May, the School Bboard ranked the current options and made a list of alternative options according to their rank against the superintendent’s preferred options.

Out of the eight options that the School Board ranked as the highest, their top two at the elementary and high school levels were consistent with the superintendent’s preferred options. But ranked the M4 — or adding more seats at Williamsburg, Gunston, Swanson and Jefferson higher than the superintendent’s preferred M1 Wilson Boulevard option and over M5 — an option that would renovate and add more seats at Reed to house H-B Woodlawn program, move the Children’s School to Madison site, and renovate the current H-B Woodlawn site at Stratford to construct a new 1,300-seat middle school.

But APS’ current bonding capacity — or, the maximum amount of funding available based on credit — does not allow them to build fast enough to meet the demand of seats needed for the growing number of students.

“We have budgetary constraints that we have to work within,” said School Board Vice Chair James Lander. “We have a certain amount of seats but we have to stay within our debt capacity limit.”

With the current bonding capacity that APS has, they can build the seats that are needed, but not within the timeframe that they are needed the most — an obstacle that have many APS parents worried.

“We have enough bonding capacity … we don’t have it in the years that we most need to bring the seats on board,” said School Board Chair Abby Raphael.

Parents like Taylor Elementary mother Eve Reed, whose children will also be directly affected by overcrowding throughout their APS experience, is concerned about where APS will put all of the students before the need for seats gets bigger.

“I don’t think they’ve thought about the long-term costs,” said Reed.

While other parents like Nathan Zee whose children will soon make their way through APS starting from Kindergarten, hopes that the School Board will make the best decision, so that no new issues or additional options may delay the process.

Zee hopes “when the recommendations get put down in ink, that there isn’t a last minute issue that comes up due to coordination that didn’t occur that should have between the School Board and County Board.”

The School Board is scheduled to meet three more times before voting on their final option by June 17.