The Loudoun County School Board stepped back from a proposal that would have concentrated children from a largely poor, Hispanic neighborhood into two schools after hearing emotional testimony from parents who accused leaders of wanting to segregate their children.
Tasked with redrawing boundaries to ease overcrowding in Leesburg schools, the board voted last Tuesday night to move forward with an alternative plan that maintains the current policy of economic integration in the wealthy county, dispersing children from a cluster of downtown townhomes and apartment complexes to five schools.
The plan also shifts many students across Leesburg to schools closer to their homes, part of a compromise for board members who prioritized sending the county’s children to schools in their own neighborhoods. But nearly all of the children who live in the downtown Leesburg community — where 84 percent qualify for free and reduced-price meals — will be able to stay at the schools they attend. The failed proposal would have moved all of those students to different schools.
Board member Beth Huck said she thought about what she would want for her own child: an economically integrated school or a neighborhood school that drew children from the surrounding community. In the end, she said, she would want both.
“I want community schools, and I want diversity,” Huck said. “That being said, I’m looking to compromise.”
Huck said she thought the plan represented an acceptable balance of both philosophies. The new approach “helps move us in the direction of community-based schools while maintaining a balance so the communities can support them,” Huck said.
The plan passed 7 to 2 after an hour of testimony from parents, many of whom argued that the plan to create two high-poverty schools in their community was a form of segregation.
Parents from the downtown neighborhood, who delivered comments in Spanish with the help of interpreters, said they did not want their children to be moved from their current schools, where they learn alongside the county’s more affluent children. The parents called the proposal to create high-poverty schools “discrimination” and worried that the county would not deliver on its promise of providing extra resources to aid the two schools, where more than half of the children would come from impoverished households and nearly half would be English-language learners.
“I don’t want the kids to be divided,” Griselda Fuentes, whose daughter attends Frances Hazel Reid Elementary, said tearfully. “This is going to cause great stress on our community.”
Parents who supported the plan, however, have expressed concerns that their children were being shortchanged because teachers were spending so much of their time and energy helping high-needs children. These parents also said it was unfair for at-risk children to be bused far from their homes.
“Why are we treating over 1,300 at-risk students differently than the other 4,700 students in Leesburg?” said Stephanie DeWan, who has three children at Evergreen Mills Elementary. “Not all students are being treated equally or fairly.”
The current enrollment map was created with the aim of balancing the number of at-risk children sent to each school. It means that the children in the dense downtown neighborhood, home to a cluster of apartment buildings and townhouses, are sent to four schools, and some travel three miles on school buses to get there.
In February, as the board discussed how to move students to relieve overcrowding at one elementary school, they pondered reversing economic integration and proposed moving toward a model that prioritized sending children to schools closest to them.
The proposal that would have created high-poverty schools set off an intense debate about the best way to serve children needing extra attention. The county boasts some of the highest test scores in the state, but its disadvantaged students have sometimes fared worse than the state average on standardized tests, forcing county officials to reexamine how they serve their most vulnerable students while their affluent peers thrive.
Officials have proposed adding teachers and staff to elementary schools with high rates of at-risk children, even when those schools do not qualify for federal funds. The district also hired a math coordinator to help close the achievement gap in that subject, where it is especially acute.
“I feel strongly that we would have been able to provide a better education for at-risk students in a targeted environment,” said board member Debbie Rose (Algonkian), who backed the plan to create two high-poverty schools.
But board members who wanted to maintain economic integration pointed to research showing that it helps disadvantaged students. One study, in Montgomery County, found that poor children who attended economically integrated schools fared better than those who attended high-poverty schools that received extra resources.
Those who supported clustering students in poverty pointed to the success of similar schools in Sterling, Va., where some beat district averages on standardized tests.