Wakefield Chapel Parents Unhappy with Annandale Study Recommendation

A group of parents in the Wakefield Chapel community are speaking out to keep their children at .

A preliminary recommendation, from the Fairfax County Public Schools Facilities and Transportation Department, proposes having students in the area attend instead of .

Currently, half the students at Wakefield Forest Elementary School (WFES) go to for 7th grade. Poe feeds into Annandale High School (AHS).

Under the recommendation, all WFES students would attend , which feeds into Woodson High School, eliminating the split feed currently in place. The proposed recommendation is intended to help relieve overcrowding at AHS by using the capacity available at Woodson.

AHS’s Diverse Community

“We just desperately want our children to be part of this community,” said Kathy Ryan, an AHS alumnus. Ryan’s daughter is a rising sophomore at AHS, and Ryan also has a rising 8th grader who would be in the first class of former WFES students to attend Woodson if the boundary recommendation is approved.

Some Wakefield Chapel-area residents whose children attend AHS say their kids enjoy the community at AHS, a school known for its diverse population. In 2009-2010, Annandale's student body was 30.27 percent Hispanic, 28.57 percent white, 22.94 percent Asian, 14.63 percent African-American and 3.59 percent “other.” Many of the students come from different ethnic backgrounds, reflective of the Annandale community itself, which is . That exposure is something the parents believe their kids will lose if they attend Woodson instead.

“These kids are not just friends; they’re learning from each other,” said Laura McLean, also an AHS alumnus. “Kids at Annandale High School experience a global perspective to their education that they can’t get anywhere else. That’s also happening at the middle school level at Poe.” One of McLean’s kids graduated from AHS in 2009 and is now attending Virginia Commonwealth University and she has another child at Poe who is a rising 8th grader.

The school’s diversity is a big part of the reason why Wakefield Chapel neighborhood parents want their children to attend AHS, but it is also part of the reason some parents and students believe others might be happy with the change.

In an editorial published in March of this year by the AHS student newspaper, The A-Blast, Co-Editor-in-Chief Emily Fruchterman, wrote: “While many are loathe to admit it, some fear our diversity. Going to AHS certainly has been an eye-opening experience; while I was born and raised right here in Annandale, I now know people from every part of the world, each of whom brings a different perspective to the table. Students at AHS may not always get along, but we’ve learned one of life’s most important lessons—we do not judge each other based on our accents, wealth, or the color of our skin, but on the people we truly are.”

Jan Kaplan’s son, Ben Wolfenstein, AHS class of 2011, wrote about how much he enjoyed the diversity at AHS in one his college application essays. "The diversity [at AHS] makes the International Baccalaureate program, with the goal of creating a student who is more cognizant of the world, more international than was probably ever imagined… and I am lucky to have had the opportunity to learn in that sort of environment," Wolfenstein wrote. Kaplan and her family have lived in the Wakefield area for 13 years.

Overcrowded, Over Capacity

According to Emily Slough, president of the AHS Parent-Teacher-Student Association, Wakefield Chapel students comprised approximately 6 percent of the 2010-2011 AHS population (roughly 170 students out of 2600). By 2016 they are expected to comprise 5 percent of the total population (140-150 students out of 2704), creating a 5 percent reduction in AHS's overall enrollment in 2016. In exchange, the parents said the kids are shifted from an overcrowded high school to an overcrowded middle school; Frost Middle School is projected to operate at 123 percent capacity if all WFES students attend Frost. [See PDF]

“Why is it acceptable to move us from one high school to another when there’s already a modular at Annandale High School and then pay for $3 million to put one at Frost to accommodate us?” said McLean. (The $3 million figure McLean cites comes from the Facilities and Transportation recommendation document, available here.)

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Correction: A previous version of this story indicated there would be a 2 percent change in population at AHS with the loss of Wakefield Chapel students. The change is 5 percent. The story has been updated to reflect this change.