Schools seek relief over BRAC
By James Cullum
The chair of the Fairfax County School Board sees only three options: the school board can do nothing, it can plead with members of Congress to force the Army to act, or Fairfax County Public Schools can sue the Army.These three measures are being deliberated because some in the school system do not trust the accuracy of the Army's student projections. The Army says that around 265 new students are expected to come to southern Fairfax County when 19,000 defense employees are relocated to Fort Belvoir and the Engineer Proving Ground.
Fairfax County Public Schools representatives fear that other Army projections, specifically the 3,248 new students projected last June, may or may not be closer to the truth.
“We have to get the Army's attention if they are not going to listen to us. If the Army tells us they did the study accurately, and they say that the mitigations are our problem, that's not how communities work and not what our citizens want,” said school board chairman Dan Storck.
Southern Fairfax County is home to many schools that are already at or over capacity. Trying to plan for an unknown number of incoming students is perplexing, Storck said, especially when it can cost upwards of $77 million to be able to successfully absorb more than 3,000 new students.
Army spokesmen contend that most of the employees whose jobs are moving to the area already live in the region and will not move, so the impact on schools will be minimal.
Their argument was bolstered by an independent study commissioned last year by the Northern Virginia Workforce Investment Board, which concluded that “southern Fairfax can expect an additional 50 children.”
An Army report released last summer said that in an extreme scenario, “Fairfax County and Prince William County would be expected to receive the highest number of children. Fairfax County would receive an estimated 3,258 school age children ... which would be about a two-percent increase over the current total FCPS student enrollment of about 166,500.”
Those figures were based on the unlikely projection of 50 percent of incoming employees moving to southern Fairfax County to follow their jobs, said Belvoir spokesman Don Carr.
“The issue is an emotional one,” Carr said, but, “If you agree that most of the incoming employees already live here, their kids are already in schools here, how is this a BRAC issue?”
Carr contends that it is county zoning decisions of where to build housing, rather than the location of jobs, that affects the number of students in each school.
Despite these points, the school board and staff largely distrust the accuracy of the Army's figures, which have been different in various Army reports on the defense worker shift. Also not evaluated in the Army's estimates is the potential impact of support contractors moving to the area because of the base realignment.
The problem of a rising student population in southern Fairfax County “is going to increase every year, from now to 2011 and beyond, and people are making decisions to move to Fairfax County right now based upon where their jobs are going to be,” Storck said.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the school system has “no money,” Storck said, with about $2 billion in unfunded construction needs.
According to Superintendent Jack Dale, board members and staff have informally made plans to make their own assessment of the impact of the base realignment on schools.
There is not yet a timeline for such a study, but “If our own analysis says we will receive X number of students, then we will go to the federal government to receive funding to mitigate that impact,” Dale said.