One Family, Two High Schools, Until Budget Grows

Delay in Building Plans Has Immediate Impact

Here's what the recent years of budget shortfalls mean to the Heller family in the Manassas area: Their youngest son, Michael, 14, can't go to the same high school as his older brothers. He wasn't granted the usually routine transfer request to attend Brentsville District High School in Nokesville because the building is overcrowded, and a new high school meant to relieve the bottlenecks has been postponed until 2011.

Prince William County school officials were forced this year to close Brentsville and Battlefield high schools -- and their Cambridge and information-technology programs -- to rising freshmen who live outside the schools' boundaries. (Students who already transferred can still attend.) The reason: Both schools are, virtually speaking, as packed-in as the North Rail at the Virginia Gold Cup.

Until a new school opens in the nearby Kettle Run area in 2011, families and students will have to wait out the long lunch lines and hallway traffic jams.

"My kids have really liked the Cambridge program," said Heller, 49, whose sons normally would attend Osbourn Park High School near Manassas. "We liked the fact that Cambridge, as opposed to International Baccalaureate, doesn't insist that you excel in all disciplines. It allows you to pick one or two."

Gail Hubbard, the county's supervisor of gifted education and special programs, said that the shutdown of transfers to the two schools is temporary and that the students who requested them were allowed to apply after the deadline to specialized programs at other high schools.

"We've never totally closed a program to transfers before, but we needed to deal with the overcrowding," Hubbard said. "We worked with families as much as we could to find another alternative that would work for them. Obviously, for some families it was a tough thing."

At Brentsville, for example, the school is so crowded that some stairwells are one-way, and students en route to the cafeteria for lunch have to follow a rigid traffic pattern. One hallway intersection is so fearsome that it's been dubbed "the Mixing Bowl."

Hubbard said that the schools will not suffer for a lack of student interest in their most rigorous courses.

Still, those assurances do little to comfort Heller. "The kids who transfer into the Cambridge program at Brentsville help provide the student base for those classes," she said. "My kids have to take Cambridge classes that [school officials] were begging them to take because otherwise they'd have to close them."

Now, Heller said, her family life may soon be completely upended. She explained it bluntly:

"I have four alpha males. I need something that's common between them, so they're not fighting all the time," she said.

"Who gets the car? Then you're going to a football game and you've got to find rides for everyone.

"We'll have Saturday meets for cross-country -- and we'll be rooting for two different teams."