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New Schools Ready for a New School Year

Not long ago, Potomac Falls Principal E. Wayne Griffith was out on his school's football field when he counted 24 white-tailed deer grazing. Now, with the new school year just five days away, he's counting panthers.

Some 850 of them are expected to walk through the front doors Tuesday when Potomac Falls High School (team name: the Panthers) and 39 other Loudoun County schools kick off the 1997-98 academic year, welcoming nearly 24,000 students, about 2,150 more than last year.

In a county where the main educational challenge has been growth, growth and more growth -- especially in Loudoun's rapidly developing eastern end -- Potomac Falls is one of three new schools opening next week, along with Lowes Island and Dominion Trail elementary schools.

The identically designed elementary schools each will start with 600-plus students, 200 below capacity. Potomac Falls, which will lack a senior class its first year, has room for 1,375 students, relieving the crowding at Broad Run High, where most of those students would have gone.

The trio of new schools -- the latest in a building surge that has seen 10 schools open in Loudoun since 1989 -- will serve the booming suburban land scape straddling the Route 7 corridor between Fairfax County and the Ashburn area east of Leesburg. With communities such as Cascades (6,564 homes), Countryside (4,892) and Ashburn Village (5,055) springing to life, Loudoun's school enrollment has ballooned 63 percent since 1990, with an additional 42 percent rise forecast over the next four years.

To serve the 3,000 new homes and 7,000 new residents arriving each year, the county's school planners anticipate needing to build, equip and staff at least 15 more schools by the year 2004, a budget-buster even in robust economic times.

Three of those 15 schools -- a middle school and two elementary schools -- are already funded and set to open in the next two years, while money for three others -- a high school and two more elementary schools -- is included in an $86.5 million bond issue to be voted on in a referendum in November.

"Growth continues to be a real challenge for us," said Edgar B. Hatrick III, Loudoun's superintendent of schools since 1991. ". . . There's a demand both for [money to build] new schools and renew old ones and a demand for operating dollars that puts a real strain on government."

The school system's $152.8 million operating budget for this year, while it represents about a $10 million increase in local funding over last year's budget, still falls about $14 million short of what Hatrick originally requested. As a result, administrators have increased class size this year and put off such initiatives as a strings musical program, a longer school day and some technology enhancements.

Hatrick said there is "a continuing need to educate the county" about the school system's needs. In the last five years, Loudoun voters have approved nearly $120 million in school bonds, and November's referendum issue, which includes $12.6 million for computer equipment, is the largest in county history.

But because the school bond will be divided into four parts, some worry that approval of the whole package could be difficult. School Board Vice Chairman Ellen D. Oliver (Broad Run), for one, hopes that "there will be enough compassion on the part of those who don't want new schools and enough votes on the part of those who do to make this pass."

Absent sweeping systemwide initiatives this year, the biggest changes most Loudoun parents are likely to see are higher lunch prices and the conversion to a nine-week grading period at the middle and high school levels. The average class size also is going up slightly.

For those who eat at school, lunch prices will increase by 10 cents to $1.50 for elementary-age children and $1.60 for older students. Milk prices will increase a nickel, to 40 cents.

At the middle and high school levels, a nine-week grading period will replace the six-week version, with an interim report required for any student who has dropped two letter grades or who is about to receive a D or an F in a subject. Elementary schools already adhered to a nine-week schedule.

"It gives you more time, if a child is having a problem, to intervene and do something to fix the problem," Griffith said. Fewer report cards "also give teachers more time to teach," he added.

Class size, a focal point of last spring's budget debates, will increase slightly, on average, at all grade levels: from 22 to 22.5 students at the elementary level, from 21 to 21.6 in middle schools, and from 24.5 to 26.6 in high schools.

While the rise appears minimal, Oliver and others who live in the county's more populated areas say it is grossly misleading.

"When you hear our average class size, this sounds like a pretty nice place to live. But the averages bear no resemblance to the reality in the classroom," said Oliver, who voted against the school budget last spring over the issue. "Show me the classroom in eastern Loudoun in March that has 22 kids in it," she challenged. "At Ashburn last year, every single first grade at the end of the year had 29 children in it, while in Waterford, there sits a class with 16 kids. We need to spread the pain around."

Reflecting a slightly shifting demographic profile, the school system also will add two ESL (English as a Second Language) centers this year, at Broad Run High and Lowes Island Elementary, for a total of six such sites. The ESL program served 160 students last year, up 51 percent since 1990.

Lowes Island Assistant Principal Janet A. Radcliffe said the biggest challenge the $8.9 million Sterling school faces its first year is "making this a community and pulling [people] together so they start looking at Lowes Island as a we."

The school will hold an open house tomorrow at 9 a.m., but Radcliffe said many parents couldn't wait and have been driving past the school day and night, peeking in the windows.

At Dominion Trail in Ashburn, which holds its open house tomorrow afternoon at 1:30, Principal Sharon J. Keegan said it will be nice to give her students, some of whom have bounced from one school to another the last few years as boundaries shifted, a permanent home.

"Every time I drive down the road, there are more houses going up. It's just incredible," she said. "And every time I walk into the office, there are two or three new families waiting to register."

Orientation at Potomac Falls, the county's first new high school in 21 years, is tonight at 7.

The $29.9 million high school, in the Cascades section of Sterling, boasts a 650-seat Broadwayesque theater, more than 385 instructional computers, a child development center, five teaching kitchens, two gyms, a 2,300-seat football stadium with an eight-lane track, and a media station in each classroom that taps into library resources.

"We'll have lockers to ourselves," said incoming junior Jeff Fedynak, 16, "which we haven't had for two years" at Broad Run High School.

"Plus we get to be seniors for two years," added classmate Gen Shadlock, 15.