STAFFORD — The Stafford County School Board reached a final consensus on the nine-month-long elementary school redistricting process, voting in favor of Plan E 2-1.
The plan affects 3,036 students and splits nine neighborhoods. There are entire neighborhoods, like Aquia Harbour, whose children would be moving from Ann E. Moncure Elementary School to Hampton Oaks Elementary. Many Aquia Harbour parents and students spoke out against the plan.
“Ann E. Moncure is my second home,” Aquia Harbour resident and Ann E. Moncure student Victoria Sear-Walker said during the public comments section of the School Board meeting. “It has shaped me into the person I am now.”
Ann E. Moncure will be the newest elementary school in the county when it opens in September. Students from the Embrey Mill neighborhood will be taken from Winding Creek Elementary School and sent to Park Ridge Elementary School. Along their bus routes, they’ll pass four other elementary schools.
Parents and students along with the Parent and Teacher Organization at Ann E. Moncure raised $30,000 for a new track outdoor basketball court. Some Aquia Harbour residents who participated in raising the money for the track and court won’t be able to use it during school hours.
“I got to see the new layout of the school I’m not going to,” Ann E. Moncure student Conrad Jones. “I won’t be able to give tours of the school even though I know the layout.”
Diversity in each school was one of the many things listed in the criteria that the School Board wanted to include in this process of redistricting. In Plan E 2-1 there is a 30 percent difference of students who receive free and reduced lunch between Hampton Oaks and Ann E. Moncure elementary schools. In Plan E 2-2 the difference between the two schools that number shrinks to seven percent.
Joshua Cole, who unsuccessfully ran for state delegate in Virginia’s District 28 in Fredericksburg and Stafford spoke at the School Board meeting in favor of Plan E 2-2.
“Plan E 2-2 has less racial and economic disparities than Plan E 2-1,” Cole said.
Rising fifth graders will be able to stay at their current school if redistricted under a grandfather clause Superintendent Dr. Scott Kizner announced at the beginning of the redistricting process in December.
In June 2018, the School Board requested that the Stafford County Board of Supervisors, which funds the schools, give $10 million to buy the old Fredericksburg Christian School building off Garrisonville Road in North Stafford, and include the cost of renovations in 2018’s Capital Improvement Plan. While some elementary schools are running out of seats, others have seats going unused, which prompted the need for redistricting.
In return for the old Fredericksburg Christian School, the School Board agreed to redistrict all 17 of the county’s elementary schools.
The purchase of FCS and its planned use as a northern campus for the schools’ head Start program allow for the removal of 20 Head Start classrooms from elementary schools and relocating them to the new facility and the Gari Melchers Complex in southern Stafford County. This makes approximately an extra 473 elementary seats available for use by Kindergarten through fifth grades.
