Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord Finch sided with the local school board over parents who cried foul about school redistricting indicating that the western county school boundary changes adopted last winter are likely to remain permanent.

Lawyers for the school system and the parents presented their case in a three-hour hearing July 3. Finch took three weeks to review the material submitted by both sides and released a short four-paragraph legal decision July 28.

Eleven community members had sued the school board over its February decision to shift some neighborhoods from the Oakton, Madison and Westfield high school districts to the South Lakes High School district. As part of its decision, the school board also moved some homes from the Chantilly High School district to the Oakton High School district, though none of these residents decided to sue the school system.


FROM THE DIAS and in court, the school board had said that it needed to make theboundary adjustments to provide well-rounded curricula in all western county high schools.

South Lakes, one of the smallest high schools in the system, could not offer the breadth of classes available at other high schools. The amount of students at Westfield and Chantilly – Fairfax’s two biggest high schools – made those schools sports, performing arts programs and other co-curricula activities overly competitive, according to school officials.

But the several parents affected by the redistricting said Fairfax County had different motives for making the boundary adjustments. They said the school board had engaged in "social engineering" by moving, in general, middle class children into a school with more disadvantaged students.

The percentage of students who qualify for free a reduced lunch at South Lakes is more than three times than those found at Oakton, Madison or Westfield. South Lakes also has a significantly larger percentage of students who use English-as-a-second-language services than the other schools, according to statistics provided by the school system.

The plantiffs’ lawyer, Steven Stone, had argued Virginia law only allowed the school system to change school boundaries if it improved the school system’s efficiency with regards to facilities or operations. If the school board had redistricted to balance social and economic factors in school populations or to "improve instructional effectiveness," then it had broken state law, he said at the initial court hearing.


"IT IS pretty remarkable that they are on paper saying you can even consider instructional effectiveness during a boundary study," said Tom Hutton, a senior attorney with the National School Boards Association who has followed the case closely.

It is not unusual for people to challenge a boundary decision in court, judges have typically given school board a lot of flexibility when it comes to boundary decision, according to Hutton.

Fairfax said it primarily redistricted because of an imbalance in the size of school populations but school boards have been able to use a number of factors – including socio-economic equity – to justify boundary adjustments. According to Hutton, the U.S. Supreme Court has only prohibited school boards from using race as the sole factor for a redistricting.

"You can consider things like socio-economics and a lot of them do," he said.

Hutton said boundary changes are among the most controversial decision school boards have to routinely make.

"At the end of the day, a school board has to draw the lines somewhere and it is very hard to make everyone happy," he said.

Hutton said one of the "ironies" of this particular legal challenge is that South Lakes is a caliber of school that people in other parts of the country would normally fight to attend.

"Lets review what happens at this school. There are a number of kids that get scholarships and many are attending elite universities. … Some of the uniqueness [of this case] has to do with the type of community these other schools were serving," he said.


THE SOUTH LAKES community had said that they hope to put the fight over the boundary study behind them and to focus on welcoming new families into their enclave next year.

"I have a sense of relief because it means we can focus on what is important. … We have to be careful with the new children. We want them to be part of Seahawk culture," said Eugene Nkomba, president of the South Lakes Parent Teacher and Student Association (PTSA).

Nkomba added that he, personally, questions whether the lawsuit was in the best interest of the children involved.

Nick Pesce, whose children will be moved from Westfield to South Lakes as a result of the boundary study, said he has little regret about being involved in the law suit.

"All I can say is I think we did everything we could. I am really proud of all of the people who volunteered to help. It has been an overwhelming thing the way we pulled together," said Pesce, president of the Fairfax Coalition of Advocates for Public Schools (Fairfax CAPS), an organization which formed in part to fight the boundary study and hold the school board "accountable." Fairfax CAPS raised approximately $100,000 to cover the legal fees for the eleven resident suing the school system.

And even though some neighborhoods have technically been moved to the South Lakes High School district, Pesce said his organization knows of several dozen students who have "pupil placed" into another school.