Lou Zone of Vienna, formerly the Hunter Mill Magisterial District’s appointed representative to the Fairfax County School Board, can still remember the living rooms he visited in 1993, the last time Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) re-evaluated elementary school boundaries in the Great Falls area.
A new school, Aldrin Elementary, was under construction in Reston, and the septic field at Great Falls Elementary was overtaxed. Those two events triggered boundary adjustments that affected both of those schools, as well as Forestville Elementary.
Zone had been appointed to the School Board by then-Supervisor Bob Dix, a Republican, who was unafraid of controversy.
Zone said he remembers “taking some people on a tour of Aldrin, just to see if they’d be interested” in what was a state-of-the-art new school.
They were parents who lived in Ascot and Brandermill, neighborhoods south of Route 7 with Reston addresses where children could have walked to Aldrin without crossing any major roads.
But “They wanted a Great Falls mailing address, just like everyone did on Route 7,” he said. “I never saw so many people complain about going to Aldrin.”
The Ascot-Brandermill parents took a poll in their neighborhood which showed that 81 percent of the respondents wanted their children to go to Forestville Elementary School, he said.
“That’s when they put me on the ice cube and said, ‘will you do what we want to do, or will you do what you want us to do?”
ZONE SAID he also tried to interest parents in Colvin Run, Colvin Forest, and Carper’s Farm, then known as “the three C’s,” to go to Westbriar Elementary in Vienna.
As a community with about 100 students attending Great Falls Elementary school, they were “on the bubble.” The septic field at GFES was overwhelmed, and the population of the 44-year old school had to be reduced by about that same number.
“Great Falls is a very old school,” said Zone. “It’s beyond antique.”
“I had a good conversation with the people in the three C’s,” Zone said. “I told them I thought Westbriar was a better school than Great Falls anyhow,” he said. “But they were insistent.”
“Those people up there call themselves Great Falls, even if they have a Vienna mailing address,” he said.
But people living on the north side of Route 7 looked at the road as a dividing line, preferring to define the attendance area by its postal ZIP code, he said.
“It was obvious to me there is a problem with people on each side of Route 7 about what constitutes the community of Great Falls,” Zone said.
“There is a dividing line. It’s called Route 7,” Zone said.
But that didn’t make the decision for him.
Even then, when School Board representatives were appointed rather than elected, “It depends on who the School Board member is, and what the majority [on the board],” Zone said.
In the end, Zone met with his Dranesville District colleague, Stuart Mendelsohn, who had been appointed to the School Board in 1993 as a political unknown by then-Dranesville Supervisor Ernest Berger. Both were Republicans.
GIVEN THE POLITITAL REALITIES they faced, the two men recommended leaving Ascot and Brandermill where they were, at Forestville Elementary.
The three C’s moved from Great Falls to Forestville Elementary.
“Everybody was happy, except for Facilities Planning Services,” Zone said.
“The bottom line came down to: ‘you can’t make everybody happy with the boundary adjustment.'
“Sometimes, the person who isn’t happy is the facilities department.
“They said they would have to come back and revisit [the boundary plan] in five years.
“Andrew Chapel has been around a long time. We didn’t just pick it up last year,” he said.
Zone said he would have preferred to install public sewer at Great Falls Elementary, or add to the existing school building at Forestville.
“I was the only School Board member who suggested that we redo a good portion of the school boundaries all over again,” he said.
“Facilities [Planning Services] already had a plan for 21 schools and their feeders.”
But through his colleague, Mendelsohn, Zone said he was aware that the Great Falls Citizens Association and other civic groups opposed extending public sewer service north on Walker Road to reach the elementary school.
“We worked hard in coming up with a compromise that the people would accept,” Zone said.
“I fought like hell for them, although I didn’t agree with them.”
Zone lives in Vienna, the town — and ZIP code — eschewed by many of the Great Falls residents.
He said the decision-making process caused tension among the School Board, FCPS staff, Area III administrators, and the School Board Representatives Mendelsohn and Zone.
“We do political things to correct problems, and then we wonder why we have political problems when it comes to something like boundary adjustments.”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with SAT scores. If you really want a school that has better test scores, I give you Westbriar vs. Great Falls.
“I think we try to correct things using political methods, not educational methods.
“I give you 22066. They’re in love with the fact they are in Great Falls,” Zone said.
FCPS FACILITIES PLANNERS were correct that boundaries in Great Falls would have to be revisited. But it has taken nine years, rather than five since boundaries were adjusted for Aldrin in 1993.
This year, with another boundary adjustment in progress in Great Falls, Zone doesn’t have to pay attention to it. He and a carload of other golfers just went to Myrtle Beach, S.C. for four days, playing 126 holes of golf in four and a half days.
It’s an enviable position for Zone.
He doesn’t have to care about school boundaries this time, but he does.
“It’s too late now,” Zone said last week. “You’re going to go through the procedure.
“Facilities has a plan, and they are going to stick as close to it as they can,” he said.
“You still have people who will be intent on making the move not happen.
“A commensurate number of people will be upset. Life will go on.
A small handful of people will take their children out [of public schools] and put them somewhere else.
“There’s got to be a better way. We go through these civil wars every time we do this,” Zone said.
“People across the highway are calling each other names, when they used to play bridge together.
“People move to Great Falls for land values and prices. They’re not moving to the Route 1 corridor,” he said.
“It has to do with socioeconomics and culture.”
“When [residents] buy a house, why can’t they go to the school in that community?” Zone said.
“They can’t keep doing this and moving people around. They are the ones that are paying for the [classroom] trailers,” Zone said. ”The story should be there’s a different way to do this. It’s the 21st century. We are doing it like it was 1930,” he said.
“My problem on the School Board was we just didn’t seem to know why we did things.
“Too often, there was no reason.
“We like poking our fingers in our eyes every time we do it. Why do we have to keep changing those green lines [on the attendance map] all the time?”