War is imminent in the Middle East. Women and children are starving in Ethiopia. A major change in estate taxes is proposed. And there is not enough money, seemingly, in the nation, to fund rail service to Dulles Airport.
These were among the major issues on the national agenda that came up for discussion when U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-10th) came to McLean last weekend for a “town meeting” with his constituents.
But it was a local issue over which Wolf has no control that generated the most heat and light during the 105-minute meeting: the readjustment of elementary school boundaries in Great Falls.
Four elementary school parents waited for 90 minutes into Wolf’s meeting before one of them finally was recognized. “We care about people in Ethiopia, this that and the other,” she said. “But we care about our local school system.”
She thanked Wolf for pulling the plug on a federal study of proposed highway river crossings between Maryland and Virginia. She praised his initiatives that encourage telecommuting to get cars off the road.
Then she asked him what citizens can do when public school officials do not respond to citizens’ concerns about school boundaries.
Although Forestville Elementary, where they are currently assigned, is less than a mile away, she said her neighborhood on the northern end of Seneca Road in Great Falls has been reassigned to Great Falls Elementary this fall, when a new elementary will open at the Andrew Chapel School site.
“WHERE DO YOU GO when your school board won’t respond to you?” she said, alleging that her phone calls have not been returned.
Another woman, whose children go to Great Falls Elementary but have been reassigned to Andrew Chapel, said one school official told her that “You women have too much time on your hands.”
“You could run for the School Board,” Wolf told them. “You can move these people.”
“Go get somebody who is going to beat up on them for you, and get them elected,” said another man in the audience.
“People [might] laugh,” said Wolf, describing how he cashed in a pension to pay for his first campaign for Congress. He ran three campaigns before he was first elected to Congress in 1980, he said.
The last iteration of four different boundary options, according to a woman who lives on Seneca Road, bears too heavily on people living in Great Falls neighborhoods in favor of children from neighborhoods that have Reston and Herndon addresses.
“We have begged for their [school officials’] attention,” she said. “They are busing 300 kids into our schools.
“We have done research. We have interviewed the principals. We can demonstrate they have overcrowded” the schools in Great Falls, said another woman who said she pays $9,000 per year in taxes.
Speakers at the meeting were not asked to give their names, and although three women identified themselves to the Connection, they asked that their names not be used in the newspaper. All said they fear that school officials might retaliate by refusing to consider their neighborhood’s requests.
One woman asked reporters to investigate her assertions that Armstrong and Aldrin Elementaries in Herndon and Reston have sufficient floor space to absorb children from neighborhoods on the south side of Route 7.
But school officials have refused to consider relocating those neighborhoods outside the Langley High School Pyramid, she said.
“There is no oversight in their decision,” said the woman. “It affects my kids.”
One woman said her daughter has spent most of her time at Forestville Elementary school in a classroom trailer, where children must raise their hands to go inside the building to use the bathroom.
“Her [classroom] trailer was attacked by a woodpecker,” she said. “It is unbelievable what we are enduring there.”
She said raw sewage sometimes seeps on the playground because the school depends on a septic system that is overtaxed. Public sewer does not extend to either Great Falls or Forestville Elementary Schools in Great Falls, further limiting their capacities, she said.
“We have watched the development on the western end of the county,” she said. “It has really squeezed us.”
WOLF IS A CONSERVATIVE Republican who represents Virginia's 10th Congressional District, including the counties of Loudoun, Clarke, Frederick, and Warren, and the cites of Manassas, Manassas Park and Winchester.
In Fairfax County, he represents McLean, Great Falls, Herndon, and parts of southwestern Fairfax, Prince William and Fauquier Counties.
But elementary school boundaries dominated the final minutes of Wolf’s meeting in McLean on Saturday, and generated more emotion than even the prospect of war with Iraq.
The community room at the McLean Government Center was already overcrowded when the meeting started.
A woman who was holding two seats got glares until her companion arrived about 30 minutes after the meeting started. Others stood in the hall outside, or traipsed to the front of the room to occupy several empty upholstered chairs.
From the adjoining doorway of Dranesville Supervisor Stuart Mendelsohn’s conference room, one of his staffers, a reporter, and Dranesville Planning Commissioner Joan DuBois stood and listened. DuBois is one of two announced candidates for Mendelsohn’s
Fairfax County Police, who share the government Center with Mendelsohn, interrupted several times to ask people to relocate their cars from the police parking lot behind the building.
One man left the room when his cell phone began playing “The Toreador Song” from the Bizet opera, “Carmen,” and a woman who got bored began to touch up her makeup.
Other citizens waited patiently to ask questions about U.S. policies in the Middle East, the likelihood of war with Iraq, government retirement pensions, President George W. Bush’s proposed changes to the estate tax, and the threat of terrorism.
In response to a question on property tax increases, both Wolf, a resident of Vienna, and McLean resident Vincent F. Callahan, delegate from Virginia’s 34th District and chairman of the House of Delegates Appropriations Committee, said they are suffering from the increases too.
Wolf said he hopes for “some kind of circuit breaker” on property tax increases.
In response to a question about terrorism, he said “Life will never be the same” after the attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001.
“I voted for a commission to look to see what happened on 9/11; to see that if a mistake was made, it won’t be repeated,” he said.
“We know Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons, and we believe he has biological [weapons] too - - smallpox and anthrax,” he said. “The scenarios are frightening.
“THE PRESIDENT IS in a very difficult position,” Wolf said, urging that U.N. weapons inspectors be given enough time to search and that the Bush administration “make sure you do everything to ascertain there is not a war with aggressive inspections.”
“Saddam Hussein is not going to go [into exile] if he thinks this thing is not really going to happen,” said Wolf. “It may never be so simple as ‘everyone thinks yes’ and ‘everyone thinks no.’
“I honestly don’t know any more than you know” about Saddam’s alleged plan to destroy Iraqi oil wells, Wolf said.
He commented that although cyberterrorism is a major threat, the FBI’s “new role” is to combat it. He expressed confidence in the new FBI director .
In Ethiopia, “We are trying to get new leaders, but in the interim, you have to help the woman and child who are starving,” he said.
Asked to comment on the Palestinian question in the Middle East, Wolf said that “All administrations have trouble: Clinton, the other Bush, Reagan and Carter.”
But until violence abates, Wolf said, “The President’s policies are appropriate. It’s just how do you get from A to B.”
A man with a French accent commented that “A lot of people hate Americans. They see the helicopters and gunships, and say, what kind of America is that?”
“We appreciate the French,” Wolf responded. “We appreciate what you did at Yorktown.”
“The American people are the rest of the world. I came from an immigrant family from Germany,” he said.
“We are not a perfect country. We are a good country, and we do good things.
“Most of the food in Ethiopia is coming from America -- one-third of it. The French and the Italians are not doing very much,” he said. ”We defeated Fascism. We defeated Communism. We will defeat Terrorism.”
On the subject of traffic, Wolf said his priority is to “protect neighborhoods.”
But he said widening the outbound lanes of I-66 would “flush out the traffic” and relieve residential streets such as Old Dominion Drive, Washington and Wilson Boulevards.
If he could be Virginia governor, Wolf said, he would “bring in the citizens that live along I-66, and show them the footprint to see how it could be widened without an impact.”
On rail to Dulles, Wolf has always supported the concept of first using rapid bus transit system to build ridership and density before moving to rail in phases.
Rail “can’t be done by 2010,” he said. “The state doesn’t have the money. It is intellectually dishonest for people in public office to say it can be done,” he said.
He said it should be built in segments, with the first one going to Tysons Corner. “That gets it there in a way the people can afford it. We need transportation. The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum will open in December, and four to five million people will visit a year.”
I-495, he said, will not be widened, because the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) shows too many houses would have to be destroyed.
Wolf also consistently promotes the idea of telecommuting. “There is nothing magic about strapping yourself in a metal box, and driving 35 miles to use a computer,” he said.
He supports “pollution credits that can be sold on the Chicago Merc” for companies that encourage employees to telecommute."
One man in the audience commented that "We sent a message to Richmond in the last election. Did they get the message?”
“We’re not going to raise any taxes, if that’s what you mean,” Callahan said. “We’re not going to build any roads, either.”
“We have lowered your taxes considerably. We are one of the lowest taxed states -- for good or bad.”