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AUGUST 27, 2015
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VOLUME 27
Sports
Ready For Rams: Riverside Students Tour New School Danielle Nadler
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Leesburg Today/Danielle Nadler
Students were invited to walk through the brand new Riverside High School last week, ahead of the first day of school Aug. 31.
Cla ssifi e d
ALMOST 80,000 STUDENTS RETURN TO SCHOOL MONDAY. SEE MORE BACK-TO-SCHOOL COVERAGE ON PAGE 28.SEAT...PAGE 10
he students didn’t seem to notice the dozens of heavyduty construction vehicles still parked on the campus of Riverside High School last Thursday evening. Their attention was on their new school. “It’s ginormous,” junior Joey Dill fawned as he stepped into the entryway. “This is the nicest school I’ve been to.” “Look at the view from here,” his friend, junior Nicholas Whitmore, chimed in, pointing out the window at rows of thick trees and rolling hills. As soon as the orange cones are moved, “it’s going to be amazing,” he said. Construction is clearly still in progress on portions of the
46-acre campus in Lansdowne, but the bulk of the school building was ready just in time to welcome students for last week’s “Riverside Ram Jam Kick Off” event. Students were invited to pick up their class schedules, watch the football and volleyball teams scrimmage and tour the school that was mostly off limits through the summer to allow crews to finish their work. “It’s like opening a present,” Marisa Murphy, a parent of sophomore Sean Murphy, said after getting a look inside. Her children attended Stone Bridge, followed by Tuscarora, but she said she certainly does not mind another transfer to Riverside, which she can see from her living room window. She’s happy she will no longer
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Continued on Page 20
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months after a Leesburg Today article that brought to light a sort of dual-enrollment turf war between NVCC and Petersburg-based Richard Bland College, which provided tuition-free courses in two Loudoun County high schools last year. Earlier this year, NVCC sent a formal letter of objection to SCHEV after it learned that Richard Bland was providing tuition-free dual-enrollment classes to 70 students at Rock Ridge and Heritage high schools. NVCC enrolled about 1,300 Loudoun high school students last school year. Several colleges and universities offer courses in Loudoun’s public schools, but Richard Bland was Continued on Page 54
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On average, Virginia’s community colleges will receive $3,129 in state funding for each enrolled student, according to SCHEV. “We determined that all of the high schools were doing enough things that we could go all the way down to refunding 100 percent of tuition to them,” Leidig said. “Given the student loan debt that you keep reading about in the country and the anxiety of families about the cost of college, we thought it was the right thing to do.” High school students who take college-level courses on one of NVCC’s campuses still will be charged tuition. The decision to drop the fee comes four
Permit #78 Springfield, VA
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he commonwealth’s largest community college will no longer charge tuition to the nearly 3,500 students who take dualenrollment courses at 55 high schools throughout Northern Virginia each year. Northern Virginia Community College’s administration said it would waive its tuition fee, which in Loudoun County was $24.26 per credit, or between $72 and $145 for most classes last school year. That already-discounted fee had been expected
to drop to $10 per credit for the 2015-2016 school year. But NVCC Loudoun Provost Julie Leidig said the college analyzed how much Northern Virginia’s high schools were providing in resources and decided to eliminate the dual-enrollment charge for Loudoun and the seven other school divisions with which it partners. High schools provide the faculty to teach NVCC’s dual-enrollment courses and the classroom space. Plus, Virginia’s colleges receive additional state funding based on how many high school students they enroll, according to Peter A. Blake, director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
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NVCC To Drop Tuition Fee For Dual-Enrollment Courses
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