LoudounNow LOUDOUN COUNTY’S COMMUNITY-OWNED NEWS SOURCE
[ Vol. 1, No. 28 ]
[ loudounnow.com ]
[ May 19 – 25, 2016 ]
Home and Garden Special section inside........... 21-31
SPARKS FLY
Fire Officials Alarmed by Code Revisions BY RENSS GREENE
Crowd Management Ali Khaligh/Loudoun Now
Mercer Middle School in Aldie enforces strict traffic patterns to move 1,605 students between classes. By this fall, the school will have 688 students more than its building is designed to hold.
Enrollment Relief Put on Hold for Packed Schools BY DANIELLE NADLER
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ercer Middle School, Loudoun County’s most crowded school, has gotten creative to accommodate 255 more students than the building was designed to hold. To cut down on the number of times 1,605 students must forge the hallways, daily homerooms have been replaced with a weekly advisory period. And students are asked to follow strict traffic patterns: no left turns unless absolutely necessary. “This traffic scheme is the only way kids can get to class. And they’re only going to have more students next year,” said School Board member Jeff Morse (Dulles), who represents the district in which Mercer sits. It will be another couple of years before Mercer Middle School, and other packed schools in the southern end of
the county, get much reprieve. That will come when a yet-to-be-named middle school (MS-7) opens along Braddock Road in August 2018. Until then, the school system faces what its leaders have called an “enrollment hump.” Some members of the Loudoun County School Board saw the opening of Brambleton Middle School as a chance to move about 200 students from Mercer, and other schools south of Rt. 50, to schools north of it to get over that so-called hump. But, as the board adopted school assignments for Brambleton Middle and HS-11, the high school next door, last week, the majority of members opted for a boundary map that moves the fewest students, holding off on any major changes to families to the south. Board members who favored the adopted map, called Plan 2 Amended, said it will mean fewer assignment changes for students in those very full schools. For example,
! LE W A O S N N O
they don’t want a middle school student to be moved north to Brambleton Middle School in 2017 only to be reassigned to MS-7 when it opens in the following year. They prefer to redraw the attendance lines in the south this fall, when they have new enrollment projections and, hopefully, a site for HS-9, the high school slated to open in 2021. “I do think it’s the right move to wait and gather more information about enrollment projections,” said Chairman Eric Hornberger (Ashburn). But the adopted boundaries also leave Mercer Middle School with 688 students above its building capacity this fall and 1,050 students over by 2017. It also leaves Eagle Ridge Middle School 153 students over capacity in 2017. Morse, who proposed the alternate plan that would have shifted about 200 PACKED SCHOOLS >> 47
Loudoun fire officials say state revisions to the fire code are placing homebuilders’ demands above the safety of homes and businesses. The Virginia Board of Housing and Community Development is in the process of revising the state fire code, with a goal of removing elements that are duplicated in the building code. The problem, Loudoun’s fire officials said, is that deleting those rules from the fire code takes away their ability to enforce them. Chief Fire Marshal Linda Hale gave the example of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s visit to a Stone Ridge coffee shop last week. Hale’s office made sure that, while people crowded into the shop to see Clinton, there were adequate emergency exits for everyone. “So, should something happen, we can assure that everyone gets out,” Hale said. “The Secret Service is here to be able to make sure the dignitary gets out. Our job is to be able to make sure everybody else gets out.” And while the building code is set in stone at the state level, localities can add to the fire code to address local concerns. For example, Loudoun’s fire code has more deSPARKS FLY >> 20
Renss Greene/Loudoun Now
Combined Fire-Rescue System Chief W. Keith Brower Jr., Chief Fire Marshal Linda Hale, Chesterfield County Assistant Fire Chief Rob Dawson, and Fairfax County Fire Marshal Captain George Hollingsworth tell the Board of Supervisors’ finance committee about their battle in Richmond.
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