Compare Oakton, Vienna, Falls Church, Great Falls and McLean?

[FCNova]

Originally Posted by JEB77

I do know that the boundaries extend all the way through Great Falls to the Loudoun border and that, once families get zoned for Langley, they fight to stay there.

Some of the houses zoned for Langley seem like they're actually closer to South Lakes or Herndon HS. I don't have a big issue with either of those, but I'd be pretty pissed if I paid a premium to buy a home in the Langley pyramid and it got rezoned. I saw one home recently that was at the very edge of Fairfax County, in the Langley pyramid. It was an older home, nothing fancy but still listed in the high 600s. You could probably throw a rock from its backyard and hit some houses in Sterling zoned for Loudoun schools, which were probably priced 100k less and much nicer. Langley HS isn't THAT great.

[JD984]

Originally Posted by FCNova

Some of the houses zoned for Langley seem like they're actually closer to South Lakes or Herndon HS. I don't have a big issue with either of those, but I'd be pretty pissed if I paid a premium to buy a home in the Langley pyramid and it got rezoned. I saw one home recently that was at the very edge of Fairfax County, in the Langley pyramid. It was an older home, nothing fancy but still listed in the high 600s. You could probably throw a rock from its backyard and hit some houses in Sterling zoned for Loudoun schools, which were probably priced 100k less and much nicer. Langley HS isn't THAT great.

There's no question that some of those houses are closer to Herndon, South Lakes and other schools as well, but the traditional justification was that the Langley boundaries ran along Georgetown Pike and picked up other areas north of Route 7 in that direction. If you look at where Langley is located, it's close to Arlington, which has its own schools, and it's also only 3 miles from McLean HS, so the boundaries have to pick up areas further west.

This isn't unique to Langley; boundaries for other schools also are affected by their location and proximity to other schools. Almost all of the area assigned to Oakton HS is west of the school. It just so happens that the moderate-income areas near Blake Lane are very close to Oakton, so they are assigned there, together with areas further west extending all the way to the Oak Hill/Herndon area. To take another example, there are some neighborhoods assigned to Marshall that are closer to Madison and Oakton.

There are also some areas fairly far west south of Route 7 that have been carved out and assigned to Langley, and I've read that some of this happened years ago at the behest of politicians, or at least the politically connected, who wanted their neighborhoods assigned to Langley. But, again, I've never read that people from Langley "lobbied" to keep less affluent neighborhoods out of the school, which implies a different level of "snobbiness."

Ironically, if you look at some of the recent FCPS planning documents, FCPS suggests that quite a few of the schools in the Langley pyramid have declining enrollments now, compared to the schools closer to Tysons. There's actually a good chance that some additional neighborhoods are going to get rezoned to Langley in the future, but exactly which ones aren't yet entirely clear.