Arlington County is known for putting a premium on education, and it consistently outspends the rest of the D.C. region on a per-pupil basis, according to a survey by the Washington Area Boards of Education (WABE). Arlington spent $18,616 per student last year, compared with a per-student cost of $13,718 in neighboring Fairfax County.
APS could spend less in its efforts to cope with growth, but doing so would require measures that many area parents find unpalatable. For starters, it could redraw school district boundaries more often. While some Arlington schools are already over capacity by at least 20 percent (and more will soon hit that mark), others are projected to remain much less crowded.
But being redistricted—and the logistical and emotional disruption that comes with it—is anathema to many parents and students. “People view their schools like a family, so moving a school boundary is like a divorce. People get upset,” says County Board Chair Garvey.
Some homeowners also complain that boundary changes could affect their property values.
School architecture and amenities are another area where some county leaders believe spending could be reduced. Arlington spends at least twice the national average on its new schools, according to School Planning & Management’s annual construction report. Discovery Elementary’s elegant, light-filled building cost an estimated $43.8 million for 630 seats, whereas the regional spending average for new schools is $25 million for 700 seats. The new H-B Woodlawn building, designed by the prominent European architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group and slated to open in 2019 with 775 students, will cost an estimated $101 million.
“Some of the features that we have had in our most recently constructed schools were not absolutely necessary,” says county board member John Vihstadt. “Nice to have? Yes. Exciting? Yes. But were they really necessary to give our kids a state-of-the-art education in a modern facility? No.”
Still, paring down costs could prove difficult now that the bar has been raised. “[School officials] need to be consistent and not listen to some taxpayers more than other taxpayers just because their property taxes are higher,” says Megan Haydasz, a mother of two students at Patrick Henry Elementary.
Haydasz is now chairing a committee to gather community input as APS plans a new 725-seat, $59 million elementary school next to Thomas Jefferson Middle School near the intersection of Arlington Boulevard and South Glebe Road. (APS plans to shift students from Patrick Henry to the TJ site and relocate its Montessori program from Drew Model School to the Patrick Henry building in the fall of 2019.) Haydasz says she isn’t averse to trimming bells and whistles, but wants “any cost-cutting measures to be applied evenly across all construction projects, both now and in the future.”
“One school shouldn’t bear the brunt” of the cost savings, she asserts.
John Chadwick, APS assistant superintendent for facilities and operations, notes that there are reasons Arlington may spend more on school construction than other jurisdictions. “We have very high standards and community expectations for class size, special instructional uses, physical education and athletic facilities, and community amenities that are not matched in many other school districts,” he says.
Heeding Arlington County’s emphasis on sustainability, APS also invests heavily in energy-efficient building practices, which are pricier upfront but save money over time. While the initial building costs for Discovery were significant, the building draws so much power from its geothermal wells, solar arrays and solar water heater that APS may save about $100,000 per year on utility bills, Chadwick says.
Former APS finance chief Deirdra McLaughlin, who retired in July, agrees that some new school buildings could certainly be “more plain Jane,” but she says that a lot of Arlington’s premium pricing is unavoidable. Constrained by the county’s sky-high real estate market, its commitment to expanding parkland (rather than building schools on greenspace) and backlash from homeowners who don’t want increased traffic in their neighborhoods, APS has few site options. As such, it’s recently been inclined to establish and expand schools on the sites it already owns. But those sites tend to be topographically challenging, which increases building costs. Plus, many of them already harbor other schools.
The school board is currently considering replacing the Education Center—a building next to Washington-Lee High School that houses the school board’s offices and APS administrative staff—with a new “small” high school for up to 1,300 students. Critics say that such a move would essentially amount to an expansion of Washington-Lee that would pack 3,500 students onto one campus.