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Fairfax judge rules in favor of school board in redistricting case
A Fairfax County judge has ruled that a controversial school redistricting by the Fairfax County School Board was executed within the board's authority.
Late Monday afternoon, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Gaylord L. Finch Jr. denied a request for an injunction, according to Scott Chronister, a spokesman for FairfaxCAPS, an advocacy group that funded the suit against the school board.
On Feb. 28, the Fairfax County School Board voted 10-2 to approve boundary adjustments for South Lakes, Oakton, Chantilly, Madison and Westfield high schools, Thoreau and Hughes middle schools, and Wolftrap and Sunrise Valley Elementary Schools in an action called the “West County high schools boundary adjustment.”
The plan would redistrict students from attending Westfield, Oakton and Madison high schools to instead attend Reston's South Lakes High School. Also, some students who would have gone to Chantilly High School would attend Oakton.
On March 28, a suit was filed on behalf of 11 parents of children affected by the proposed redistricting plan, with the support of The Fairfax Coalition of Advocates for Public Schools (FairfaxCAPS).
The suit stated that the School Board's decision was invalid because it was “arbitrary and capricious and undertaken in excess of its authority.”
It further maintained that the school board did not comply with its policy on school boundary adjustments and ignored information demonstrating that the redistricting does not “maintain or improve operating efficiency or instructional effectiveness of the schools impacted,” and that “the school board exceeded its statutory authority by considering the socioeconomic characteristics of the school population” in making its redistricting decision.
But on Monday, Judge Finch ruled otherwise. "We lost at the Circuit Court level," said Chronister on Monday of the decision.
Chronister said that the judge's decision, approximately four paragraphs long, was "extremely disappointing in its brevity and lack of providing any kind of clarification on the specifics on the rationale of the ruling."
The case originally went to court on July 3, where in three hours, both sides pleaded their cases. Finch promised a decision by July 28.
"Our next move is continue our efforts to ensure accountability for the school board," said Chronister. "We need to sit down as a group and see if we want to appeal this decision. I think that it is very clear that if a Circuit Court could make such a decision - that the school board did not act in excess of its authority - we need to do something at the state level to fix the statute governing the board's authority," he said.
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