2023 Arlington County Board Candidate Questionnaire
Question 3 of 5
In recent years, the County has greatly increased density in certain areas and our South Arlington schools have more overcrowding than our North Arlington schools, a trend that APS projects to increase over the next decade. How do you think school capacity should be factored into the County’s review process for new development projects?
Audrey Clement: In the ten years I’ve been attending County Board meetings, I’ve never heard it acknowledge that a particular development project that has come up for review will increase school enrollment by other than a negligible amount. This argument is hard to counter, because the County insists that its projections are based on objective forecasts, despite statistics showing burgeoning enrollment throughout the County. If the County routinely insists that development does not impact enrollment in general, it is hard to make the case that it disproportionately impacts enrollment in South Arlington. Yet the County gave critics pause when it refused to do an impact analysis on the effect of EHO densification on school enrollment, arguing since only 20 new multiplexes will be built a year, the impact on schools would be negligible. Since July, 2023 more than 40 applications for EHO zoning permits have been submitted. Of 27 approved or under review, about half are multiplexes, raising serious questions about the County’s enrollment projections. If elected I will insist that the County do an impact study of EHO on school enrollment, and if the projected increase is significant, call upon the County to either amend the EHO ordinance or rezone vacant office buildings for APS facilities, as it has done for private schools.
Maureen Coffey: We need a plan for school growth including facilities and workforce that matches up with our development pipeline. APS already produces student generation rates for every housing unit in Arlington. The student generation rates tell us, on average, how many APS students come from a type of housing (e.g., single-family home, high-rise condo, townhouse). The County planning and housing staff need to work more closely with APS staff so that we can use our generation rates during our planning processes to estimate the impact on schools. We know that Arlington will continue to grow and we need to be proactive about the services needed to support that. New schools are not built overnight - they take years of planning. If we don’t start including schools in the process now, we are not going to be able to provide equitable education opportunities to our students and families.
Moreover, I would like to see Arlington County develop a comprehensive plan that includes schools. We have so many projections about our growth and future demand but no plans on how we will meet those needs in the long-run. Creating a concrete vision that integrates housing, schools, parks, public safety facilities and transportation will help us answer the hard questions before it is too late.
Susan Cunningham: Our transit-oriented development principles have helped Arlington build many more homes along metro and bus corridors. These homes have been more highly concentrated in the center and south of the county, due to metro proximity and the prioritization of Columbia Pike and National Landing redevelopments in recent years. The Plan Langston Boulevard effort will lay the path for some additional density farther north, but that will take time and is unlikely to shift the balance.
School (and county) facilities planning has been limited to at times 2-3 years and at most 10 years. This is not enough to stay ahead of needs, especially in an already developed county. In recent years the focus has been on using existing sites rather than acquiring new sites. This means we don’t currently have a long-range plan for where new schools will go to support additional population. So, while we have identified the need for additional elementary school seats near Rosslyn and National Landing, we have not identified locations for these schools. I will encourage long range planning, including working with developers to propose new schools as community benefits in redevelopment projects. In addition, I will encourage APS to consider leased space for some schools to reduce overcrowding and pilot smaller school communities.
If current development projections stay on pace, we will need to add more elementary school seats, especially in the south and east. In addition, we know we have a shortage of family sized homes in the county, especially in our committed affordable portfolio. As we address these shortfalls over time, we need to plan for the school capacity impacts and work to distribute these homes across the county (and especially north of I-66) rather than over concentrating them in a few schools.
One approach to providing additional school space is to consider repurposing empty office space to house schools. My experience building, maintaining, and retrofitting buildings including schools will help to evaluate these possibilities and to implement ones that make sense. While leading school reform efforts, public school construction, and operations in Washington, DC in the early 2000s, I managed a temporary middle school program in an office building (amazing how 8 flights of stairs in the morning can help young minds wake up and focus!) and adaptively reused an old public building for a school campus including teacher housing. Many options can work, but we need to get started.
Other jurisdictions build schools capacity planning into their development review processes. As a member of the Joint Facilities Advisory Commission, I researched and recommended adoption of similar practices in Arlington. As an example, Montgomery County charges a school impact tax for any residential development, additional fees if development will exceed school capacity, and in extreme cases will refuse additional development until/unless school capacity catches up. “Developers pay school impact tax on new residential units regardless of the adequacy status of the schools serving the proposed project. The school impact tax helps pay for the construction or expansion of school facilities countywide. The rates are determined by school impact area classification (Turnover or Infill) and residential unit type (single family detached, single family attached, multi-family low-rise or multi-family high-rise).” (https://montgomeryplanning.org/planning/countywide/growth-and-infrastructure-policy/schools/)
Juan Carlos Fierro: The Achilles Heel of Arlington’s Planning process is that it does not adequately consider the development impacts of proposed projects that intensify density and population growth. Arlington’s planning process requires a major makeover to consider not only the impact of proposed projects on school capacity, but also other impacts such as stormwater, water and sewer, and public safety requirements that require special public investment such as fire stations.