Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Loudoun County Public Schools – Part 1 – Chantilly

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by

sherlockj
in ,

by James C. Sherlock

Freedom High Seniors Waiting to Receive their Diplomas. Credit Hazel Nguyen, Design Editor, Uncaged (student Newspaper at Freedom)

Part 1 of a series.

Sometimes, even at my age and experience, I am legitimately surprised.

After writing about the growth of leadership, support and administrative staffs in both institutions of higher learning and the public schools, I thought I had the picture.

I did not.

Then I looked at Freedom High School in Loudoun County.

This article is not meant to reflect criticism, just amazement.

Freedom High School in Chantilly has about 2,000 students each year.

Student demographics last reported were 42% percent white, 38% Asian, 9% Hispanic, 6% Black, and 5% multiple races.

  • Chronic absenteeism was half of that statewide.
  • Free and reduced price meal eligibility was 1/5th of the state average.

With median household income in Chantilly of $131,362 annually, Freedom has one of the least economically challenged student bodies in Virginia. Langley High School, drawing from McLean, with a median household income of $242,610, has, and is likely to keep, that record all to itself.

But Freedom has a larger percentage of students from wealthy families than all but a few Virginia public schools.

Freedom High features, in addition to its teaching staff:

  • A principal
  • 3 Assistant Principals
  • A Registrar
  • A ParentVue contact
  • An Athletic Director
  • An Assistant Athletic Director
  • A Special Education Dean
  • 3 Secretaries
  • A Bookkeeper
  • A School Nurse
  • A Lead School Security Officer
  • 2 Safety and Security personnel
  • 2 School Resource Officers (Deputy Sheriffs)
  • An Attendance Administrative Assistant

And then there is its Unified Mental Health Team:

  • Director, School Counseling
  • 9 additional School Counselors
  • A School Psychologist
  • A School Social Worker
  • A Student Assistance Specialist

Each represents a full-time job.  It is a big school in the wealthiest county in America, but I am astonished nonetheless.

Freedom students, unsurprisingly, blew away the SOLs.

Of the 2,023 graduates, three are headed to Ivies. If you wonder where UVa gets its Asian-American students, not a few of them are from Freedom.

These are the 2023 Freedom seniors headed to UVa:

  1. Jamie Anastasi
  2. Adithya Balasubramaniam
  3. Hannah Bartz
  4. Nikhil Boyalla
  5. Anushri Chatterjee
  6. Ryan DelVecchio
  7. Madhav Donepudi
  8. Caroline Egger
  9. Sabrina Farooq
  10. Manmayi Ghaisas
  11. Zara Hameed
  12. Rishi Kandimalla
  13. Lily Kang
  14. Areeb Khan
  15. Angie Kim
  16. Nikhil Limgala
  17. Umar Luqman
  18. Sarah Maiwald
  19. Ronit Malhotra
  20. Sneha Moothedan
  21. Visvajit Murali
  22. Srikar Nadella
  23. Christine Nguyen
  24. Lucy Nguyen
  25. Adhira Prasanna
  26. Meghan Puppala
  27. Varun Rajan
  28. Arjun Rao
  29. Pratha Ravani
  30. Grafton Rentz
  31. Nicole Shou
  32. Dhanya Sriram
  33. Daniel Tanudjaja
  34. Mira Thaloor
  35. Matthew Wang
  36. Matthew Werfel
  37. George Yao
  38. Isaac Yoo
  39. Eisabel Zamora
  40. Emma Zimmerman

They did the work. They earned what they got. We look forward to their contributions to society.

Congratulations to each of them.

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Comments

23 responses to “Loudoun County Public Schools – Part 1 – Chantilly”

  1. Lefty665 Avatar
    Lefty665

    What is the message? Our schools can be successful, they just need a better selection of kids and families? Or, the other 99% of kids are SOL (L=Luck)?

    1. James C. Sherlock Avatar
      James C. Sherlock

      I’ll get to that.

    2. Matt Adams Avatar
      Matt Adams

      Have a community with 5 pools for the summer, several parks for the kids to play & people that way back at you when you pass them.

      1. how_it_works Avatar
        how_it_works

        Amazing how much you have to spend in Northern Virginia to get a house in a neighborhood with those amenities.

        1. Matt Adams Avatar
          Matt Adams

          That is very true, my rent was $2250 for a 2500 sq ft townhouse for the community that the school in question resides.

          1. how_it_works Avatar
            how_it_works

            House I used to live in back in Elmhurst, IL in a neighborhood with those amenities (and which somehow manages to avoid turning into complete dump despite the lack of an HOA) is worth $322K according to Zillow.

            Try to find any house you can buy for $322K in NoVA you don’t need to wear a bulletproof vest to go to closing…

            NoVA ought to have a slogan. How about “Overpriced Mediocrity”.

          2. Matt Adams Avatar
            Matt Adams

            I could understand the price because of access to the Fed, which is what is driving it all. However, traffic is in a word horrible and the other means of getting to DC are terrible as well.

            That’s not to say there aren’t some pockets even with high prices in NOVA that aren’t sketchy either. Inside the beltway that math gets tossed on it’s head.

            I don’t miss it, I had a 32 mile commute that would take me an hour.

          3. how_it_works Avatar
            how_it_works

            I think access to the Fed is highly overrated, by people who see high salaries without considering cost of living or quality of life.

          4. Lefty665 Avatar
            Lefty665

            Fortunately I discovered there was life beyond the beltway when I was relatively young, although Richmond was something of a culture shock.

          5. Matt Adams Avatar
            Matt Adams

            I was a transplant from WPA by way of CPA. So my progress was gradual, still not to my liking as I prefer the country. I could understand the culture shock, Richmond probably didn’t change its stripes for a very long time.

  2. Not Today Avatar
    Not Today

    Investments in student learning and mental health PAY OFF. These positions don’t represent bloat or excess but investment. Congrats to the school and its students/graduates!

  3. James Wyatt Whitehead Avatar
    James Wyatt Whitehead

    Freedom High School is in South Riding, Virginia. Not Chantilly.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Riding,_Virginia
    Although if you go back to the early days of the 1790s, Congressman Richard Bland Lee arranged for a southern tip of Loudoun to break off and join Fairfax County in the Sully Plantation/Dulles region of Northern Virginia. Too far to Leesburg. Lee wanted a closer court house, Fairfax.
    I had a choice between Department Chair of History at Freedom or Briar Woods way back. I picked Briar Woods. We crushed Freedom in everything from sports to band to academics. Better fight song and school colors too. I do salute the scholars from Freedom. Great accomplishment! Interestingly, the land where the school is located was once called Conklin. It was a poor neighborhood established for freed slaves in Reconstruction. I can recall the tar paper shacks, hand pumps in the front yard, and out house in the backyard. That was only 25 years ago. I have often wondered if those long time land owners were compensated. Pricy real estate now.

    1. Matt Adams Avatar
      Matt Adams

      Oh for certain pricy real estate now. I moved out in 2019, a median house price was $636,000. 2500 sq ft townhouses were going for $500,000+.

      I did enjoy the area and it had everything you needed, but it was just to expensive to buy a house.

  4. Acbar Avatar
    Acbar

    Friends and relatives who visit us often remark, first, on the strong Asian presence here in northern Virginia, and then on the many other nationalities, all so often first encountered here through their many restaurants and cuisines, and then through random neighborhood shopping and community gatherings, and then, yes, through the schools. Why is purple Virginia turning bluer, and why is northern Virginia leading the transition? I think a lot of it can be traced to the lack of ethnic phobias in northern Virginia and the polarized disconnect from those who still preach, and practice, and see the nation in terms of, hostile cultural identities. And that lack of phobias, that broad acceptance of ‘others,’ begins in the public school system, in places like Freedom High but really throughout the northern Virginia region.

    There is one cultural identity that stands out for its sometime isolation from this educational mixing bowl, African American, and that isolation too is dissipating, but far too slowly, and against the headwinds of economic status and, even in northern Virginia (and certainly elsewhere in Virginia), confronting a minority who still endorse racism. The debate over the need for race-based ‘affirmative action’ and its effect on other minorities runs deep here.

    It’s expensive to live and horrible to commute in northern Virginia. Why do people move here anyway but because the jobs are here, and the good schools, and a cultural mixing bowl that works. The reactionary sorts are having a hard time opposing this drift; often they engage in a counterproductive rearguard action that only increases the isolation of those left behind. RoVa, take note, NoVa is your future, sooner or later. Don’t fight it, embrace it. Don’t reinvent the wheel but learn from NoVa’s mistakes as well as its many successes. “Woke” did not come here to die.

  5. Matt Adams Avatar
    Matt Adams

    Just an aside, this area (South Riding) is more ethic than show by Freedom’s demos. However, there are a lot of schools in the area as well as a Paul the 6th.

    It’s a very nice area, the only problem I experienced when I lived there was snow clearance.

    1. James Wyatt Whitehead Avatar
      James Wyatt Whitehead

      There is a new one in Middleburg that will tap into Loudoun pool of students. Beautiful campus of the old Notre Dame academy. Started up by one of the big box churches in Leesburg.
      https://ccaguardians.net/

      1. Matt Adams Avatar
        Matt Adams

        Oh Middleburg, Hunter’s Head Tavern. Now I’m hungry.

  6. Dick Hall-Sizemore Avatar
    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    I don’t know what Jim Sherlock’s point is, but I have three observations. One, I am surprised that only three students are headed to Ivy League schools. With this level of family income, there is certainly the money there to pay for it. Two, the demographics of this school district illustrates what we have been talking about–kids from higher income families get the the high SOL scores and get into the more selective universities. Three, 40 kids from one Northern Virginia high school going to UVa confirms one of the reasons my grandson wanted to go to an out-of-state school. Going to UVa or even W&M would have put him in the same group of kids that he had known all his life. (Admittedly, another major factor was that he wanted to be on his college swim team and his times are not fast enough for Division I.)

  7. James A. Bacon Avatar
    James A. Bacon

    That sure is a lot of white-adjacent names. Maybe we’ll have to start talking about White-Adjacent Supremacy.

  8. WayneS Avatar
    WayneS

    33 non-teaching administrators in a school with 2,000 students doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable to me – especially given all the state and federal laws, regulations and policies they have to keep track of and follow.

    It comes out to about one non-teaching administrator for every 60 students (60.6 to be exact).

    1. James Wyatt Whitehead Avatar
      James Wyatt Whitehead

      Multiply 33 times 17 high schools. 561 positions. A fork lift is needed to haul in the dough for pay check time. When Freedom and Briar opened in the same year 2005, about 20 positions were funded. Of course times have changed, the schools are larger, and the school board has added positions to address challenges.
      Truth about most of Loudoun’s high schools. The factors that determine success are primarily intact families, level of parents education, and income. Socioeconomics.

  9. f/k/a_tmtfairfax Avatar
    f/k/a_tmtfairfax

    A nit. I believe the correct address for Freedom HS is South Riding, VA.

  10. Teddy007 Avatar
    Teddy007

    If the school an AP or an IB school. Given that it has more male tha female students, I suspect it is an AP school. Also, given that it has more male than female students, which sports teams are good?

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