Redistricting Fever: Back To School! (Or Not)

Now that the awesome yet unsuccessful pro-school lawsuit by the awesome pro-school FairfaxCAPS is nothing but a memory (and given its $140,000 price tag, maybe a down payment on a nice new summer home for its attorney), everyone affected by the South Lakes High School redistricting is going to accept the inevitable and buy their kids Bratz backpacks and send them off to school, right?

Not exactly.

Despite a court ruling this week that upheld the School Board's decision to reshuffle high schools for hundreds of western Fairfax County students, many parents have found a way to bypass the new boundary map and send their children to campuses of their choice.

More than a third of the 226 rising freshmen who were to be added to the roster of South Lakes High School for the coming year have transferred to nearby high schools for curricular reasons, school system records showed. Most of the 85 students who left the Reston school applied to pursue Advanced Placement classes not offered at South Lakes High. By contrast, nine incoming freshmen transferred from the school last year for similar reasons.

Of course, we pointed this AP/IB "loophole" out in our very first post on redistricting fever, way back in September or October. If people had just been paying attention, they could have saved themselves $140,000 and the funniest lawsuit since the McDonald's coffee one. Except that plaintiff actually won their lawsuit. The funniest quote of the story:

A friend whose transfer request was also accepted sent Cynthia Fry a jubilant e-mail.

"You would think she had gotten accepted into Harvard or Yale, we were so excited," Fry said.

Nice. Let's see what happens when these parents try to sue an Ivy League school when their own bratz don't get accepted there in a couple of years.