Notebook: Mount Vernon District Visioning Task Force—Oct. 4

Last week, two committees from Supervisor Gerry Hyland's Mount Vernon District Visioning Task Force met at the Mount Vernon Government Center. Members of the Public Safety and Education committees planned new ideas to take the district through the next 25 years. 

Education:

Dale Rumberger has a booming voice, one you'd find on the radio, but he instead uses it to lead the Mt. Vernon Education Taskforce, which hosted its second meeting last week where members discussed the future of education within the 18 elementary, three middle and three high schools within the Mt. Vernon District. The big topic was planning for future building, a hard feat when there are no hard numbers on the breakdown of students in the last 25 years, according to Larry Bizette, demographer to Supervisor Gerry Hyland in an e-mail to the taskforce. This is largely due to the changing boundaries of the district in the past 25 years.

"In looking back in time, school boundaries have changed are not directly comparable to today's boundaries," Hyland wrote.

Another big topic was how to project growth accurately. According to Rumberger, there is no additional building space in the district, so if there is growth, administrators will have to get creative. "Modules are often used in the military to create space, they could be implemented here."

Rumberger also discussed the beginning of a plan to create a Saturday morning tutoring program, bringing in members of the community to decrease the divide between older people and people without children and schools. Judy Harbeck, chair of the Mt. Vernon Council of Citizens' Association education committee said that she's housed concerns that teachers no longer have secretaries to organize volunteers, "Teachers are no so overworked and don't have the time to make sure volunteers will be teaching students information that directly pertains to their coursework." But Rumberger said that if there was a structured tutoring program, it wouldn't be up to the teachers to coordinate, alleviating them and potentially raising grades. He referenced The Saturday Toward Excellence Program, a partnership between Chantilly Pyramid Minority Student Achievement Committee and Chantilly High School, which offers free tutoring for students grades 3 through 12, as a potential model. The program would potentially raise grades in the district and provide a solution to the recent budget cuts to the education budget in the state.

The next meeting will be held at 7 p.m. on October 18. 

Public Safety: 

The committee's main task at hand was to plan a strategy to gather data for the demographics of the Mt. Vernon District over the past 10 years. According to Camerotta, this data must be collected in order for the committee to make projections pertaining to changes in demographics over the next 25 years.  This data will help give the committee a better idea as to what issues will be most important to the projected demographic in the Mt. Vernon District. With the help of Staff Liaison Christine Morin and Lieutenant Wall, the group determined that information such as annual income and age must be gathered from the county demographer as well as from data from 911 calls. 

"There's obviously going to be a significant population growth to the west and south to Mason Neck," remarked Committee Chair Joe Camerotta. "We need to know the expected population change in Fairfax County over the next 25 years." 

Cammerota led the group in reviewing the list of ideas from the September 13 meeting. Lieutenant Mike Wall of the Fairfax County Police Department also attended this meeting and provided valuable feedback for the group. Cammerota walked the group through condensing items on the list in order to prepare it for presentation to the Task Force as a whole.  

The committee condensed issues such as communication, citizen emergency response, adequacy of neighborhood watch and community police theme in one group, and crime/districts and reporting for Mt. Vernon, allocating resources to areas that have been seeing an increase in crime, and increased bike patrols in another.  

The committee decided to plan two public meetings in order to learn which issues the public should be focused on in their planning. These meetings will be held on October 25 and on November 8, with locations to be determined.