Schools
School bells are ringing in Leesburg
Frances Hazel Reid welcomes 862 of 31,138 elementary students in the public schools
Monday Aug. 29 was end-of-summer, back-to-school day for more than 66,000 public school students in Loudoun, and for 862 kindergarten through 5th graders at Leesburg’s Frances Hazel Reid Elementary School.
Principal Brenda Jochems and her staff were on duty by 7 a.m., organized to meet every bus and every parent in a car. Their job: Get a stick-on tag on every student identifying his or her bus number.
Find out what's happening in Leesburgwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
That way, the teachers in the classrooms can double-check those tags with their lists – and most important, make sure every child gets back on the right bus some six or seven hours later.
Jim Alexander was front and center, his first day as an administrative intern after 13 years in the classroom.
Find out what's happening in Leesburgwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“It’s very nerve wracking and exciting, like I’m starting out as a brand new teacher again,” he said.
Alexander was armed with fliers informing parents of the school’s new Watch D.O.G.S. program – Dads of Great Students.
D.O.G.S., a program of the National Center for Fathering, promotes getting fathers and father figures involved in the daily life of their children’s schools. It started as a way to enhance security, and has grown into an initiate to offer students positive male role models.
“We’ll have dads come in during the school day,” Alexander said, “and help keep the school secure, do activities with the students, get to know people in the building.”
He’s already got enough dads signed up to take care of the first month or two of the school year, and his goal is to have a D.O.G.S. dad in the school every day till the end of the school year next June 8.
There could be an academic upside as well: A RAND Corporation study several years ago found a measurable improvement in the standardized test scores of 3rd graders whose fathers were active in school activities.
BY THE NUMBERS:
0 spaces open in the Frances Hazel Reid kindergarten classes. Any additional enrollments will be “overflowed” to the closest elementary school with room.
1 new school opened this year – J. Michael Lunsford Middle School in Chantilly.
75 of this year’s new teachers graduated from a Loudoun County Public School.
80 public schools in 2011, up from 44 in 1999.
400 new teachers hired for 2011-12.
834 school buses will travel more than 9 million miles by the end of the school year next June.
4,469 seniors in the class of 2012, up 52 percent from the 2,320 who started kindergarten back in1999.
66,266 (projected) students, k – 12, up from 26,787 in 1999.
31,138 students enrolled in kindergarten through 5th grade this year, up 1,481 from last year.
