Speaking at the Dec. 19 school board meeting, Liz Bolton was aggrieved.

“I went to speak out of an earnest belief in Alexandria’s commitment to equity,” Bolton later told Theogony. “I asked for data on the demographics and growth patterns and decision making process that would support closing a Title 1 majority Black school.”

“Five months later, I still don’t have that data,” she said. “Alexandria’s families deserve better than this.”

Bolton’s child attends the Jefferson-Houston School, which for decades was an elementary school. But in 2014, it transitioned to begin serving students from grades pre-kindergarten through eight. Five years later, the K-8 model expanded to include the Patrick Henry School, which was also originally an elementary school.

“[K-8 schools] employ the nurturing, individualized instruction and student-centered atmosphere of elementary education combined with the instructional processes … of middle grades education,” read a 2011 ACPS report. 

According to a Jefferson-Houston staff member who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, the K-8 vision was not fully realized as it had been originally planned, which she said could have been a reason to end it. 

“The way it should work is a modeling system, where the middle school students come down and read to the fourth-graders and vice versa,” she said. “That’s the idea, [but] that’s not working with us, so we have had to kind of segregate.” 

The staff member explained that the middle school stays on the third floor and doesn’t come down unless students use a certain stairwell. “It’s basically two schools in one school,” she said.

Some parents have argued for the end of K-8 schools for years due to their smaller size, which limits class and activity selection. Further, the schools come with additional costs — about $5.5 million per year, according to a recent ACPS presentation.

It was for those reasons, in addition to capacity concerns, that in July of 2022 the school board explored restricting access to the model by eliminating the option for families to opt-in to K-8 programs. However, a slim 4-3 vote succeeded in preserving the option to opt-in.

Between the 2022 and 2024 votes, internal discontent with the K-8 model grew, according to Abdel Elnoubi, a current City Council member who served on the school board at the time of both votes.

In addition, one of the two K-8 schools, Patrick Henry, was bursting at its seams with a 114% capacity rate, a figure that has now increased to 152%. The two city middle schools also faced utilization at or above capacity.

It was a combination of these two factors — struggles to implement the K-8 model effectively and overutilization — that eventually led Kay-Wyatt, the superintendent, to privately urge the school board to think about ending the program.

“I do remember the superintendent, on several occasions, making the comment, ‘You know, we really need to do something about K-8. We really need to look at the K-8,’” Elnoubi said in an interview.

All the while, Jefferson-Houston faced changes in school leadership — including the absence of a permanent principal for around 11 months — and staff vacancies that left the school in turmoil, said the anonymous staff member.

Parent Dave Robbins said he thought the school was on the recovery, particularly due to efforts from the parent-teacher association. “They finally steered this ship in the right direction and the school was blossoming,” he said.

But the staff member said the school still needed reform. “Some change is necessary,” she said, “and the conversion might be the right step.”

“There’s always a laundry list of people that are out on Friday and Monday, to the tune of 15 people, 20 people, sometimes. We’re just struggling,” the staff member said, articulating her belief that Jefferson-Houston faces a lack of attention from district leadership compared to other schools. “Do you think Central Office has been here? Not once.”

Elnoubi said that he thinks the disruptive environment was a deciding factor to explore elimination.

“I think the real reason [to eliminate K-8 schools] is that the ACPS administration and some school board members just don’t like K-8, don’t think it’s an effective model and don’t want to put in the work to try to fix it,” he said.

Publicly, though, the school district maintained that the rationale for considering the elimination of K-8 was primarily based on capacity concerns.

“Mainly the public comments were more around capacity, capacity, capacity, capacity, capacity. Which again, didn’t make any sense to me,” Elnoubi said. “Because you’re not adding capacity when you actually need it, which is today.”

Elnoubi is referring to the timeline of the plan, which indicates that the conversions would take place beginning in 2030. By that time, projected enrollment will be decreasing but still above intended use for some schools, including both other middle schools, according to ACPS projections.

In the weeks after the K-8 analysis report was presented publicly, high-level ACPS staff — including Finney and Kay-Wyatt — assured the community that a decision on the future of the K-8 model had not yet been made.

But as early as Nov. 7, conversions of Jefferson-Houston and Patrick Henry were included in a proposal for the 2026-35 Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) budget. They were described as a “placeholder” multiple times by Rief, Finney, Kay-Wyatt and Chief of Facilities Alicia Hart.

13 days before the pivotal vote, on Dec. 6, the ACPS Express newsletter still said, “A decision has not yet been made.”

But the Jefferson-Houston and Patrick Henry communities, along with ACPS parents as a whole, were never outright made aware of the vote to convert the schools on Dec. 19.

“[Has the Jefferson-Houston community] been told explicitly [that] this will be recommended to the board and the board will vote on it in December or around this time?” Elnoubi asked Finney in the moments prior to the vote.

“To answer that question, no,” Finney responded.

It remains unclear what exactly caused the school district to pursue the conversion of Jefferson-Houston into a middle school and Patrick Henry into an elementary school, as that plan was not studied in the analysis report. Robbins, the Jefferson-Houston parent, said he’s still waiting for a clearer explanation.

“We rightfully expected them to come to the community at some point and say, ‘Here’s our recommendation. … This is why we picked option B instead of option A,’” said Robbins, a member of the “SaveJH” initiative.

“We’ve continued to ask them to provide their justification,” he added. “They’ve never produced that.”

Other proposed models — which were included in the analysis report — were preferred by the community and more adequately addressed overutilization, according to ACPS data. Some, though, were more expensive.

The decision to eliminate the K-8 program was urged by Kay-Wyatt and Rief, according to Elnoubi.

“I certainly had conversations with Michelle [Rief] and I told her, ‘I don’t have all the information. This is rushed. I feel I need more time,’” Elnoubi said.

“She also told me it’s because Dr. Kay-Wyatt wanted a decision on K-8,” Elnoubi added. “[Kay-Wyatt] didn’t want that decision to be drawn out … because it was the last meeting [in the school board term] and if we don’t vote, then the new board would come in.”

A vote on the CIP budget was also set for Dec. 19. Removing or altering the “placeholder” plans would have required considerable reconstruction of the CIP, a difficult undertaking considering time and fiscal constraints.

It was in the midst of this tumultuous environment that a floating motion was introduced that would have directed the superintendent to “plan” for the conversions,” Elnoubi said.

Then the actual vote came around.

In February, City Manager James Parajon proposed his budget to the City Council, which now includes former school board members Elnoubi and Greene. The proposed budget provided less than half of the funds requested by the school board, and it specifically withheld the funds necessary for the K-8 school conversions.

Parajon claimed the school board’s budget request was not “sustainable,” ultimately influencing the City’s budget proposal.

The school district’s chief of communications, Julia Burgos, declined to provide comment from ACPS staff on the City Council budget for legal reasons.

Earlier in the year, on Jan. 21, lawyer and Jefferson-Houston parent Michael O’Brien filed a legal complaint against the school board claiming that it didn’t properly engage impacted families.

O’Brien’s complaint asserted that the conversion vote should be repealed under Virginia code §22.1-79. The code states that school boards must hold a public hearing and provide notice of the hearing in local newspapers for any change in “pupil assignment” that impacts 15 percent or more of students at any given school, as long as the district has at least 15,000 students in total enrollment.

ACPS enrolled more than 16,000 students in the 2024-25 school year, and a Theogony analysis found that phasing out the K-8 model would affect the assignment of more than 15 percent of students attending both Patrick Henry and Jefferson-Houston.

An analysis by Theogony also found that notice of a public hearing about the decision to vote on the K-8 model was not circulated in Alexandria’s newspapers prior to the vote in December.

On April 23, O’Brien’s lawsuit was dismissed on the basis that he didn’t have standing to file the case. Judge James Clark concluded that by the time the Jefferson-Houston conversion would take place, O’Brien’s children would no longer be attending the school.

No information on the case was available in the online courts database at publishing time, but O’Brien said ACPS claimed the Jefferson-Houston conversion would take place in 2034.

O’Brien, though, pointed to a CIP budget document that listed the conversion process as beginning in 2030 — when he would still have a child attending Jefferson-Houston. O’Brien said he missed the 30-day deadline to submit the document, so the judge had to disregard it.

According to O’Brien, the judge reasoned that the school board generated a legal “black hole” with “selective presentation” of data and information about the conversions. O’Brien told Theogony he plans to appeal.

In the days after the vote, a group of vocal parents who were strongly opposed to the conversions created the “SaveJH” website. Robbins said that it’s “disappointing” to see the elementary section of the school go.

The Jefferson-Houston staff member, though, said she supports the decision.

“I feel sad for the families, but I know that we need this as a district,” she said. “We need another middle school.”

Robbins said he was anxious that the conversion could cause elementary students to lose special benefits, like a food pantry and reading specialists, that they receive from the city due to Jefferson-Houston’s Title 1 status —  a status that only one other elementary school on the East End holds, compared to five on the West End. He also scrutinized the overall impact on equity.

“Ultimately, the West End is getting the short end of the stick, even though their elementary schools and their middle school and their K-8 school are already overcrowded,” Robbins said. “It’s extremely unfair to them that the new middle school is going to be far on the East Side of the city.”

While she acknowledged that there may have been better options, the staff member agreed with ACPS that the school needs a fresh start.

“Is this the best choice?” she said. “I don’t know. But we’ve been a failing school for a long time, so maybe it’s what’s necessary for us to start over.”