Stafford Supervisors, School Board Members in Disagreement over Elementary School 19
Supervisors don't like the School Board's decision to build at Brooke Point High School but are split on whether they should be able to change that decision.
by Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
The location of the 19th Stafford County elementary school continues to be a source of tension between the School Board and Board of Supervisors.
At the Supervisors’ last meeting on February 6, Chair and Falmouth representative Meg Bohmke again expressed her unhappiness with the School Board’s decision to build the school at Brooke Point High School, instead of on land proffered for a school in the Embrey Mill neighborhood.
“I believe it is our fiduciary responsibility as the Board of Supervisors to withhold funding and request changes,” Bohmke said. “When you have all these Board members sitting up here saying this is a terrible location, something has to change, unfortunately.”
As a result of the discussion, County Administrator Randall Vosburg said he would come back at the next meeting—scheduled for February 20—with information on “strategies of impacting where schools are located” and “what process would need to go before Board.”
All seven Supervisors have stated, either at a January joint meeting with the School Board or at the February 6 meeting, that they don’t like the idea of putting the new school at Brooke Point.
Supervisors have cited concerns about traffic in the area—which, if the elementary school is built, would contain three schools (Brooke Point High, Stafford Middle, and the new elementary).
They have also said they don’t like the idea of tearing up and relocating the high school’s parking lot and some athletic fields in order to build the elementary school.
Bohmke on February 6 said she feels there has been a lack of public transparency around the decision to reject the Embrey Mill site.
“It is our responsibility to vet where funds are being used”
Embrey Mill is located in the Garrisonville district, which was identified in 2022 by the school division as one of three high-growth areas. According to a presentation prepared by division staff on hypothetical walk zones for several elementary school sites, there are 523 students who currently live within walking distance of the Embrey Mill school site.
There are four elementary schools within the Garrisonville boundaries—Park Ridge, Hampton Oaks, Winding Creek, and Anthony Burns.
Park Ridge, where students from Embrey Mill are currently zoned, already has six “modular classrooms” in place to relieve overcrowding and will have four more next school year. Hampton Oaks and Winding Creek also both have four modulars in place.
The School Board voted against the Embrey Mill site twice last year, in April and May, both times by narrow 4-to-3 majorities following closed sessions.
Board members Maureen Siegmund, Garrisonville representative; Susan Randall, George Washington representative; Alyssa Halstead, Hartwood representative; and Patricia Healy, Rock Hill representative, voted against the Embrey Mill site.
The Board then voted 6-to-1 in October to build Elementary School 19 at Brooke Point, with Falmouth representative Sarah Chase voting against.
At the February 6 supervisors meeting, Rock Hill representative Crystal Vanuch said the appearance is that “in order to keep a promise that was probably a bad promise, (the School Board) is making a bad decision on a location for the school.”
“It is our responsibility to vet where funds are being used,” Vanuch said. “I don’t know what the path forward is here, but I hope we can turn this bad decision around.”
“There’s not anything I can do”
Other Supervisors on February 6 said that while they don’t agree with the decision, they don’t see that there is anything they can do about it, and they don’t support delaying the construction of a school.
Deuntay Diggs, George Washington representative, questioned what precedent it would set for Supervisors to dictate school location.
“I agree that I don’t like that it’s at Brooke Point … I don’t like how it was done,” he said. “But once we go down this road of telling them where to put schools, how do we stop this from happening in the future? That’s my concern with this.”
Monica Gary, Aquia representative, pointed out that the school division has said the cost of deferring construction of Elementary School 19 would be $8.6 million, and that elementary schools in the county are severely overcrowded.
“[Delaying construction of Elementary School 19] delays our students from being able to be in buildings instead of trailers and closets and hallways,” she said. “I’m not in support of doing anything further to try to push the School Board to do something different than what they decided.”
Tinesha Allen, Griffis-Widewater representative, said the “location and design (of the school) is not up to me, it’s up to the School Board.”
“If you’re not happy, you go protest at the School Board. There’s not anything I can do,” she said.
“We want a neighborhood school!”
A group of Embrey Mill parents has begun to protest to the School Board and recently shared a petition with 237 signatures titled “We want a neighborhood school built!”
“Our children can then walk to school in their own neighborhood, spending less time on buses and in cars and more time with friends and family,” the petition states.
Many of the parents who signed the petition noted that they bought homes in the Embrey Mill neighborhood because they were told an elementary school would be built there.
At least three parents, all residents of the Garrisonville district, spoke or submitted written comments in opposition to the decision to put Elementary School 19 at Brooke Point at the School Board’s last regular meeting on February 13.
Meghan Boresky wrote to express concern about putting elementary school students in close proximity to high schoolers.
“It is deeply troubling to note that Brooke Point High School has had a staggering 41 police responses since August of 2023, with twenty-one of those responses related to assaults on students and staff and eleven related to drugs,” Boresky wrote. “These incidents serve as a stark reminder that the safety and well-being of our students are at risk. The decision to build ES#19 so close to Brooke Point High School will result in instances where the behavior and activities of the high school students will have direct impact on the safety and well-being of the younger students.”
Jessica Pierce, a resident of Embrey Mill, raised the fact that one of the School Board members is a partner in the law firm that represents North Stafford Associates, the owner of the Embrey Mill development.
“Who does the School Board really represent, the developer or the constituents?” Pierce asked.
The Board member—Patricia Healy, a partner in the firm Healy & Leming—has recused herself from School Board votes related to properties her firm represents.
On February 13, she abstained from two votes that followed a closed session held to “discuss and/or consider the acquisition of real property related to the construction of High School 6 and Elementary School 18,” according to the meeting agenda.
But Pierce questioned why Healy did not recuse herself from the two votes last year on whether to accept the Embrey Mill school site for elementary school 19.
“What future decisions will they decide they need to make instead of us?”
In an interview this week, School Board Chair Maureen Siegmund said Healy, who has been on the Board for decades, is “very, very good about recusing herself when she feels there is a feeling of impropriety.”
“In this case, we were voting on a location,” Siegmund said. “We as a Board had opted for a school in the northeast of the county and [the Embrey Mill property] didn’t fit that description at all.”
Siegmund said that since she was elected in 2022, it has been the Board’s consensus that new elementary schools should go in the southwest and northeast of the county.
“From the Hartwood area, we have been pushing kids north and from the Aquia area we have been pushing kids west,” she said. “So, in an effort to meet kids where they are, we opted to prioritize those areas.”
Siegmund said that 80% of students who attend Anthony Burns Elementary, which is in the Garrisonville district, actually live closer to Stafford Elementary, which is in the Aquia district with Brooke Point High School.
“Nobody close to Stafford Elementary goes to Stafford Elementary,” she said. “Students bus down U.S. 1 to Anthony Burns. [A new school in the Aquia district] would let us put students on both sides [of U.S. 1] in schools closer to their homes.”
“Even in 2019 [when the School Board redistricted all elementary schools], we had neighborhoods pushed from Anthony Burns further west to make room for more students coming from what would have been Stafford Elementary.”
When the Board of Supervisors last spring approved both Elementary Schools 18 and 19 to open together in 2026—which happened “to our surprise and gratitude” when Supervisors had to go back and re-pass a budget after they realized that the budget as initially passed would have required the School Board to make drastic cuts to its budget—the School Board had to make a quick decision about a location for Elementary School 19, Siegmund said.
The county and school division’s joint Land Acquisition Committee considered seventeen possible sites for Elementary School 19, nine of which were located in the northeast, according to a presentation from the January 23 joint meeting of the School Board and Supervisors.
However, none of the nine sites were owned by the School Board, were within the county’s urban services area with access to sewer and water, or were construction-ready, Siegmund said.
That’s when staff identified the Brooke Point site, which “did not cost additional money as far as procuring land, did not require additional time, and met our geographic needs,” Siegmund said.
She said she feels frustrated that Supervisors “seem intent on building wherever we have land, even though it’s not where our Board identified our need is for having a school.”
Siegmund said she worries about Supervisors setting a precedent of overruling the School Board’s decisions.
“What future decisions will they decide they need to make instead of us?” she questioned.
She said she feels for the residents of Embrey Mill who were promised a school by the developers, but pointed out that Elementary School 20 is slated to open in Embrey Mill in 2030—and that supervisors have approved full funding for that project.
Siegmund said delaying Elementary School 19 is only going to exacerbate current overcrowding. Ten of the seventeen county elementary schools are over capacity this year; three more are operating at 95-100% capacity.
Any attempt to slow construction of the first new school built for growth since 2008 is “not the direction the county needs to go,” Siegmund said.
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I am interested in knowing whether one criteria for locating schools is student population density. Secondarily, are all schools funded equally according to student population?