A Second-or Third-Alexandria Public High School?

From The Alexandria Times, February 6, 2025.

On October 24, 2024, The Alexandria Times published a voters’ guide asking all candidates in the city’s elections, “Does Alexandria need a second high school?” The majority of the City Council and School Board candidates answered, “Yes.”

What is the newly-opened 300,000-plus square foot Minnie Howard Campus of Alexandria City High School (ACHS) if not a second high school? Alexandria City Public Schools’ website describes a single multi-site high school but, as a practical matter, Alexandria now has two public high schools about a mile apart.

The essential questions, which are bound up in history and identity, are whether ACPS should continue to operate two high school buildings (and other high school options) under a single name and whether it is time to start planning for a third high school with its own name and identity.

This school year revealed a downside of ACHS’ single-school multiple-campus arrangement in the problems associated with a master schedule for 4,000 students requiring students to move between the King Street and Minnie Howard campuses. Thus far, campus-to-campus student travel has had problems, for example, missed busses. A teacher told me that there is no penalty, no “tardy,” for students late to class who come from the other building.

Entrepreneurs talk about scaling up a business to market prominence. ACPS, aided by the warm “one town, one team” emotions created by Disney’s Remember the Titans movie that was released in 2000, may have allowed ACHS to scale up to a point of diminishing returns for students and teachers.

Identity matters for a person, school, or city. Is it still essential to Alexandria’s identity that ACPS operate a single high school that stretches one name and administrative structure across multiple sites—or would our students and teachers be better served by independently organized high schools?

ACHS’s leadership structure reflects issues related to the school’s size. A high school principal is a demanding position. As a high school’s academic and social/cultural leader, a principal needs clear authority, visible presence in the school building, endless energy, and firm support from the administration and the School Board.

The executive principal who oversees ACHS’ multi-site operations may simply be spread too thin. ACHS has 27 administrators and seven Academy leads—teachers with reduced teaching loads-which creates a challenge for students trying to understand who does what.

The new Minnie Howard campus, a clear success, is larger than most Virginia high schools and reflects the latest thinking about high school education. The fear, an echo of the city’s segregated past, about an inevitably inferior second high school has been overtaken by the facts—the new Minnie Howard is a great building with an excellent staff.

Other cities Alexandria’s size managed to open a second (or third) high school in different ways. My hometown, unfortunately, delayed opening a second high school so long that students from the city’s east and west sides attended school in one building in early and late shifts until a second high school was opened. Many years later a third high school opened.

ACPS allocates students to different middle schools and elementary schools. Why should high schools be different? School officials speak of “getting their hands around” a situation. ACHS, in its current size and configuration, appears to require new approaches.

Minnie Howard could operate as an independent school. At the very least, a grades nine and 10, 11th and 12th grade configuration for Minnie Howard and King Street should be studied to see if the campus-to-campus travel problems can be solved or reduced. This approach might create problems for the new academy organizational plan, but it recognizes a reality: ACHS is organized in four grades.

When I was a T.C. Williams teacher, a City Councilor asked me if Alexandria needed a second high school. I answered confidently that a single high school was part of Alexandria’s DNA.

The city’s genetic makeup has changed since that time.

We can do better for our students and teachers by acknowledging the reality of our two high schools and planning for a third one.

The writer is a former lawyer, member of the Alexandria School Board from 1997 to 2006, and English teacher from 2007 to 2021 at T.C. Williams High School, now Alexandria City High School. He can be reached at aboutalexandria@gmail.com and free subscriptions to his newsletter are available at https://aboutalexandria.substack.com.

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