News-Press Editorial:

Fairfax Supervisor Joan DuBois did a disservice to the Falls Church School Board's difficult deliberations on improvements to the Mt. Daniel Elementary School Tuesday by redefining the issue of the educational and security needs of young children attending Mt. Daniel into a contentious jurisdictional dispute.

Ms. DuBois, elected last year to represent the Dranesville district of Fairfax, where Mt. Daniel is located, came to Tuesday's "standing room only" meeting of the School Board to weigh in on the side of neighbors to the Mt. Daniel site who also turned out in force to protest some of the features of the improvement and expansion plan.

We expected Ms. DuBois, as the most powerful elected official in the room, to take a leadership role in providing insight to help accommodate the needs of both the young students and the neighbors. But instead, she launched into a shocking indictment of decisions made by Falls Church City officials about internal Falls Church matters, assuming an adversarial "us" (Fairfax) versus "them" (Falls Church) posture. Without reference to the young student needs that define the challenge for the Falls Church School Board, she said she "strongly urged" the board to scale back its plans in accordance with the wishes of her constituents, the neighbors to the site. She went on to say she was "particularly troubled" by actions of Falls Church government leaders concerning their own internal land use decisions. With all due respect to Ms. DuBois, none of the cases she cited involving Whittier Park, Madison Park or the Diener site in the City of Falls Church would have precluded the need to renovate and expand Mt. Daniel, unless she was suggesting they should have allowed for the elimination of Mt. Daniel altogether, which has never been seriously considered.

Contrary to that divisive approach, it is to the credit of most residents around Mt. Daniel that they do not deny or begrudge the need for a renovation and expansion of Mt. Daniel, but disapprove of certain elements of the present design. Appreciating this, it was thus left to the Falls Church School Board to assume the leadership role toward a resolution of the conflict, which it did by unanimously resolving to move ahead while asking its architects to develop more "alternatives and options" to still be considered. (For us, lack of adequate egress from the school site, in these dangerous times, is a paramount concern.)

The issue of the education and security of pre-school, kindergarten and first grade students should not be whether they are Fairfax County students or Falls Church students. Whatever twists and turns over the years have brought us to the current configuration of schools and neighborhoods, it is those realities that responsible leadership and citizenship, as opposed to ideology or demagoguery, are challenged to deal with. Whether we've got them or not right now, we all live for kids because we live for the future and our ability to care.