For the second year in a row, members from the Fairfax County School Board arrived at WS to speak to Leadership students and get feedback concerning the learning environment created by FCPS.

Simply by reading this newspaper every month, it is evident that the students have a lot of things they want to change about their current school system, and the members of the school board are ready and willing to hear them out.

Braddock District school board member Megan McLaughlin and Springfield District member Elizabeth Schultz came to WS with the needs of the students at the forefront of their minds.
“Your voices and opinions are extremely important to us,” said McLaughlin before they opened the floor to student comments.
Both McLaughlin and Schultz are aware of the amount of stress and work students of this area have to contend with; it is ever present in their homes as both have children that have or are experiencing the FCPS system.
The discussion began with students stating the three biggest stressors they experience in their day-to-day high school lives. As most people would guess, the most common response was homework and the amount of time it consumed, especially for students taking multiple AP classes. Add to that extra-curricular activities and students are often faced with about a 13-hour day. Most adults don’t work a 13-hour day, and no college student would ever think about taking four classes in one day starting at 7:20 in the morning.
“You are at a huge disadvantage to college students on time alone,” said McLaughlin to those taking multiple AP courses.
Students and the school board members discussed the tendency of students to overburden their schedules in the belief that they need to do everything to succeed.
An astounding 90 percent of FCPS students attend either a community or four-year college and for WS that number jumps to 96 percent. There is enormous self-imposed pressure to maintain a high GPA while also being involved in multiple after-school activities and clubs and the idea of being a so-called “well-rounded” student has been drilled into kids in this county since elementary school. Both Schultz and McLaughlin said they believe students should pursue their interests, which will make them attractive to colleges.
“Are you being a well-rounded student to get into a good college or are you being a well-rounded student to be a well-rounded student?” said Schultz, to which many answered yes to the former.
The fact of it is, some students here and in other FCPS schools will do almost anything to keep their grades up and improve their GPAs, even if that means going as far as cheating, as the school board members said. Grades have become so important that sacrificing morals in order to pass a test or turn in homework have become not only acceptable, but a common occurrence among students.
The school board is working on curing FCPS of this problem.
“I’d rather have a student who graduates with a C average and be ethical than a student who sacrifices those to get an A,” said Schultz.
While it may take a long time to fix this mentality, Schultz and McLaughlin are working toward a solution. In the meantime, FCPS is working on creating mindfulness training courses that would be available for students to deal with stress and focus their minds. This temporary solution should help slow down the growing pandemic, but it is clear that the exorbitant amount of homework and high stress is only a small part of the issue with FCPS, as students continue to stack their work load to look good for colleges and not for their own desires. Until students leave behind the pressure to meet the standards of a well-rounded student and pursue their own desires, there will always be a sacrifice of morals and a huge amount of stress prevalent in their lives.

“If you get [your ethics] right first, everything else will fall into place,” said Schultz.