Manassas Park schools focus on learning

/ Potomac News
Published: July 31, 2008

Over the past several years, the Manassas Park City Schools Division has been expanding its curriculum and student activity programs and improving facilities.

In the 2006-2007 school year, the new Manassas Park Middle School building opened. The new facility included a large stage and auditorium that will be used for many of the city schools’ performances.

About nine years ago, the school system began replacing its aging buildings with new buildings, designed with input from teachers and community members.

Manassas Park High School was the first to be replaced in 1999, followed by Cougar Elementary School in 2001, and then Manassas Park Middle School.

Another focus of the school division has been expanding student activities and fine arts education.

In the 2005-2006 school year, Manassas Park Elementary School began a new fifth-grade band program that provided every student with an instrument. In 2006, the Manassas Park School Board voted to expand that program to include all interested sixth-graders. Last year it expanded the program to interested seventh graders as well.

All four of Manassas Park’s schools and the school district were fully accredited for the 2007-2008 school year. The results were based on students’ performance on Virginia’s Standards of Learning exams, which gauge student achievement in math, science, social studies and English.

At least 70 percent of the students in each school must pass in those areas to be fully accredited.

Manassas Park City Schools’ student test scores are among the highest in Northern Virginia.

Additionally, all schools successfully meet the accreditation requirements stipulated in the No Child Left Behind legislation and the accreditation requirements of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

All kindergarten through fifth-grade students benefit from small class sizes of 11 to 12 students in the core areas of mathematics and language arts.

Cougar and Manassas Park elementary schools fully implement “parallel block scheduling,” an instructional delivery model which allows teachers to tailor instruction in those two critical content areas and provides for more specialized and individualized attention to students.

The School Board meets regularly on the third Monday of each month at 6:45 p.m., in a closed meeting. The regular session, which is open to the public, begins at 8 p.m. in the School Board Meeting Room of the City Hall Building, which is located at 1 Park Center Court in Manassas Park. The first Monday of each month is reserved for special meetings or work sessions as needed.

For more information, call School Board Clerk Lois Steele at 703-335-8867 or e-mail .