During a regular school year, Justice High School is bursting at the seams, educating hundreds more students than the facility was built to accommodate.
The Falls Church school has long been overdue for an expansion, leading school officials to search for more space.
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One option is directly across the street: Justice Park, a 17-acre tract filled with tennis courts, open fields and trails snaking through dense forest.
Fairfax County Public Schools has proposed building a parking lot for the school on a narrow two-acre strip of parkland — a step it says is necessary to allow for the school’s expansion. But officials have run into opposition from community members who have signed petitions and filled Zoom meetings pressing the school to abandon the plan, saying they’ve been left out of the process.
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Justice High School — once known as J.E.B. Stuart High School until the school board abandoned the Confederate moniker in 2017 — sits between Bailey’s Crossroads and Seven Corners in the eastern portion of Fairfax County. More than half of its students are Latino, and nearly 59 percent receive free or reduced lunch, according to FCPS.
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The school’s design accommodates only 1,994 students, but it had just over 2,200 enrolled this past year.
The school district began planning in 2017 to build a 46,000-square-foot addition, to be completed in summer 2023, that will increase the capacity to 2,500 students.
The addition includes a three-story building with science labs and classrooms and a cafeteria expansion. But it’s also expected to reduce the number of parking spaces available on the property, meaning the school needs to build more parking to meet the county’s requirements, FCPS spokeswoman Julie Moult said in an email.
Moult said FCPS looked at a number of options, including street parking on Peace Valley Lane, the road separating the school and park. According to meeting documents, the street parking was considered unsafe, and another option — building a parking garage — was dismissed as too costly.
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Then officials began looking at building a lot at Justice Park.
FCPS and the Fairfax County Park Authority started meeting privately about the idea, an authority spokesperson said. Moult said the proposal was presented to the school community for the first time at an FCPS community outreach meeting on Dec. 8, attended by one member of the public.
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Community members have said they’ve been disappointed with what they view as a lack of communication about the plan. A group of about eight parents, students and neighbors say they first learned about it in January, when they found survey flags in the park marking out the proposed parking lot.
They immediately started flooding park and school officials with questions.
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Fairfax NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Chair Lydia Lawrence, who is part of the group opposing the parking lot, said the area is one of the more densely populated in the county, with less park space than elsewhere in Fairfax.
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“I think it’s a false argument that this community should have to choose between a renovated school and parkland,” Lawrence said. “I don’t see that happening in wealthier areas of the county. I just don’t.”
She said the school and the park were built on land once owned by Black families, some of whom she said could have felt pressured to sell their property to the county for a school that Black children initially weren’t allowed to attend.
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“It’s concerning to me that again we see history repeating itself,” Lawrence said. “It seems like their needs and their thoughts are being discounted for the greater good of a 67-space parking lot for the school.”
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Kathleen Brown, Justice High PTSA secretary, Ravenwood Park Citizens Association president and one of the members leading the fight against the parking idea, said the members support the school expansion but don’t think it’s acceptable to pave the park.
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“We just want to be a part of the process,” Brown said.
In May, during an outreach meeting hosted by FCPS and the park authority, dozens of community members joined the Zoom call to ask questions about the parking plans.
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“In this day and age, and living in Fairfax County, how can we possibly think it’s okay to pave two acres of park space?” one attendee asked. “The school needs the improved space. The architects can surely come up with a better plan for parking.”
Moult said that no formal agreement had been reached between the school district and the park authority, and that the school is still evaluating its plans for parking expansion.
Judith Pedersen, spokeswoman for the park authority, said the agency is prepared to continue negotiating with the school and looking at the options that would allow for parkland to be preserved while accommodating the school’s need for space.
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“Our gut reaction to these types of things is to protect park lands,” Pedersen said. “But we’re also charged with being a good neighbor.”
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