In 2023, Justice High School will begin a massive reno­va­tion, includ­ing 46,000 square feet of addi­tional space, per Fair­fax County Public Schools’ request, who hope to add increased capac­ity to the school. However, the reno­va­tion won’t widen the hall­ways or change the funda­men­tal layout of the building. 

The goal of the Justice addi­tion is to solve the over­crowd­ing prob­lem. Accord­ing to FFX NOW, “The current school has 2,182 students, exceed­ing the design capac­ity of 1,994 students… the school board is seek­ing a long-term solu­tion that would accom­mo­date up to 2,500 students.” This would solve many issues, as Steven Denlinger, the Justice Year­book advi­sor, says, “I’m hoping it will allow each teacher to have their own room […] one of the high­est levels of frus­tra­tion I saw among new teach­ers […] was the need to move from room to room. Some of them are teach­ing in three rooms.” 

The addi­tion won’t be all bene­fits though, as fresh­man Bisma Aftab says, “The build­ing already is kind of confus­ing, cause there are so many sections and so many doors, and now they’re adding a whole [other] part?” The addi­tion adds essen­tially three hall­ways to the school, which might make things harder to navi­gate for new students. Addi­tion­ally, pass­ing peri­ods are only seven minutes long. Will adding such a signif­i­cant amount of new area with­out widen­ing hall­ways make over­crowd­ing worse? Class sizes may be smaller, but the hall­ways will be longer. And park­ing will be severely limited with the addi­tion present with FCPS saying on their Justice High School Addi­tion page, “The essen­tial addi­tion sched­uled to be constructed on the school prop­erty will substan­tially reduce the number of park­ing spaces currently avail­able […] FCPS will only be able to accom­mo­date less than half the amount of park­ing currently required by Fair­fax County.”

Addi­tion­ally, with teacher short­ages, many classes at Justice already don’t have long-term teach­ers, so if there are no new teach­ers coming to the school, does the school walk out with only new, unused facil­i­ties to show for their trou­bles? Accord­ing to FCPS’ Capi­tal Improve­ment Project status page, the comple­tion date for the addi­tion is still being deter­mined. After however many years it takes, will Justice still suffer from the same issues it’s had for years?

The addi­tion will solve prob­lems, but is the effec­tive­ness of the solu­tion over­played? The answer, as with many other things FCPS says, is “to be determined.”