Students and staff at Arlington Community High School and its predecessors have become accustomed to making moves.
And another one is in the offing.
County school officials anticipate departing the building that has housed the school since 2016 no later than the start of the 2022-23 school year, part of a plan to redevelop the Arlington Career Center parcel near Columbia Pike.
Where the school may end up remains an open question, one that might be answered next spring when Superintendent Francisco Durán presents a 10-year capital-spending package for School Board consideration.
What is now Arlington Community High School began life decades ago as Arlington Mill High School Continuation Program, located in the western Columbia Pike corridor and focused on providing education to immigrants beyond traditional high-school years.
When its then-home was demolished to make way for the Arlington Mill Community Center, the school program moved first to Ballston (where it was co-located with a Northern Virginia Community College facility) and then to the Career Center.
Its most recent move was just next door, when the school – by then accredited as a full-fledged high school – in 2016 moved into the former Fenwick Center, a building that for years had housed county-government public-health offices and other facilities.
Under the current timeline, Durán is expected to present his updated capital-improvement plan to School Board members in May 2022, with adoption a month later. That package will guide facilities planning for the next decade.