Harper Park Middle School

Harper Park Middle School is a public middle school in Leesburg, Virginia, a town in Loudoun County, Virginia.

The school is part of Loudoun County Public Schools and is located on 701 Potomac Station Drive in Potomac Station, Virginia.

History

Harper Park opened in 1999, with its student body coming from J. Lupton Simpson Middle School and Farmwell Station Middle School. Harper Park opened in a time of explosive growth in the Leesburg area. It originally served as the feeder middle school for Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, Virginia. During its first two years of operation, most Harper Park students did not live in Leesburg. In the 2000-2001 school year when Stone Bridge opened, Harper Park 8th graders were housed at Stone Bridge along with the 9th, 10th and 11th graders due to crowding at Harper Park, which had an estimated 1,500 students. In the 2001-2002 school year, Eagle Ridge Middle School opened in Ashburn, which removed over half of the student body, but students from the southeastern part of Leesburg were fed into Harper Park, which was then designated as the middle school for Heritage High School as Eagle Ridge fed into Stone Bridge. This move was very controversial because Heritage is nearly across the street from J. Lupton Simpson Middle School, which fed (and still feeds into) Loudoun County High School. The boundary lines are drawn to the point where students who live on houses across the street from Heritage High School attend Simpson which is also across the street, but interestingly attend Loudoun County High instead of Heritage later on. Though Harper Park was for a time considered to be the feeder middle school for Loudoun County High, it was abandoned because of backlash from parents in the Potomac Station and River Creek subdivisions, who wanted their children to attend brand new schools, and also because they did not want to return children to return to the same high school cluster where they were before Stone Bridge opened. In 2004, Smart's Mill Middle School opened in the northern part of Leesburg, and took Harper Park students from the Leesburg Elementary and the Ball's Bluff Elementary zones, who continue to feed into Heritage despite the middle school change. Smart's Mill also took students from Lucketts Elementary in northern Leesburg, whose students feed into Loudoun County High even after the school's opening.