By Brian Trompeter
Fairfax County supervisors voted 10-0 Feb. 7 to approve the county School Board’s request to rezone Mosaic Elementary School in Oakton to permit building additions and site improvements.
The school system will build a 55,365-square-foot, two-story expansion that will bring the school’s overall floor area to 125,000 square feet. Located largely on the site’s southwest corner, the expansion will replace part of the existing building.
The addition’s main level will have kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, a gymnasium, three courtyards, and an expanded cafeteria and library. Its second level will have classrooms for third through sixth grades and special education.
Other changes will include a parking-lot expansion that will add 55 spaces; new bicycle racks; new 5-foot-wide sidewalks along the vehicular entrances; and a 6-foot-wide asphalt trail around the playing fields in the north.
There also will be three new play areas on the site’s southern portion, including an 11,040-square-foot multi-purpose paved playground with basketball court, a 4,095-square-foot paved play area and a 6,175-square-foot modular playground.
Supervisors rezoned the 10-acre property, located at 9819 Five Oaks Road, from the R-2 residential district to R-3. The R-2 zone allows up to a 0.25 floor-area ratio (FAR) for public uses and the expansion will increase that to 0.29, requiring the rezoning to the denser R-3 district.
(FAR compares a development’s gross square footage with that of its site.)
The site, home to 69,635-square-foot school building, now is accessed from a “pipestem” driveway from Five Oaks Road. There is a bus pick-up/drop-off area near the school’s front entrance, a surface parking lot in the site’s southeast corner, a 10-classroom modular building and eight temporary classrooms.
The project also will add a second vehicular-access point for buses only from Kingsbridge Drive, which will separate from the kiss-and-ride traffic and provide additional ingress and egress for school users and emergency vehicles, officials said.
In addition to being for buses only, the new entrance off of Kingsbridge Drive will have a gate that will be closed during school off-hours so the route does not become a cut-through, said John McGranahan, the applicant’s attorney.
Buses will arrive at the property from one direction, stay on site during school hours and then leave out the other entrance, he said. The arrangement also will not result in the loss of on-street parking on Kingsbridge Drive, he added.
A tree buffer will screen the school from the view of neighbors living on Savoy Drive, McGranahan said.
The project is important for the School Board because the school, which was built in 1964, has been in Fairfax County Public Schools’ renovation queue since 2008, McGranahan said.
“It’s been a long time coming,” he said.
The expansion will add substantially to the school’s gross floor area, but increase its student capacity just slightly from 1,038 students to 1,050.
“It’s really the educational specifications that are driving that,” McGranahan said, citing as an example the new gymnasium.
The School Board hopes the expansion and renovation, which will be financed with $38 million from the 2021 bond issuance, will be constructed and ready for use by fall 2025, he said.
The upgrades are “much-needed and truly will be a beautiful renovation,” said Supervisor Dalia Palchik (D-Providence), adding that the facility was one of the first schools where she taught Spanish after college.
Mosaic Elementary now has 966 students enrolled, and the addition is intended to help the school move away from temporary classrooms that long have been at the site, Palchik said.
The applicant’s extensive outreach led to the best possible outcome for the community, which now will benefit from two safer entrances and electric-vehicle-charging stations, she said.
The facility previously was known as Mosby Woods Elementary until the School Board renamed it Mosaic Elementary in February 2021. The change took effect in July that year.
