Fairfax County Public Schools leaders don’t appear to be losing sleep over three of the district’s nearly 200 schools failing to meet full accreditation standards.
While 192 county schools have been fully accredited for this school year by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE), Justice High School in Lake Barcroft and Sandburg and Whitman middle schools in Fort Hunt and Hybla Valley, respectively, were rated “accredited with conditions” due to shortcomings in reported student achievement levels.
That brought out a barrage of questioning during the Oct. 10 School Board meeting, but Superintendent Michelle Reid and her staff attempted to put things into perspective.
The three schools were “very, very, very close” to meeting full accreditation standards, said Giovanny Ponce, chief of schools for FCPS. Sandburg fell short in math achievement, Justice and Whitman in science, as measured by the annual Standards of Learning (SOL) standardized tests and other state-approved exams.
According to Bettrys Huffman, director of assessment and reporting for FCPS, each school only had “one indicator out of 13” that led to the accredited-with-conditions ranking under the state’s one-strike-you’re-out approach to accreditation.
All three schools are making significant strides in meeting state expectations, and all three are expected to be fully accredited next year, Huffman and other school officials said.
But school board members pressed for more information.
“What is being done to support those schools?” Mount Vernon District School Board Representative Matteo Dunne asked. The two middle schools are in his district.
“There are significant plans in place,” Reid responded.
Mason District Representative Ricardy Anderson didn’t seem surprised that meeting state minimums in science achievement had tripped up a number of schools.
“Science has been an Achilles heel this year for many of our schools,” she said.
Dunne asked Reid what other schools were “on the bubble” and at risk of not being fully accredited in the future. The superintendent declined to address the matter in public but said she would circle back with School Board members.
Having 98.5% of its schools ranked as fully accredited puts Fairfax County above state levels. Across the commonwealth, 86% of the state’s roughly 1,800 public schools reached that level, but more than 250 were ranked as needing improvement.
The Virginia Board of Education approved a major overhaul of the accreditation process this summer, raising concerns among FCPS leaders that the new system will inaccurately grade schools with high English-learning and special education populations. However, exactly how the process may look in the future is not yet fully fleshed out.
“We’ll be learning more as the state puts out more details,” Huffman said.
FCPS officials highlight reduced absenteeism
Fairfax County school leaders gave themselves a pat on the back for significant reductions in absentee rates across the division.
While 108 county schools that did not meet state expectations on absentee rates a year before — more than half of the county’s total schools — that figure fell to just eight based on the new state data for the 2023-2024 school year.
“That’s serious work on behalf of our staff,” Superintendent Michelle Reid told the school board. “We’re headed in the right direction.”
The effort to cut absenteeism has been broad-based, Franconia District Representative Marcia St. John-Cunning said, crediting school-based staff as well as volunteers and others for providing support.
“When we look at the data as a board, sometimes we forget people down there doing the work,” she said. “Everybody in our schools was working hard on that.”
Chronic absenteeism, which reflects students who mis more than 10% of classroom time, is one of the factors that the VDOE monitors during the annual accreditation process.
In the most recent data, a total of 1,509 Virginia public schools met state expectations on absenteeism, another 238 were close to meeting them and 69 had rates significantly higher than that state ceiling.
When discussing the new accreditation data, several board members pressed Superintendent Michelle Reid to additionally compare student data to groups that are closer to Fairfax’s peer group.
Dunne suggested looking at the local school districts that comprise the Washington Area Boards of Education, or WABE, including Loudoun, Prince William, Arlington, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax, Falls Church, Manassas and Manassas Park. D.C. doesn’t participate in the organization.
“If we’re comparing ourselves on salaries and other metrics to schools in the WABE guide, it would be great to be able to look at student achievement and other things,” he said. “I don’t know if the rest of Virginia is always the best comparison.”
Anderson agreed that “might be very helpful.”
Reid offered no resistance to the request. “We can do that,” she said.
At-large school board member Ilryong Moon, whose three separate stints on the school board date back to 1995, noted that Fairfax County’s competition “in the olden days … used to be Montgomery County.”
These days, Moon suggested, a more apt comparison might be Loudoun, although perhaps in the spirit of competitiveness, he explicitly name that jurisdiction.
“I really do want to see … comparable data to the district west of us,” Moon told Reid.
As another option, Dunne suggested comparing data to the country’s 10 largest school districts so Fairfax could “see where we are compared to our peers.” According to Niche, FCPS is currently the 12th largest public school system in the U.S. based on enrollment.
School board’s student representative to get pay bump
She won’t exactly be getting rich, but the student representative to the Fairfax County School Board soon can expect a slight pay bump.
For years, those who have filled the position received a stipend of $50 per meeting, but to meet the letter of the law, the school board is being asked to meet the state’s minimum wage — $12 per hour now, $13.50 per hour starting Jan. 1, 2025.
Given that meetings typically run in excess of four hours, that will mean slightly more cash in the pocket of Megan Sawant, the 54th and current student representative to the body.
Sawant is a student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and was elected to the position by the countywide Student Advisory Council.
When the position was created in the 1970s, the school board’s student representative had voting power. That was stripped early on, and since then, the role has been merely advisory in nature. The stipend has been $50 per meeting since 2009.
The proposed pay increase will be acted on at a future school board meeting.
The school board voted last year to increase its pay to $48,000 for members and $50,000 for the chair. The raises went into effect on Jan. 1.
