Fairfax County Public Schools is rolling out a new plan to tackle traffic and pedestrian safety concerns at its 200 schools, but not everyone on the school board is sold on the idea.
The School Traffic and Pedestrian Safety Assessment Program, discussed during a school board work session on Tuesday (Jan. 14), aims to streamline how schools identify and address issues like clogged “Kiss and Ride” loops, bus congestion and pedestrian safety.
While some board members praised the program as a step forward, others expressed concern that the burden of identifying safety issues will primarily fall on principals and other school administrators, who are already managing significant workloads.
“This is obviously a great amount of work, and it makes sense, but … our individual schools cannot bear the full responsibility of all matters related to pedestrian and vehicular safety regarding our schools,” Hunter Mill District Representative Melanie Meren said during the meeting. “This is just another example of how we are being saddled with so much more than just instruction.”
Safety plan asks schools to self-identify concerns
The Fairfax County School Board directed Superintendent Michelle Reid on Feb. 23, 2023 to create a process for identifying schools with the highest safety risks.
The motion was spurred in part by multiple tragic crashes involving students crossing busy intersections, including one where a high school student was killed while escorting her younger sibling to the bus stop in front of Barcroft View Apartments.
FCPS Chief Operating Officer Andy Mueck said work began in February 2024 with the development of a centralized process for assessing traffic and pedestrian safety conditions at schools.
In March 2024, central office staff tested the process at Fairfax High School, evaluating severe bus congestion and overall traffic flow. While the test helped fine-tune the plan, Mueck said it quickly became clear that collecting data from all 200 schools would be an “impossible” task.
“The formal assessment write-up that they put together was very detailed, but it took several weeks and a couple visits to the school to pull [the data] together,” he told school board members. “… It wasn’t the most smooth and efficient way to gain data and start to see trends.”
The working group assembled to develop the safety plan then shifted to a school-based self-assessment model, allowing schools to identify their own issues while providing data to help FCPS spot trends and allocate resources effectively.
Every October, a designated staff member — like a principal or safety officer — will lead the self-assessment process. Using an electronic survey, schools will evaluate traffic flow, pedestrian safety and crosswalk visibility. The findings will then go to the central office, where staff will prioritize support based on the most pressing needs.
“We’re all familiar with our 200 schools, but there’s something about the people that are there, working and operating out of that school every day, that know little nuances that this team wouldn’t necessarily pick up on in one or two or three visits,” Mueck said.
Staff have also created a mitigation toolkit that recommends strategies like staggered drop-off schedules, carpool lanes and better signage that schools could implement independently to address smaller issues, while escalating bigger problems to the central office.
“This mitigation toolkit… is a living document to help those people that have the time and the initiative to be able to address some of their simpler problems at the school without having to tie pull in central office,” Mueck said.
Some school board members share skepticism
While some school board members praised the program’s potential to tackle long-standing safety issues, others questioned whether schools, already stretched thin, could handle the added responsibility.
“I do want to raise my concern regarding the additional workload to principals,” Mason District Representative Ricardy Anderson said. “I know their input is key, but I’m also concerned that they were not part of this conversation, and we always talk about not doing things on to people without them being part of the conversation. This was a missed opportunity. It’s much easier for us to sit in central office and shift things around, but I think we have to really engage with the practitioners.”
While calling the program is well-intentioned, Meren emphasized a need for stronger collaboration with local government and law enforcement to address broader safety concerns, such as traffic enforcement and infrastructure improvements around schools.
“In my view, the strategies presented here today are an effort to fill a void left vacant for too long by the county and the state,” she said. “Ultimately, though, I want to know what is the flow of information from FCPS to the county and state for them to get things fixed when we raise them and have accountability for it to be done.”
Responding to those concerns, the superintendent proposed creating a joint task force committee that would include school administrators, local government officials, and law enforcement to ensure a collaborative approach to addressing traffic and safety issues both on and around school campuses.
“I will ask the team to draft a plan for how we might envision that better working relationship, and we can provide that in a Friday letter to the board and have a follow up conversation about who initiates that with who,” Reid told the school board.
Next steps
School staff say six schools will be selected in the coming months for the self-assessment pilot program. Once the schools are chosen, staff will be trained on using the self-assessment tools, which include a questionnaire and an electronic reporting system to evaluate issues like traffic flow and pedestrian safety.
The pilot will help FCPS staff refine the process and identify any gaps before rolling it out to all schools. If the pilot is successful, the full program could launch in the upcoming 2025-2026 school year, with schools conducting annual assessments to ensure continuous safety improvements.
FCPS leaders are expected to present updates to the school board later this year with a full report on the results of the countywide program, if the pilot expands, coming in June 2026.
