Update — The Fairfax County School Board voted unanimously at its March 27 meeting to approve Mason District Representative Ricardy Anderson’s motion for a pilot program to test later middle school start times.
Earlier: As the Fairfax County School Board continues weighing its options for bumping back middle school class times, one member says she wants to give her district a head start.
Ricardy Anderson, who represents Mason District, plans to propose at the board’s meeting tomorrow (Thursday) that Fairfax County Public Schools establish a pilot program at the middle schools serving Annandale, Lincolnia and Bailey’s Crossroads to test later start times:
I move for the School Board to direct the Superintendent to provide to the Board by April 10, 2025, a cost-neutral plan to implement a pilot of later start times in as many of the Mason District middle schools (Glasgow, Holmes, Poe) as possible for implementation in the 2025-26 school year. The plan should minimize start time changes for the pyramid high schools.
Details, including the new bell schedule and how it would affect elementary and high schools, still need to be worked out, but Anderson hopes a pilot can be implemented for the upcoming 2025-2026 school year to give middle school students relief from their current 7:30 a.m. start time.
“I know this is what my community is asking for,” Anderson told FFXnow. “They’ve written many, many, many letters. They have testified. They’ve attended the work session. We have students who have come in and have spoken … So, this is a priority for the Mason District, and as their representative, it is my responsibility to advance that.”
It remains to be seen whether a majority of the 11-person school board will back the request, but Anderson says “several colleagues” have expressed support for her proposal. The motion will be seconded by at-large member Ryan McElveen, according to the meeting agenda.
Though Hunter Mill District Representative Melanie Meren told WTOP earlier this month that she didn’t anticipate any changes for the coming school year, she says she will vote in favor of creating “a budget-neutral pilot.”
“School Board Member Ricardy Anderson has done the work to hear the community on this,” Meren told FFXnow by email. “If we can do this without spending funds, I think it’s worth a shot to learn what’s possible and provide relief of the early starting times for all students.”
FCPS has had a review of start times for middle schools on its to-do list for a decade now.
After a 2011 survey found that most eighth, 10th and 12th-grade students weren’t getting the recommended eight-plus hours of sleep per night, the school board voted in October 2014 to push high school start times back from 7:20 a.m. to 8-8:10 a.m. However, that moved most middle school start times up to 7:30 a.m. to accommodate the system’s complex bus schedules.
Then-superintendent Karen Garza promised in 2015 to revisit middle school start times, but with multiple leadership changes and the COVID-19 pandemic occurring in the interim, FCPS didn’t start its current review in earnest until 2023, when it contracted the consulting firm Prismatic Services, Inc. to develop a plan for starting middle schools after 8 a.m.
Out of the six options presented by Prismatic to the school board last December, only one — Option C2, which would start middle schools at 9:40 a.m., secondary and high schools at 8:30 a.m., and elementary schools at 8 or 9:10 a.m. — was also recommended by the FCPS Office of Transportation Services.
According to FCPS staff, that option wouldn’t require any additional buses or funding, and the biggest change would be at middle schools, limiting impacts to elementary and high school students.
However, plans for implementing new school start times have been complicated by the county’s first comprehensive school boundary review in decades. With the redistricting study expected to wrap up in early 2026, FCPS has recommended that any start time adjustments be made simultaneously to limit disruptions and ensure the changes are coordinated.
Anderson worries, though, that waiting for the boundary overhaul might too much to ask of middle school students who could be in high school by the time changes are made, particularly if they end up getting phased in.
“I just think the time table is, one, unpredictable and likely to be years out before it’s realized, and that’s years that our middle school students are waiting for that relief that was promised by a board in 2015, 2016,” she said. “… I don’t want for that discussion to continue to be waylaid.”
If the school board decides to pilot later middle school start times, as Prismatic suggested at a Feb. 18 work session, Mason District would be an appropriate testing ground, because it’s the only district where sixth-grade students attend middle schools instead of elementary schools, Anderson says.
According to Anderson, the discrepancy dates back to the early 1990s, when the school board voted to pilot sixth-graders in middle school for the 1990-1991 academic year. The board agreed the following year to expand the change to all middle schools, but for reasons that remain unclear, that never happened.
At Anderson’s request, the school board directed FCPS staff in 2021 to look at moving sixth-grade students at Glasgow, Holmes and Poe middle schools to elementary schools. Feedback from focus groups and community meetings suggested an even split between parents who like the current setup and those who wanted to align with the rest of the county, so FCPS staff didn’t recommend any specific “next steps.”
Now, as part of the boundary review, FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid is looking at the possibility of shifting sixth grade to middle school countywide, as was reportedly planned in the early 1990s, Anderson says. An FCPS spokesperson confirmed that option is being considered.
Anderson acknowledged that the change would be a “significant lift,” with space constraints already a concern at many schools. But Mason District students wouldn’t have to deal with that additional complication on top of new school start times.
“I’m just really hoping that we are going to be able to provide relief to at least part of our community in the near-future for the middle school start times and then, for all of our students in the next few years,” Anderson said. “… I would really like to lean very heavily on the staff recommendation to do a pilot so they can learn and study, because a pilot is done in many other things that Fairfax County engages in, and so, this will not be an unusual step.”
This story was updated with a comment from Melanie Meren and the text of Ricardy Anderson’s proposed motion.
