The new school year is just over a month in, but several Fairfax County School Board members are still thinking about a summer break that some families have lamented was too short.
“Something has to change,” Mason District Representative Ricardy Anderson said at the Sept. 25 board meeting.
“I’ve been receiving a lot of feedback from parents about the calendar — it’s been more than I’ve received in the last few years,” Anderson said, reporting hearing from parents complaining about “the lack of summer.”
Fairfax County Public Schools concluded its 2024-2025 academic year on June 11 and kicked off the current 2025-2026 school year on Aug. 18.
The shrinking gap stems from the addition of more teacher work days and holidays spaced throughout the school year, plus a winter break that has recently grown to two full weeks.
In between all the breaks, school leaders under state law are required to have a minimum of 180 days or 990 hours of instructional time.
At-large school board member Ryan McElveen was the first to bring the matter up after Superintendent Michelle Reid presented her annual start-of-the-school-year report at the Sept. 25 meeting.
“It felt like there wasn’t any summer,” he said, pressing for a fresh look at calendar development strategies. “… There’s value in bringing back some form of the calendar committee, or at least having that conversation as a board.”
Responding to comments by McElveen and Anderson, Reid acknowledged the break between school years isn’t what it once was.
“The summer flies at this point, for sure,” she said.
But Reid said school board members need to decide among themselves whether future calendar changes are worth pursuing.
“That’s probably a board conversation,” she said. “I’ll wait for the direction of the board.”
Anderson took Reid up on that, saying she’d bring the issue forward as a board matter for consideration.
Currently, FCPS establishes three years’ worth of calendars scheduled into the future — a system Reid said is working.
“We don’t ever want to be in the situation where we can’t have calendars at least a couple years out,” the superintendent said.
Acknowledging that “parents have loved the three-year calendar,” Anderson said there still needs to be more conversation about the future.
“There has to be some space for us to get feedback,” Anderson said, suggesting the public is growing “more dissatisfied” with the short summer break.
