Fairfax County school leaders are paying careful attention to start-of-school enrollment figures, attempting to determine if the Trump administration’s immigration policies are leading some families to keep their children at home.
“Some students are a bit reluctant to be in school at this time,” Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle Reid told school board members during a Sept. 25 report on the first month of classes.
“Clearly some of the immigration policies have impacted families,” Reid said, while acknowledging there isn’t yet any hard data to determine what role that might play in the enrollment dip.
“We’re in our sixth week. It’s hard to establish absenteeism rates this quickly,” she said.
As of Sept. 22, FCPS has 177,007 students attending 199 schools and centers. Though the division still ranks as the ninth largest in the nation — with a larger student population than that of 11 states — enrollment is down by more than 4,000 students from the 181,153 in class at the end of the 2024-2025 school year.
Reid said it’s not unusual for student population to be running behind at this point in the school year.
“We generally grow from the beginning of the year [in August] to the end of October,” she said.
But some school board members expressed concern that some students were staying home out of fear of schools being targeted by federal immigration enforcement agents.
“I worry about students missing out on education because of fear,” Braddock District Representative Rachna Sizemore Heizer said.
The Trump administration rescinded a memo in January that had previously barred immigration enforcement activities in “protected areas,” including schools, places of worship and healthcare facilities.
Department of Homeland Security has denied that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is raiding schools, stating that agents have “discretion” to go into schools with a supervisor’s approval but those actions are expected to be “extremely rare.”
However, ICE agents attempted to enter two elementary schools in Los Angeles this spring, allegedly to conduct “wellness checks,” and there have been multiple reports of family members getting arrested while dropping off or picking up students. School districts nationwide, particularly in California, where there’s a large Latino population, have observed upticks in absenteeism, and teachers say they have students who are afraid to come to school or have stopped attending altogether.
Reid said FCPS is developing online options for families that don’t want their children in classrooms.
Fairfax is not the only local school division to see lower than anticipated student enrollment at the start of the school year. Neighboring Arlington Public Schools is running behind both last year and its projections for the start of school.
FCPS opened the 2025-2026 school year with about 41,300 employees — 25,600 of them full-time — and with all classroom positions and 99.7% of positions “critical to the opening of school” filled.
Mason District Representative Ricardy Anderson said having teaching ranks full was a major plus.
“It is very exciting, not to mention comforting to parents, to know that their students, their children, are starting the school year with a teacher and not a long-term sub,” she said.
The school year also opened with 22 new lunch recipes and six new breakfast recipes in cafeterias. On a typical day, the school division will serve more than 31,500 breakfasts and nearly 77,500 lunches.
