Fairfax County Public Schools leaders say they are making staffing adjustments in the wake of a year-over-year decline in student enrollment that seems to have caught them by surprise, though the downward trend isn’t new.
As a result, the school division will work to do better forecasting so there are fewer enrollment surprises in the future, Superintendent Michelle Reid told the Fairfax County School Board last Thursday (Oct. 8).
“Hopefully, we’re going to get the data much tighter,” Reid said. “This year, we were off by several thousand students. We want to make sure our enrollment demographic projections are more accurate.”
Virginia’s largest school district recorded 171,936 students in pre-kindergarten through high school on Sept. 30, the date used by localities for official counts reported to the Virginia Department of Education.
That’s down from 177,124 students reported during the 2025-26 school year and from 180,559 in 2024-25, according to state data.
In her annual Opening of Schools report, Reid did not use the Sept. 30 figure, but a slightly higher figure of 172,346 students from Aug. 24, the first day of school. FFXnow found the Sept. 30 figure in monthly enrollment reports posted on the school system’s website.
Reid said a “rebalancing” of teachers has been completed in response to population variations across the system’s 200 schools and programs, and work is underway to align staffing with needs among other work groups.
“What we’ve been very committed to at this time is not disrupting classrooms whenever possible,” she said.
Quizzed by Mason District School Board member Ricardy Anderson on the reasons why “we’ve lost 4,300 kids from last June to now,” the superintendent said multiple factors were in play.
“For over a decade, we’ve had fewer kindergartners than we’ve had seniors graduating,” Reid said. “What’s mitigated that traditionally are students moving in, often from out of the country … which is not what we’re seeing this year or last year.”
As enrollment falls, the goal is to curtail outside hiring in order to maintain existing staff, even if they have to be moved to different positions.
“We just need to be really strategic,” said Reid, who previously disputed characterization of the staffing approach as a hiring freeze. “If we have fewer students, we don’t want to continue hiring more staff. We need to make sure the staff we have … are able to be redistributed to open positions.”
FCPS has set up a workforce rebalancing committee to try to make improvements to the process, said William Solomon, the school system’s chief human resources officer.
Solomon reported that 99.7% of budgeted positions were filled at the start of the school year, a marked improvement from figures reported just a few years before.
Of the 16,000 teaching positions, only “a few dozen” were unfilled at the start of this school year, Solomon said.
About three-quarters of those 16,000 teachers are deemed to be in critical positions for first-day-of-school operations. They are classroom teachers as opposed to resource teachers or specialists who work with a broader group of students.
Tom Dannan, the school board’s Braddock District representative, said he was glad to see the high number of filled positions.
“Everything has to focus on the students, so I appreciate we’ve worked to retain [teachers],” he said.
“We obviously want to maintain stability” wherever possible, Reid said.
In her Oct. 8 report, Reid offered a host of facts and figures beyond enrollment.
Fairfax County Public Schools is home to 14% of all Virginia students, and its student enrollment is larger than that of 11 states. Reid added that the county’s student body consists of youth from 199 different countries and territories.
Following the U.S., countries most frequently represented in local classrooms are:
- Afghanistan: 2,932 students
- Honduras: 2,859 students
- El Salvador: 2,796 students
- Bolivia: 1,857 students
FCPS owns or leases facilities totaling 29 million square feet of space. That’s the equivalent of 10-and-a-half Empire State Buildings.
FCPS opened the school year with 1,625 school buses — including 49 electric vehicles — that transport 130,000 students more than 93,000 miles per day over nearly 6,000 routes.
Mount Vernon District Representative Mateo Dunne did the math from the dais, calculating that Fairfax school buses travel the equivalent of “35 times to the moon and back in a single school year.”
Fairfax County is not the only Northern Virginia jurisdiction facing declining enrollment.
Neighboring Arlington’s Sept. 30 student count of 27,168 was the lowest since 2021 and well off projections made last spring. In response, Arlington officials cut about 23 positions from the budget, with Superintendent Francisco Durán warning that other cuts might be needed.
“We will continue to monitor these enrollment trends throughout the year, and align our staffing and resources accordingly,” said Durán, who was an FCPS staffer when he was selected as Arlington’s superintendent in 2020.
Falls Church’s student enrollment was up slightly but largely flat year over year.
