When Audrey Ortiz-Peterson was in middle school, she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps by joining the military someday. His suggestion to start running for fun, though, was a lot less appealing.
“I was not a fan,” Ortiz-Peterson, a senior at Mount Vernon High School in Alexandria, recalled. “It was not very fun to me.”
Fairfax County leaders marked the 10th anniversary of the Fairfax Area High School Student Shark Tank Technology Challenge earlier this week.
“It’s only gotten bigger and better,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay said when presenting a proclamation saluting the contest’s first decade on Tuesday (May 19).
Laasya Mohan has a study routine: first, the fourth grader at Floris Elementary School sorts spelling words by topic. Then, she further divides them into two lists — the ones she feels sure that she knows how to spell, and ones she feels unsure of. She examines the roots of words and considers language patterns. Finally, her mom quizzes her.
The intense process often lasts five hours a day — but it has paid off.
The night before freshman orientation at George Mason University, 17-year-old Saniya Dilip Darediya sat in her room and cried.
Having just arrived in the U.S. from India, she recalled, “I was scared and afraid I might not belong here.”
Fairfax County supervisors are being asked to provide additional funding for library materials, with some advocates stressing the value of increasing print holdings.
“Libraries are in fact in desperate need,” Langley High School junior Mia Nash told the Board of Supervisors at an April 15 public hearing on the fiscal year 2027 budget.
On Christmas night 2025, Annandale High School sophomore Annie Vu was killed in a high-speed crash on I-495 while heading home from a holiday dinner — a tragedy that shook the Annandale community and left many students and parents searching for answers.
Some of those answers came through the reporting of Annandale High School senior Zoe Ligairi.
A student at Fairfax High School was convicted yesterday (Thursday) of assault and battery after being accused of groping more than a dozen of his female classmates.
Israel Christopher Flores Ortiz, an 18-year-old who is currently a junior at the school, was found guilty by a judge on nine misdemeanor counts that stemmed from numerous instances of what prosecutor Jenna Sands described as “grabbing butts.”
Laasya Mohan, a fourth-grader at Floris Elementary School in Herndon, won the 2026 Fairfax County Spelling Bee on Sunday (March 22).
Mohan, who is 9, and first runner-up Aadhya Vijayakumar, 13, an eighth-grader at Rocky Run Middle School in Chantilly, will both advance to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington in late May.
To students, the one to two months left until prom may seem like a lifetime away, but for anyone looking to get a head start on picking out their outfit, Reston Community Center (RCC) is once again here to help.
RCC’s annual Diva Central shopping event will return to its Lake Anne facility (1609-A Washington Plaza North) for a 24th year on March 14.
Fairfax County students again dominated in the 2026 Virginia Aviation Art Competition, sponsored by the Virginia Department of Aviation.
Students from the county won first place in all three age categories and won seven of nine overall awards in the competition, whose theme this year was “Fly to Save Lives.”
