Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is a school division in the U.S. state of Virginia. The division is an agency of the Fairfax County government, and it administers the public schools in Fairfax County and the City of Fairfax. The main administrative offices of FCPS are located in the Merrifield area of Fairfax County, just west of the independent city of Falls Church. Match with full address. 2010 map.. This place is not in the independent city of Falls Church; City of Falls Church zoning map. In Virginia, cities are not within counties.
As of December 2025, all schools in FCPS were accredited by the Virginia Department of Education.
With nearly 183,000 students enrolled as of March 2026, FCPS is the largest public school system in Virginia, and it was the 12th-largest school district in the country as of autumn 2021. The division has been led by Division Superintendent Michelle Reid since July 2022.
History Nineteenth century
The public school system in Fairfax County, Virginia, was created after the American Civil War, following Virginia's adoption of its Reconstruction-era state constitution in 1870; this made free public education a constitutional right for the first time. The first superintendent of schools for Fairfax County was Thomas M. Moore, who was sworn in on September 26, 1870. At the time of its creation, the Fairfax County Public Schools system consisted of 41 schools—28 serving White students and 13 serving Black students.
In 1886, Milton D. Hall was appointed superintendent, and he served for 44 years until his retirement in 1929.
Twentieth century
Fairfax County Public Schools, like most school systems in the American South, practiced de jure segregation. The county had local elementary schools for Black students, but no high schools for Black students. Although Fairfax County was densely populated, it had proportionately few Black high school students. Fairfax, Prince William, Loudoun, Arlington, and Fauquier counties all shared a high school for Black students. This school was centrally located among the counties in Manassas. Other students attended high schools in Washington, D.C., where many had relatives. Those schools included Armstrong High School, Cardozo High School, Dunbar High School, and Phelps Vocational Center. In 1951, Fairfax County began construction of Luther Jackson High School after residents requested a high school for Black students. In 1954, FCPS had 42 elementary schools and six high schools; Luther Jackson High School opened in Falls Church as the first high school for Black students in the county.
In 1954, the Supreme Court's decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education ordered an end to racial segregation in public schools. In response, Virginia enacted legislation to prevent desegregation, took control of school placement decisions, and closed some school systems that attempted to desegregate. When Arlington County announced an early desegregation plan, its school board was dismissed by the State Board of Education.
In 1955, the Fairfax County School Board renamed its "Committee on Desegregation" the "Committee on Segregation", after a petition and the threat of litigation from a civic group called the Virginia Citizens' Committee for Better Schools.
After the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Daniel L. Duke—author of Education Empire: The Evolution of an Excellent Suburban School System—wrote: "Whether local school systems such as Fairfax County, left to their own, would have moved forward to implement desegregation in the late fifties will never be known. Richmond removed any possibility of local option...".
Court decisions later noted that the state, rather than the county, controlled student placement during this period. A 1964 decision stated:
Fairfax County began its desegregation efforts shortly thereafter.
By 1955, delegates from Northern Virginia in the Virginia General Assembly openly opposed the Stanley Plan—1956 statutes supporting racial segregation in Virginia—and called for more far-reaching legislation. Virginia's 10th congressional district was the only district to vote against the Gray Plan. Delegate Boatwright introduced another bill aimed at Northern Virginia school boards. Known as the Boatwright Bill, it would have prohibited certain federal employees from serving on school boards or holding other local offices. Boatwright said that his bill applied to all Virginia communities, but he acknowledged that Northern Virginia would be most affected. Supporters of the bill argued that federal employees favored the federal government's position on integration. At the time, four members of the seven-member Fairfax County School Board were federal employees.
In the case of Blackwell v. Fairfax County School Board in 1960, Black plaintiffs charged that Fairfax County's grade-a-year desegregation plan was discriminatory and dilatory. Fifteen Black children had been refused admission to White schools because they did not fall within the grades covered by the school board's assignment plan. The plaintiffs successfully argued that desegregation was proceeding too slowly under the plan. District Judge Albert V. Bryan did not categorically reject grade-a-year plans, but he held that they needed to be judged according to the character of the community. Since Black students made up less than four percent of Fairfax County's school population, Bryan considered fear of racial friction an unacceptable justification for such a cautious desegregation plan.
The report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1962 found that "Every sign indicates that the communities in Northern Virginia will be the first in the State to reach compliance with the mandate in the School Segregation Cases." Fairfax County was later among the first school systems in the country to receive funds to aid desegregation because of its efforts to implement a desegregated system.
The Fairfax County School Board voted in 1958 to switch from a 7–5 grade-level configuration (i.e., 7 grades in elementary school and 5 grades in high school) to a 6–2–4 configuration, necessitating the creation of what were then called intermediate schools for students in grades 7 and 8. By the time the first eight intermediate schools opened in fall 1960, they had already exceeded their 1,000-student capacities.
In fall 1960, the first Black students were admitted to newly desegregated Fairfax County public schools. For example, Jerald R. Betz and Raynard Wheeler enrolled at Belvedere Elementary School in Falls Church, and Gwendolyn Brooks enrolled at Cedar Lane Elementary School in Vienna.
The changeover to the 6–2–4 plan was the last major initiative of Superintendent W. T. Woodson, who retired in 1961 after 32 years as head of FCPS; this was the second-longest tenure in the system's history. In April 1961, Earl C. Funderburk, superintendent of schools in Wilmington, North Carolina, was appointed to replace Woodson.
In 1961, FCPS also began administering schools in the City of Fairfax.
As early as 1965, Superintendent Funderburk was discussing plans to decentralize FCPS. By 1967, he had developed a plan for five area offices, each serving part of the county, and he had appointed Woodson High School Principal Robert E. Phipps and West Springfield High School Principal S. John Davis as the first two area administrators that December.
Although the school board had endorsed Funderburk's plan, it also hired the consulting firm Cresap, McCormick & Paget to audit the system's management organization and operations. In 1968, based on the consultant's recommendations, the school board implemented a significantly modified version of the decentralization plan, dividing FCPS into four areas that functioned as miniature school systems. In January 1969, Funderburk resigned, telling the school board that he did not want a third term as superintendent. In May 1969, the school board selected Lawrence M. Watts—of the Greece School District in Greece, New York—to lead FCPS, which had grown during Funderburk's tenure from 65,000 to 122,000 students.
In May 1970, Watts appointed Taylor M. Williams as the first Black high school principal in FCPS since desegregation, placing him in charge of James Madison High School in Vienna. The appointment was one of Watts' final official acts. After less than a year as superintendent, Watts died of a heart attack at age 44 in June 1970 (at his home in Oakton). Assistant Superintendent S. Barry Morris was named interim superintendent, while the school board sought a replacement to lead the 130,000-student school system.
In September 1970, Area Superintendent S. John Davis was chosen after a nationwide search to serve the remaining 33 months of Watts' four-year term.
During the mid-1970s, Davis faced declining enrollment and population shifts. The student population dropped from a high of 145,385 in the 1974–75 school year to a low of 122,646 in 1982–83. Families also migrated from established eastern and central parts of the county to newer developments in the west and south, requiring Davis to request the closure of some schools while seeking to build new ones elsewhere.
In a 6–5 vote in May 1976, the school board voted to reinstitute textbook rental fees, hoping to raise an additional $1.3 million to close a projected budget shortfall. The plan was scrapped two months later, in July, when the board was able to find a $1.4 million surplus.
In 1978, Fairfax County began countywide enforcement of its 15-year-old standardized six-point letter grading scale, with a ten-point spread at the bottom of the grading range. The grading scale, established in 1963, provided that a score of 94–100% was an A, 87–93% a B, 80–86% a C, and 70–79% a D, with any score below 70% an F.
The county school board adopted a $279 million budget in February 1979, which included a 5.15% cost-of-living raise for the system's teachers and other employees. The increase was only slightly more than half of the 9.9% inflation rate that month and less than the 9.4% increase that FCPS employees had sought. In April 1979, the Fairfax Education Association (FEA)—the professional association representing teachers in the county—adopted a work-to-rule action. Under the action, teachers would not work beyond the 7.5 hours per day that were specified in their contracts. The FEA also gave Superintendent Davis a vote of no confidence.
The vote of no confidence was cited as a major factor in Davis' decision to resign from FCPS on May 18, 1979. He accepted an appointment from Governor John N. Dalton as Virginia Superintendent of Public Education, despite taking a $5,000-per-year pay cut.
After Davis resigned, the Fairfax County School Board appointed Associate Superintendent William J. Burkholder as interim superintendent.
In November 1979, after a four-month search, the school board named Lucius Linton Deck, Jr.—superintendent in Orange County, Florida—to lead FCPS. Deck's years in Orange County had drawn mixed reactions, with some residents glad to see him leave, but others praising him as a strong and professional leader.
Deck inherited the issue of closing underused schools, which had also affected Superintendent Davis. Twenty-nine elementary schools, mostly in the eastern part of the county, were studied for possible closure; however, Deck recommended in April 1980 that eight schools be closed, five more than the review panel had suggested. The following month, the school board voted at its May 22 meeting to close seven of the eight schools, a decision that was met with angry hisses and boos from parents in attendance.
Fairfax County teachers' work-to-rule action, which had begun in April 1979, ended in May 1980.