Sharing Our Success From 2022-23 School Year

• 181,851 enrollment as of June 30, 2023
• Total operating budget: $3.5 billion 
• Special education: 15.7% 
• English for speakers of other languages: 20.4% 
• Economically disadvantaged: 34.9% 
• Students are from 204 countries and territories 
• Students speak 200+ home languages
• Demographics (2022 fall membership): Asian 19%, Black 10%, Hispanic 28%, White 37%, Multiple Races 6%, Native American: .3%, Native Hawaiian: .1%   
• On-time graduation (class of 2022): 94.1 % 
• FCPS students mean SAT Score in 2022: FCPS students performed well above state and global averages 
• 15,474 took an Advanced Placement test in 2022 
• In 2023, 238 FCPS students were named National Merit Semifinalists
• FCPS has 842 Commended Students in the 2023 National Merit Scholarship Program.
• Employees (all employees, including substitute teachers and hourly employees): 39,409 (as of June 1, 2023)
• 15,788 teachers (as of June 1, 2023)
• 79.3% of teachers hold advanced degrees 
• 79 Superintendent community conversations, topic-based community meetings, strategic planning forums     

Goals

The strategic plan goals include:
• GOAL 1: Strong Start: PreK-12 | Every student will develop foundational academic skills, curiosity, and a joy for learning necessary for success in Pre-K through 12th grade.
• GOAL 2: Safe, Supported, Included, and Empowered | Every student will experience an equitable school community where student health and well-being are prioritized, and student voice is centered.
• GOAL 3: Academic Growth and Excellence | Every student will acquire critical and creative thinking skills, meet/exceed high academic standards, and achieve their highest academic potential.
• GOAL 4: Equitable Access and Opportunity | Every student will have access to high-quality academic programming and resources to support their success.
• GOAL 5: Leading for Tomorrow’s Innovation | Every student will graduate ready to thrive in life after high school and with the skills to navigate, adapt, and innovate for a sustainable future.

Guiding Principles

“The strategic plan is FCPS’ North Star in ensuring excellence, equity, and opportunity for each and every student now through 2030,” said Superintendent Dr. Michelle C. Reid. “I am incredibly grateful to the entire Fairfax County community for partnering with us to co-author our strategic plan. Together, we have created a blueprint for mountaintop educational opportunities that will support closing achievement gaps and help our students fulfill their greatest academic potential.”

The next steps for implementing the strategic plan involve aligning, prioritizing, and organizing the work of the school division, and establishing a monitoring and reporting structure for the plan. The five guiding principles that informed the development of the new strategic plan are:

• Student-centered: Keep students at the center.
• Engaging diverse voices: Create multiple avenues for parents/caregivers, student, staff, and community engagement.
• Data-driven: Use data to drive the development of the plan.
• Alignment: Create unity of purpose.
• Research-based: Development approach and content guided by research.

For some seniors, whether they graduate or not comes down to a tough reality, such as attending school or helping support their families or themselves. That is the situation West Potomac High School senior Madelyn found herself in late last year. With the responsibility of a younger sibling to take care of, her schoolwork became less of a priority.

To help Madelyn and others like her, FCPS began a pilot program this spring to provide instruction outside of traditional school hours for students at six high schools across the division. Students meet with teachers in-person, three days a week, from 4 to 6 p.m. and work independently from home for the remaining two days.

“These students are facing difficult times that none of us can even imagine having to manage at a school age,” said Joe Thompson, special projects administrator for the Non-Traditional Schools and Programs who oversees the pilot. “For example, they can be responsible for sibling child care, for financially supporting their family as the primary wage earner, and there can be transportation issues that hinder attendance. “The smaller setting, the flexible setting, the one-on-one aspect, has really given these students the support they need to succeed.”

Catherine Coulter seems like the perfect hire for any Fairfax County Public School community looking to bring on a new teacher. Coulter, who has a master’s degree in education, six years of classroom teaching experience, and is an FCPS grad herself, had long wanted to teach in the community where she grew up.

Amid headlines about national and regional teacher shortages, Coulter was eager to stay in the classroom. There was just one hiccup — Coulter has a middle school teaching certification, and she hoped to pivot to teaching elementary students.

A new FCPS teacher trainee program is helping Coulter, and others like her, bridge the gap to start teaching this fall while finishing up requirements to become fully licensed in Virginia. Coulter started in September as a fifth grade teacher at Fairview Elementary School in Fairfax Station, while taking a four week class in elementary education instructional methods.

“My end goal in being a teacher was always to come back to FCPS and work here,” said Coulter, who spent the last three years teaching in Washington, D.C. “I had the best educational experience here and honestly the reason I wanted to become a teacher is because of the experience I had as a student in FCPS.”

Veteran auto technology teachers and best friends Dominic Prakash and David Plum have more than 50 years combined teaching experience in Fairfax County Public Schools. 

The Lake Braddock Secondary School automotive instructors first met in an FCPS auto class themselves at South Lakes High School in the 1980s.

After working as lead automotive technicians at dealerships, both wound up as teachers and have run the Lake Braddock auto shop together for almost 25 years.

They say they share the same work ethic, and trust each other to keep the students’ best interests at heart, whether someone is college-bound and wants hands-on experience before majoring in engineering or aiming for a  career as an auto technician themselves.

“They are the two teachers whose class I look forward to every single day,” student Wesley Carson said. “They teach that life is a lot like operating a manual transmission — you stall sometimes, but you let up the clutch, roll backwards a bit and then keep pushing forward.”

The Global STEM Challenges Program at Thomas A. Edison High School has students tackling major environmental issues year-round.

The three-year program, in which ninth graders focus on food access and agricultural issues, 10th graders target clean water, and 11th graders contemplate sustainable energy, makes Earth Day every day.

Global STEM Challenge Program students are tasked with problem solving in teams of their peers, researching current solutions to vexing global matters and then coming up with their own plans to tackle them.

Two groups saw insects as an untapped resource for helping the environment.

One student group turned an unused file cabinet in a Fairfax County Public Schools storage warehouse into a bug incubator. Students transformed the file cabinet into a home for black soldier flies, and plan to use their larvae as a more environmentally friendly food source.

In the same classroom, another group is building a container for mealworms, gathering their “frass,” or waste product, which will drop through a mesh lining on the bottom of the crate into a collection unit to use as fertilizer. Mealworms happily eat plastic, PVC and styrofoam, thereby reducing the waste associated with those materials as well, the students say.

“Our goal is to teach students to break the mold in thinking about critical issues for our society and our planet,” Lead Global STEM Challenges Program Teacher Chris Kniesly, says. “In a traditional classroom, things are very prescribed, you teach a set of circumstances and students are tested on their understanding. In this program, we want students to upend circumstances so they can become changemakers in their future careers.” 

Kaavya Karthikeyan and Akanksha Tibrewala attended Greenbriar West Elementary School, Rocky Run Middle School, and Chantilly High School together. With a little extra time on their hands in the height of the pandemic, the two neighbors started playing around with modifying a traditional walker to make it more helpful to people with Parkinson’s.

Akanksha’s great-grandmother suffers from paralysis on the right side of her body, and Kaavya’s neighbor has a grandfather with Parkinson’s disease. “Our personal experiences had shed light onto the issue of people with degenerating muscles,” Akanksha said. “We wanted to do something to help address that.” And so, AutoTrem was born.

The walker on wheels will automatically move forward with the press of a button, and is equipped with a sensor at the front that stops movement if an obstacle is detected in its path. A laser on the top bar of the walker shines light on the ground, and users are directed to try to have their foot reach where the light is — with the goal of increasing stride length over time.

Their work involved consulting with actual patients at physical therapy offices and senior centers, getting their feedback and making adjustments along the way. The friends won the Fairfax Area Student Shark Tank competition, sponsored by the Fairfax Area 50+ Technology Committee, snagging a 2,500 cash prize for their efforts.

Akanksha and Kaavya say their work isn’t over yet though. The duo filed for a U.S. patent, and are awaiting word on if they receive one.

A prom dress shop run by marketing students from the Fair Oaks Classroom on the Mall program has helped hundreds of financially challenged students attend prom in style each spring since 2006 by providing dresses and accessories at no cost to students. 

The marketing students apply the retail marketing and visual merchandising skills learned throughout the school year to transform a classroom into the Prom Dress Shop.

“Students apply learned marketing lessons to a real-world retail environment,” said Miranda Schick, Centreville High School and Classroom on the Mall marketing teacher. “And they support the School Board’s goals of helping students succeed beyond the classroom through Portrait of a Graduate attributes, including communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and global citizenship skills.”

Eighth grader Rishab Nanduri made a brace to help people with spinal cord injury inspired by his father’s back pain woes. His classmate Aasritha Duriseti made a specialized bottle cap opener after watching her grandmother struggle to open things on her own. And Roman Moreno-Hines made a “third thumb” that he hopes will help people with arthritis hold objects longer after noticing his grandfather’s difficulty hanging onto coffee mugs.

It’s all part of an “Engineering With Empathy” unit created by Rachel Carson Middle School Instructor Mark Bolt for students in his Engineering 3 elective course.

“The overarching goal of this project is for my students to understand that empathy is an important component of engineering,” Bolt says. “Engineers need to understand their users’ needs, and put themselves in the users’ shoes, in order to then build an effective solution.”

Bolt challenged his students to start the project by researching various disabilities and the obstacles individuals must overcome to perform daily tasks. Then he had students construct an adaptive device, have classmates test it and give feedback that can be used to improve the item.

“I loved the real world element,” said Rishab Nanduri, who made the back brace with velcro straps, chipboard, and fabric that he hopes would help people like his father on a daily basis.

The launch was the culmination of seven years of hard work for TJ Space. Led by Robotics Lab Director Kristen Kucko, many students from the high school a hand in this historic launch.

“TJ REVERB is significant because the CubeSat was designed, built, coded and integrated entirely by high school students,” said Kucko. “The students did not use a satellite kit, nor did they have an industry or university partnership to assist them. Building satellites is not an easy task. According to Col. Nick Hague, astronaut, countries have not been able to build CubeSats. The students in TJ Space should be proud of their accomplishments.”

CubeSats are a small satellite, about the size of a tissue box. The technology was developed by Cal Poly and has become the industry standard. CubeSats allows for more standardized and cheaper deployment of satellites. TJ was the first high school in the world to launch its own CubeSat in 2013, called the TJ3SAT.

Barcelona. Berlin. Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Ghana. Rome. These are some of the places where 19 Annandale High School students spent their summer, aided by a collective $75,085 in scholarship funding they won after being encouraged to apply for the grants by their teachers.

“For $50, I’m going to Paris,” Meilhi Leon, a freshman, says. Meilhi says she learned about the opportunity, which comes through CIEE Global Navigator’s School Partnership program, in French class.

Annandale High School has a special partnership with the Council on International Exchange that results in some funding being earmarked for the school because of its commitment to world language instruction and having staff who are working to build awareness of scholarship opportunities to study abroad.

Annandale High School teachers pitched the program to students as a great opportunity to learn how to fill out applications, a life skill they hope the teens will remember when they begin the college application process, says Laura Wells, who coordinates the school’s Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program. AVID classes seek to assist students with organization, writing, and college/career awareness.

“This chance to put themselves outside of their comfort zone is also important to success in college,” she says. “Studies show that one factor impacting the ability to adjust to college is having had an experience living away from your parents — whether study abroad, living on a college campus — so I am always trying to push kids to seek out these types of programs. It’s an enrichment opportunity.”

The Cappies (Critics and Awards Program) is an international effort to recognize, celebrate, and provide learning experiences for high school theater and journalism students that was launched in FCPS.

Within each Cappies program, every participating high school selects three to nine students for a critic team. After receiving intensive training in theater criticism and review writing, the team attends plays and musicals at other high schools in their area, and then writes 300-600 word reviews on deadline.

Volunteer teacher-mentors lead discussions and select the critic-written reviews that are later published by area newspapers, with student bylines. The student critics also determine who will be placed on a Cappies award ballot in each of 39 award categories.

At the end of the season, the critics who have reviewed five or more shows may vote for the Cappies award winners. A gala awards ceremony is held at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., every June.

On Tuesdays after school, a group of middle and high school students volunteer their time and share their passion for classical music while mentoring elementary students at Dogwood Elementary School. The room is filled with lively sounds from the piano and string instruments, layered with laughs and words of encouragement. 

The room is filled with lively sounds from the piano and string instruments, layered with laughs and words of encouragement. 

Founders — and sisters — Ella Kim, of Oakton High School, and Emma Kim, of Rachel Carson Middle School, first performed piano and violin at Dogwood as part of an Instagram takeover for WETA’s Classical Radio Station, highlighting their lives as young classical musicians. They decided that they wanted to bring Dogwood students free music lessons on a weekly basis. The sisters began recruiting their friends to join their initiative. They partnered with FCPS teachers to help form music and art curriculums and train mentors on how to teach and engage with the mentees in a fun way. 

They also created an Amazon wish list that included keyboards, art supplies, and music books. For Dogwood Principal Kate Beckner, the value of the program is in students inspiring others by sharing their gifts and talents. “It’s beautiful to see students sharing their blessings with younger students,” she says.

Young adults with disabilities enrolled in the Culinary Arts program at the Davis Career Center handdelivered cookies they made from scratch as a special gift to welcome Dr. Reid to FCPS.

The students who swung by her office with the special delivery were enrolled in the program, which teaches students skills like baking, cooking, catering, and food service. “These look incredible! Wow! My cookies never look this good!” Dr. Reid said in delight as culinary student Isvar Komakula handed her the cookie bouquet.

Culinary Teacher Lauren Forshay said the students light up when they see what they’ve accomplished. “To be able to see a product from start to finish is very educational and very rewarding for these students,” Forshay said.

Outstanding Elementary New Teacher
Elogien I. Ali | Sixth Grade Teacher, Saratoga Elementary School

Outstanding Secondary New Teacher
Melvin Burch-Bynum | JROTC Marine Senior Instructor, Mount Vernon High School

Outstanding New Principal
KJ An | Eagle View Elementary School

Outstanding School-Based Operational Employees
Alexa Pugnetti | Administrative Assistant I, Woodson High School
Leonard Roberts | Custodian II, Bull Run Elementary School

Outstanding Nonschool-Based Operational Employee
Nicole C. Wheeler | Bus Driver Supervisor, Lorton Center, Transportation

Outstanding School-Based Professional Employee
Katelyn M. Hagen | Intervention Specialist, South County Middle School

Outstanding Nonschool-Based Professional Employee
Ken Wilson | Safety Specialist, Gatehouse Administration Center, Facilities

Outstanding School-Based Leader
Karen J. Hertel | Assistant Principal, Bryant High School

Outstanding Nonschool-Based Leader
Alice Wigington | Executive Director, Budget Services, Gatehouse Administration Center, Financial Services

Outstanding Elementary Teacher
Laura Senturia | Fourth Grade Teacher, Colin Powell Elementary School

Outstanding Secondary Teachers
Daniel J. Miller | English Teacher, Fairfax High School
Annie Ray | Orchestra Director, Annandale High School

Outstanding Principal
April Cage | Garfield Elementary School

Anyeli Salguero, a 16-year-old Bryant High School senior, received her high school diploma this June, a year ahead of schedule, with her 20-month-old daughter in her arms.

In doing so, she made history in her family: A Honduran immigrant who moved to the U.S. at age 7 while speaking little English, Anyeli is the first to earn a high school diploma. 

Her mother and father both left school after eighth grade, and her grandmother stopped going after first grade, she says.

“They are all so proud and excited for me,” Anyeli said. “My daughter is proud and excited for me too — like my graduation cap says: my diploma is her future.” Anyeli is grateful for a Fairfax County Public Schools program known as Project Opportunity, an initiative that aims to keep expectant and new parents on track to getting their high school diploma.

She transferred to Bryant High School in 2021, knowing Bryant had a daycare center on site. At first she would trudge to school in the August heat while seven months pregnant, since she lived less than a mile from the school and didn’t qualify for bus service.

She found staff at Bryant were flexible and eager to help. Principal Chris Larrick arranged for her to take a bus to school. Counselor Margaret Veenstra and other Project Opportunity staff helped her obtain a car seat, play pen, and diapers before her daughter was born. Anyeli says Bryant ensured school could be part of her life as a new mother. “The staff helped me a lot: there was homebound learning, I had a teacher bring both school work and diapers to my house, and I applied for the daycare in the building and by the time I was ready to go back to school my daughter had been accepted.”

She heads to Northern Virginia Community College in the fall, where she plans to study business administration and get her associate’s degree. “I get a lot of judgment being a mom at such a young age,” she says. “But, I see my future as bright right now.”

Rufus “Rick” Kelly knows he could do information technology work anywhere. But the Fairfax County Public Schools’ senior technology specialist says his Native American roots and cultural upbringing led him to a 30-year career in public education.

While working for a large technology company in his 20s, Kelly says he realized he wanted to do something else with his life.

“I needed to satisfy my social conscience,” Kelly said, adding his Native American upbringing instilled the value of public education. Over 30 years at FCPS, his work has gone beyond information technology: he’s offered input to the Virginia Department of Education on state curriculum and Virginia’s Indians. He’s met with elementary school classes and hosted learning luncheons with coworkers to teach them about Native American history and beliefs.

Jay Corwin is a bus driver who took a student with special needs under his wing. The student barelyspeaks to adults, but has bonded with Jay. Jay visits the student’s school once a week for an hour to play games and draw pictures.

“I absolutely love helping people,” Jay says. “BeforeI joined FCPS I was a Fairfax County firefighter for 30 years where I got to help people everyday. When I became a bus driver I saw that I could continue to help people, and it’s for that reason I was excited to become a mentor.”

Frank Sarfo, Little Run Elementary School custodian, cares not only about the Little Run building, but also for everyone who uses it.

Mr. Frank, as he is affectionately known, is originally from Ghana, where he was a soccer player. Mr. Frank has been known to fix a student’s bike during the school day so the student could ride home. When a kindergartener was anxious and refusing to go to school, he began to excitedly greet him and walk him in. He is a super star in the annual sixth grade vs. school staff kick ball game (dressing head to toe in his Ghanaian soccer uniform).

“Frank comes to school every day to do his assigned job, but he also models kindness,” says Little Run Principal Christie Yarn.