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Fairfax County Public Schools is approaching a pivotal vote on its first comprehensive boundary review in roughly 40 years, with a revised plan that could reassign about 1,700 students to relieve crowding and simplify attendance patterns.

The School Board is scheduled to vote Thursday on recommendations from Superintendent Michelle Reid. The decision follows more than a year of work, including community meetings and public hearings, led with support from Thru Consulting.

School Board Chair Sandy Anderson compared the process to shifting magnets on a board: Moving one group of students can create complications elsewhere. She said the goal has been to balance enrollment while affecting as few children as possible.

The proposal originally would have affected approximately 2,200 students. Reid’s revised recommendations lowered that figure by about 500.

Decades of piecemeal changes

School boundaries determine which schools serve each residential address. Although Fairfax County has adjusted individual boundaries over the years, School Board Member Melanie Meren said those changes were not part of a comprehensive countywide review.

Past adjustments were often administrative and handled inconsistently, she said, sometimes beginning after a resident contacted the superintendent or a board member.

The board changed its policy in 2024 to require the superintendent to review boundaries throughout the county every five years.

Officials must weigh school enrollment and capacity, transportation, proximity and access to academic programs when considering boundary changes.

Some campuses are overcrowded or have substantially higher enrollment despite being near schools with available space. Anderson said those imbalances carry budget consequences and can affect where the division is able to expand programs.

“We can’t build our way out of this problem,” she said, responding to suggestions that the county simply add capacity wherever enrollment is growing.

Split feeders and attendance islands targeted

The review also seeks to reduce fragmented attendance patterns.

Currently, 42 schools operate as “split feeders.” That means some elementary schools send students to multiple middle or high schools, while some middle schools send students to more than one high school.

More than 20 schools also contain “attendance islands,” which are assigned geographic areas that do not directly connect to the rest of a school’s boundary.

Reid has said her recommendations would reduce both arrangements, potentially allowing more students from the same elementary school to continue together through middle and high school.

Families face choices and uncertainty

A policy adopted in summer 2025 allows high school students affected by boundary changes to remain at their current schools. Some elementary and middle school students may also have flexibility.

Students who choose to stay, however, will not receive transportation because that is governed by a separate process, Meren said.

The prolonged review has unsettled some students and parents. Justice High School junior Willow Rosenthal said she learned about it before winter break through conversations at her bus stop and with her family.

“We were all kind of anxious, worried,” Rosenthal said. “We were like, ‘Oh, we really hope we go to the school we’ve been going to for the past couple years now.’”

At a Jan. 10 public hearing, Tamara O’Neil said families had endured 18 months of stress and uncertainty as children wondered where they would attend school and parents hesitated to make plans. She expressed relief that the process was nearing its conclusion.

Nicole Meade, president of the Herndon Middle School PTA, said a countywide review was overdue.

“Forty years seems like a really, really long time,” Meade said.

Officials will not consider neighborhood demographics or potential effects on home prices when drawing boundaries, Meren said.

“The school board and the school system are not responsible for property values,” she said. “We don’t look at that data as part of this work.”

Fairfax County is not alone in reconsidering attendance zones. Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system, is also examining some of its boundaries.