Enrollment in Fairfax County schools this fall is expected to see only a small increase over the last year, part of a years-long trend of flattening growth in student population that contrasts sharply with the booms of the county’s outlying neighbors.
Fairfax expects to have 164,490 students in its system this school year, a fewer than 1 percent increase over last year’s 163,593. In fact, Fairfax’s enrollment has been essentially flat since 2003. Officials say the trend is, in large part, due to a shrinking supply of buildable land that is constraining large-scale residential growth in Virginia’s most populous county, which is also by far the commonwealth’s largest school district.
“The county has basically been built out,” School Board Chairman Dan Storck said. “We don’t have very much in the way of open space any more to build tracts of housing.”
Also, Storck said, high housing prices have kept many younger families from moving in, leaving Fairfax with an increasingly aging population that isn’t putting large numbers of new students into the system.
The rapid growth Fairfax County’s student body once saw appears to have shifted, however, to Loudoun and Prince William counties.
Prince William this year is set to surpass the city of Virginia Beach as Virginia’s second largest school district, reaching 72,000 students after growing by more than 30 percent in the past seven years. The county expects to have about 2,000 more students than it did last school year.
Loudoun County Public Schools is at 53,000 children and growing by an even larger margin of 3,000 students a year, opening 25 new schools in the past seven years.
“Loudoun is the fastest growing county in America and that’s just a trend that continues,” Loudoun County Public Schools spokesman Wayde Byard said Friday. “We grow more in a year than the actual size of 61 school divisions, so it’s like putting a little school division on top each year.”
The trend is mirrored in other dense, urbanized areas of the commonwealth and their outer suburbs, said Virginia Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle, who cited similar growth in Powhatan and Goochland County school districts outside of the Richmond area.
