Fairfax County Public Schools asked parents a blunt question: would you give up the days off for Christmas and other religious holidays to free up instruction time? One option the survey never offered — trimming the district’s own planning days and workdays.

Imagine sending your kids to school on December 25th.

What You Need To Know:

• Fairfax County Public Schools emailed parents a survey on the school calendar. One option for adding instruction time: eliminating the days off for “religious and cultural observances” — and the survey’s own examples were Christmas, Diwali, Eid al-Fitr, and Rosh Hashanah.
• The survey asked which trade-off families found most acceptable: cutting religious holidays, shortening winter break, shortening spring break, observing fewer federal holidays, or turning the day before Thanksgiving into a school day.
• Notice what was missing from the list: the district’s own teacher planning days and workdays. Parents were asked to surrender holidays. The bureaucracy’s days off were never up for discussion.
• This is happening under an all-Democrat School Board led by Chair Sandy Anderson (Springfield District). The Board sets the calendar and directs Superintendent Michelle Reid — who is hired by the Board, not elected, and carries out the policies the Board hands her.
• All 12 School Board seats are on the ballot in November 2027. The parents who don’t like these priorities are the ones who get to replace the people setting them.

The Story

Fairfax parents have spent months asking for one simple thing: more full weeks of school. They flooded the district with thousands of messages, frustrated that fewer than half of the school weeks even have five days of teaching.

The district’s response was a survey. And buried in it was a question that stopped parents cold: if the calendar had to give somewhere, would you be willing to give up the days off for religious and cultural holidays — Christmas among them — to make room?

Other options were milder: shorten winter break, shorten spring break, drop a federal holiday, add the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. But one category was conspicuously absent. The survey never asked whether the district could part with its own planning days or workdays. Families’ holidays were fair game. The administration’s calendar was not.

This is not the first time the Board has reached for the days off that matter to families. In April, it voted 8-1, with three members abstaining, to turn Veterans Day into a regular school day, and 5-1, with six abstaining, to cut elementary early-release days down to eight. (One report indicates a separate move to eliminate the day off for Indigenous Peoples’ Day failed on a 7-4 vote — a contrast worth confirming, but a telling one if it holds.)

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, an FCPS mother of three, took the survey and went public, calling out what she sees as the district’s anti-Christian bias and pointing to the Board’s 2022 decision to decouple spring break from Easter. Her larger complaint was about priorities: while the calendar fills with planning days, workdays, and observances, she argued, too many Fairfax students still aren’t reading or doing math at grade level.

For its part, FCPS says it is committed to building a calendar that works for students, staff, and families, and that the survey is simply part of gathering input.

But a survey reveals its authors’ priorities by what it refuses to put on the table. Fairfax’s leaders asked families whether they’d trade away Christmas, Diwali, Eid, and Rosh Hashanah. They did not ask whether the district would trade away a single one of its own days off. That is a choice — and an elected Board made it.