Nine Democrats on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors looked at a $5.7 billion budget and decided the crossing guards had to go.
Thirteen positions eliminated, stripped from every public high school in the county, for a savings of $1.89 million, which is about three hundredths of one percent of what the county spends in a year.
That was the vote on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, and it passed 9 to 1. Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield) cast the only vote against it.
Herrity had defeated the same proposal a year earlier, and he told the Board its reasoning did not survive contact with the budget. This was never a genuine choice between crossing guards and some other service the county needed. The money was there. They could have found the savings anywhere else and chose not to.
Melanie Meren, a Democrat who represents Hunter Mill on the School Board, warned in May that the county was pulling guards away from “the exact locations with the newest drivers” and was balancing its books “on the backs of our kids’ safety.”
Walter Alcorn, the Democrat representing Hunter Mill on the Board of Supervisors, said school safety programs should never be where a county goes looking for discretionary savings.
Chairman Jeff McKay handled that criticism by sending the County Executive a screenshot of his reply to Meren, captioned “What I sent the bimbo.” Meren was on the thread. She read it and asked him directly whether she was the bimbo, and he told her yes.
Sixteen members of Fairfax’s delegation in Richmond condemned him. So did the entire School Board. Every one of them a Democrat. He apologized on May 19, 2026 and called his own words disrespectful and wrong.
The guards stayed cut.
In the same budget, supervisors found about $890,000 to put back into four smaller programs. They also shaved the real estate tax rate from $1.1225 to $1.12 per $100 of assessed value.
Fairfax found the money for a fraction of a penny on the tax rate, but could not find it for thirteen adults standing at high school crossings. Nine Democrats decided which of those two things mattered more.
Fairfax high schools opened on August 24, 2026 with the posts empty.
On Tuesday, September 1, 2026, the seventh day of school, a 16-year-old was hit by a car walking to South Lakes High School in Reston. It happened around 7:54 in the morning. He went to the hospital with minor injuries. The driver stopped and was cited.
McKay’s response was that this is “not a police problem” and “not a county problem.” It was, he said, “a pedestrians and/or drivers not paying attention problem.”
By that afternoon a crossing guard was back at her post outside South Lakes. Within days the county was moving to put guards back at the high schools it had stripped in May.
For four months the county insisted these positions were expendable, and it took a single morning to reverse that. What the Board did in those few hours says more about the risk it accepted in May than anything it said at the time.
Herrity asked for the money back, joined by Dranesville Supervisor Jimmy Bierman, and the Board takes up a $400,000 placeholder to restore the guards permanently at its meeting on Tuesday, September 15, 2026.
It is a public hearing. You can stand up and speak.
Go tell them what you think. Nine of the ten supervisors voted to take crossing guards away from Fairfax high schools while their own party was begging them not to. Every one of those seats is on the ballot in November 2027.