Fairfax CountyET is Virginia's largest school division and one of its wealthiest. Its 2023 graduation rate of 93.4% places it comfortably above the state average. Its reputation as a high-performing suburban system is well established.

That reputation does not extend to all of its schools.

Three alternative schools within Fairfax County posted dropout rates between 40% and 79% in 2023. Together, they enrolled 431 students in their graduation cohorts. In these buildings, dropping out was not the exception. It was the most common outcome.

The Three Schools

Fairfax County Adult High School had a 78.8% dropout rate in 2023, with 203 students in its cohort. Its graduation rate was 15.3%.

Bryant High had a 47.5% dropout rate and graduated 37.7% of its 122 students. Five years earlier, in 2019, Bryant graduated 42.0%. The rate has declined.

Mountain View High had a 52.8% dropout rate and graduated 39.6% of its 106 students. Its 2019 rate was 50.6%.

What the Division Rate Hides

Alternative schools exist to serve students who have already fallen off track: students who are over age for their grade, who have been expelled or suspended, who are managing pregnancies or family obligations, who have cycled through other schools. The students at Fairfax County Adult High, Bryant, and Mountain View arrived at those schools because something went wrong earlier.

That context matters. But it does not change the arithmetic. Fairfax County had 431 students in 2023 attending schools where the dominant outcome was leaving without a diploma.

Remove the three alternative schools from the calculation, and Fairfax County's graduation rate ticks upward. The gap between the division's rate with and without these schools is small in percentage terms, because the alt school cohorts are a tiny share of the total. But for the students inside those buildings, the division-wide statistic is meaningless.

The Trend Is Moving the Wrong Way

Both Bryant and Mountain View saw their graduation rates decline from 2019 to 2023. Bryant dropped from 42% to 37.7%. Mountain View fell from 50.6% to 39.6%. The students arriving at these schools are not being served better over time. They are being served worse.

Fairfax County built these schools to be a safety net. The safety net is catching fewer students each year. What happens next is a decision the school board has to make, not a trend that will resolve on its own.

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