Arlington School Board members Thursday night (Dec. 12) voted unanimously to implement a bell-to-bell ban on student use of phones in county schools starting Jan. 6.
“Our schools are places of learning,” Superintendent Francisco Durán said just before the vote, saying his recommendation was “a policy that will protect that instructional space.”
With the deadline for School Board action looming, two major advocacy groups are pressing for a blanket ban on student phone use during the instructional day in Arlington.
The Arlington Education Association (AEA) and Arlington Parents for Education (APE) have sent a joint letter to School Board members and Superintendent Francisco Durán, seeking the more restrictive of two options currently being considered.
Arlington’s school system has 13 days built into the 2024-25 schedule to use as snow days or for other unexpected closures.
Whether they will be needed is an open question.
His 300th-win season turned out to be the last for longtime head high-school football coach Bruce Hanson.
The head coach of the Yorktown Patriots decided in recent days to step down from the position he took over in 1985. Hanson also will retire as a phys-ed teacher at the Arlington school.
A proposal to restrict access to cellphones at Arlington high schools remains up for debate as a School Board decision deadline approaches.
With the decision date set for Dec. 12, Board members have one major decision left to make related to high schools:
Rather than a frontal assault against it, Arlington School Board members may try to win a delay in implementation of the state’s new school-accountability regimen.
School leaders plan to ask the General Assembly to intervene and postpone the Virginia Department of Education’s new School Performance and Support Framework, a two-pronged evaluation and ranking system that is replacing the previous accreditation process.
Closures are taking place around the county for Election Day tomorrow (Tuesday).
The day is a county government holiday, bringing closures to all Arlington Public Library locations, the Long Bridge Aquatics and Fitness Center and community centers run by the Dept. of Parks and Recreation.
Arlington School Board members in mid-November will consider a major overhaul to how the school system tackles boundary adjustments.
If adopted, school leaders will start looking at boundaries on a two-year cycle rather than the current five years, and will apply a new set of criteria to guide how to make them.
Leaders of Arlington Public Schools are getting an early start on health-insurance renewal, while bringing employees into the conversation from the very beginning.
The goal, Superintendent Francisco Durán told School Board members Tuesday (Oct. 29), is to do better than in 2023, when confusion over a change in health-care providers and poor communication with the rank-and-file about it sparked outrage and led to an auditor’s investigation.
A group of Arlington Public Schools fifth graders received some unexpected attention from First Lady Jill Biden this week.
Twenty-two students from Hoffman-Boston Elementary School arrived at the White House on Monday ready for a tour of the East Wing, teacher Belinda Folb told ARLnow. They had no idea that they would be personally meeting the First Lady herself — or that five of them would be accompanying her on a private tour.
An Arlington School Board candidate and a local LGBTQ+ advocacy group are locking horns over questions of support and inclusion for transgender students.
Equality Arlington issued a statement earlier this week taking aim at Forward Party-endorsed candidate James “Vell” Rives’ stance on Arlington Public Schools’ nondiscrimination policy for transgender students.
New figures show efforts to reduce absenteeism in Arlington public schools may be bearing fruit.
When Arlington School Board members approved the system’s fiscal 2025 budget in the spring, they set a goal of ultimately reducing chronic absenteeism from the then-current level of 13.5% to less than 8%. In recently updated data, there was a bit of progress on that front.
