The Arlington Outdoor Lab is expected to grow by 85 acres through the purchase of an adjacent tract in Fauquier County.
The Arlington Outdoor Education Association’s (AOEA) purchase will increase the lab’s current 226 acres by over a third.
students
|
The vast majority of Arlington Public Schools students and faculty feel safe at school, new data suggests.
A recent survey found that 88% of respondents in grades 4-5 and 85% in grades 6-12 said they felt safe, Aaron Queen, the school system’s director of safety, security and emergency management, said at a School Board meeting last week.
|
A group of Arlington Girl Scouts has received high honors for adding new “see me” flags to two Wilson Blvd intersections.
Twenty fifth graders from Ashlawn Elementary School saved funds from cookie sales to add baskets of bright red flags to N. Livingston and N. Liberty streets in February. Last month, Girl Scouts of the USA recognized their efforts with a Bronze Award — the highest honor a junior Scout can earn for community service.
Supporters of the Arlington Outdoor Lab program at times have had to fight to maintain funding in Arlington Public Schools’ annual budget process.
This year, however, there are smiles all around.
The proposed $845 million fiscal 2026 budget to fund Arlington Public Schools (APS) for the 2025-26 school year has again brought up concerns over how much funding should go into classrooms and how much is needed to provide central-office oversight.
Given fiscal challenges faced by the county government and school system, and the ongoing uncertainty over the region’s economic future, those concerns may be more pronounced this year.
Excess capacity at elementary schools might someday lead Arlington Public Schools to close facilities — but there aren’t any immediate plans to do this, officials say.
“We are not projecting a need to close any schools at this time,” Board Chair Mary Kadera said in response to a question at last week’s Arlington County Civic Federation meeting.
A new policy limiting state and federal law enforcement’s access to Arlington Public Schools facilities is going into effect.
The Arlington School Board has approved a policy revision that restricts access for law enforcement agencies other than the Arlington County Police Department.
Arlington school leaders are making strides in reducing chronic student absenteeism, but the results have been uneven.
Twenty-eight county schools showed year-over-year declines in chronic-absentee rates in the second quarter of 2024-25. But 11 posted an increase, Superintendent Francisco Durán told School Board members last week.
Arlington School Board members for six months have promised a new approach to tackling the school system’s budget-development process.
Those assurances are about to be put to the test.
|
About 60 students took part in the debut of a youth-led coding competition at the Arlington Career Center this weekend.
“We had to communicate with many people — it was quite an effort,” said Nate Levin, a senior at Yorktown High School who, along with Brayden Zee of Yorktown and Sheel Shah of Arlington Tech, organized the 4.5-hour event.
Subpar results from remedial summer-school programming at Arlington Public Schools have left leaders in search of new strategies.
“We weren’t seeing significant [academic] growth,” Superintendent Francisco Durán said during a program recap at the Jan. 16 School Board meeting.
It’s been the practice for some years, but now peanuts and their derivatives are formally banished from food served in Arlington public-school cafeterias.
Cafeterias now must “provide exclusively peanut-free food,” an Arlington Public Schools policy implementation procedure (PIP) mandates.