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Making Change

Caring for our community

Fairfax Villa Elementary School

Small school, big heart

Above: Victoria Huynh, Zula, Nathan, Principal Dave Gerstner, Trinh, and Assistant Principal Shelia Sosbeki with a thank-you note made by the first grade class. (Photo: MainStreet Bank)

It’s 9 a.m. at Fairfax Villa Elementary school, and the last school buses are pulling in. Staff waiting inside the entrance greet students with a smile as they come through. In Miss Huynh’s first grade classroom, about a dozen children sit on the multi-colored squares of an alphabet rug.
 
“I feel supercalifragilisticexpiali… I can’t even say it,” said one first-grader named Dash. “I have my mind blown.”
 
“I’m super duper duper happy,” said a student named Elisa.
 
Miss Huynh’s classroom is receiving a $1,000 donation from MainStreet Bank’s employee-directed giving program.
 
“What are we going to use it for?” Miss Huynh asks Elisa.
 
“To make our classroom even better,” she says.
 
In September 2023, MainStreet Bank’s Zula Gankhuyag and Trinh Ton decided to pool their funds to support this first grade classroom, where Zula’s son Nathan is a student.
 
“Miss Huynh is new to the school this year,” Zula said. “I would like to support her hard work. She is a great young teacher.”
 
Nathan is the youngest of Zula’s three children, all of whom have attended Fairfax Villa. They moved from Arlington when her oldest was going into fifth grade.
 
“They were very friendly, and very warm, welcoming,” Zula said. “It was a different experience when I first walked into the Villa… I was like oh, this is very small. But I get in there and it’s just very nice. The people and staff are nice,” she continued. “It’s very warm and welcoming. They’re all friendly and willing to help you.”
 
While Trinh doesn’t have a personal connection to Fairfax Villa, she’s deeply familiar with the financial problems schools face, so she decided to join Zula in her donation.
 
“Schools don’t have enough funds for each class,” Trinh explained. She hears stories from her daughter, a teacher in Prince William County, about how badly teachers need supplies.
 
Fairfax Villa is only about three miles away from MainStreet Bank’s headquarters in Fairfax, and Trinh loved the idea of using her donation for something so local.
 
“I want to give back to our community,” she said. “I believe we need to build, teach and guide [children] when they are young.”

Above: Fairfax Villa students read together and work with counting bears, a type of math manipulative. (Photos: Fairfax VIlla Elementary School)

Fairfax Villa may not be a big school, but its roots in the community run deep.
 
The building is tucked away in a pocket of trees in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The school has around 500 students, including those in the special education and early childhood education programs.
 
“This school is known as a small school with a big heart,” said Principal Dave Gerstner. “And it is. We always try to lead with our hearts in every decision we make.”
 
Many teachers live in the surrounding area and they have students whose parents or even grandparents are Fairfax Villa alumni.
 
“The community itself has a lot of longevity,” said Assistant Principal Shelia Sobeski. “There’s just this sense of that pride in the community.”
 
Outreach is an important part of the work Dave and Shelia do, especially when it comes to typically underserved populations. 28% of students are on free and reduced lunch and 22% are still learning English.
 
The school recently hosted its first Parent-Teacher Association meeting at Waples Mobile Home Park, a neighborhood where a number of lower income and non-English speaking students live.
 
Dave says the school’s family liaison, Ursula Freitag, came and helped translate everything so they could host the meeting in both English and Spanish. They provided food and brought free clothes, toys, and books for the families that attended.
 
“It was great because the kids brought their moms and dads over. They were able to take anything they wanted food or clothing wise. And then we had a PTA meeting right there,” said Dave. “It was so well received and they said they would love for us to come out and do it again.”
 
About 20% of Fairfax Villa students are in the special education program, which serves students with learning difficulties, special needs, and disabilities within the Woodson High School pyramid.
 
“You will see those students in morning meetings… they’re in the lunchroom while others are having lunch,” said Shelia. “We just try to be as inclusive as possible.”
 
They recently added seats to the student council association so both the special education and early education students can elect their own class representatives. Last year they tried a new fifth grade “buddy” program for older students in the general education population to help with the special education classes.
 
“Our fifth grade gen-ed kids came over to the classroom to spend time with them – which they absolutely loved,” Dave said. “They would do more stuff sometimes for the fifth graders than they would do for their own teachers.”
 
He says he saw a big positive impact on the fifth-grade students too.
 
“One of our fifth graders… he’s a student that sometimes struggles with his behavior, but when he goes over there it just clicks,” Dave said. “He’s just a bright, young, intelligent man like we know he is.”
 
The more you talk to staff at Fairfax Villa, the clearer their love for the students is.
 
Dave is an optimistic and engaged principal who always makes time to connect with students.
 
Every week he uses his lunch time to meet with a group of students he mentors. They eat, chat, and play games like Uno together. Dave is behind the school’s “positivity program,” which has a theme every week for kids and parents to reflect on, like forgiveness. On Mondays, they wear matching green positivity T-shirts and get a new theme to think about.
 
While many public schools have struggled to retain teachers and staff, Fairfax Villa has had teachers actively seek them out – like Miss Huynh who came from a different school. And when new staff come, they tend to stick around.

Above: Staff pose with the school mascot. (Photo: Fairfax VIlla Elementary School)

“We have teachers who have their own children who are teachers here,” Shelia said.
 
“It’s one big family, absolutely,” said Karen Wells, the school’s administrative assistant. “We enjoy being around each other. We laugh, we have fun, we just all click throughout the whole building – and you get that feeling from the parents too.”
 
Dave says they really try to build a family-centered work culture. Both in terms of forming bonds that feel like family – but also in making sure that teachers are able to prioritize their families when they need to.
 
“We always talk about family first mentality. We really try to be a family in the school, but your family at home is what really needs to come first,” said Dave.
 
“I can honestly say for the most part coming into work is a joy,” said Shelia “It’s ‘oh my gosh I can’t wait to see Dave and Karen!’ I can’t wait to see what everybody did…checking in on the kids, seeing the children. For the most part smiles as they walk in the door, and if not we turn that frown around.”
 
But the school still faces challenges. Like many schools, their students have been struggling to catch up with math, reading, and writing since the pandemic.
 
“We had some kids who didn’t know how to write their names when they first came back,” Dave said. “It’s going to take years to recover. I think everyone just thought it was going to be a quick fix, and it’s really not going to be.”
 
Last year they were able to send some teachers for additional training in things like advanced math recovery.
 
“The teachers that started this last year and worked on these skills and strategies, they saw a huge difference,” Dave said. “They love going to this training because they see the impact it has on the students in the classroom.”
 
But funds are tight these days, and they don’t have much leftover for training.
 
Virginia recently mandated an overhaul of how reading is taught in public schools, giving them a hard deadline to switch to a new “science of reading” curriculum. But school staff say the mandate came without any additional funding to help the schools implement the change. Fairfax Villa’s been working for the last two years to get ready for the switch.
 
“It’s a huge undertaking for our staff,” Shelia said. “Unfortunately, the state wants us to do this, but does not fund it at all. Not the training, not the materials or resources.”
 
They hired a new reading specialist, Lisa Choi, to help them transition to the new program. Dave says she’s been an asset to the school. Children who have been identified for individualized support have made great gains under her watch, he said. But they’ve had to use a substantial chunk of their budget to bring her on.
 
“We spend the money to have this wonderful person in our building,” Dave said. “Because of that, though, we don’t have funds to have people go to trainings.”
 
They’ve had to cut back on other expenses too. They aren’t able line up substitute teachers in advance and haven’t been able to replace their supply of math manipulatives – hands-on tools like counting bears that can help kids learn math – which went missing after being loaned to students during the pandemic.
 
“There’s been so many things that we’ve had to pay for,” Karen said. “So we just have to really look at things when somebody’s asking for something and we have to do what’s most important for these kids.”
 
The PTA has been holding fundraisers to help. That’s where Zula got the idea of using her donation for Miss Huynh’s class.
 
With the donation from MainStreet Bank, Miss Huynh was able to restock her classroom with school supplies, math manipulatives, and 21 new books plus a shelf to hold them.
 
Zula said Miss Huynh loves books and often reads with her class. And now, she’ll have lots of new stories to share.

Left: Trinh and Zula hold up the student-made thank-you note outside of Fairfax Villa. Right: the 21 books Miss Huynh bought for her students. (Photo: MainStreet Bank)

To learn more about Fairfax Villa Elementary School visit fairfaxvillaes.fcps.edu

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