Making Change

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, to help cover the costs of classroom supplies.

In September 2023, two MainStreet Bank employees decided to pool their funds to support this first grade classroom, where one employee’s son is a student.

“I would like to support Miss Huynh’s hard work. She is a great young teacher,” she said. She says the school welcomed her family with open arms when they first moved from Arlington. “It was a different experience when I first walked into the Villa. The people and staff are all friendly and willing to help you.”

While the other employee doesn’t have a personal connection to Fairfax Villa, she hears stories about how badly teachers need supplies from her daughter, a teacher in Prince William County.

“Schools don’t have enough funds for each class,” she said. “I want to give back to our community. I believe we need to build, teach and guide children when they are young.”

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. “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.”

Dave and Shelia do a lot of outreach work, especially in their underserved communities. 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. They hosted the meeting in both English and Spanish and brought free clothes, toys, and books for the families that attended.

They have a special education program to serve students with learning difficulties, special needs, and disabilities. It makes up about 20% of their student population. They take care to make sure the students feel included, recently adding a special education seat to the student council and starting a fifth grade “buddy” program, where older students 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. They would do more stuff sometimes for the fifth graders than they would do for their own teachers,” he said. It’s made a big impact on the fifth-graders too.

“One of our students sometimes struggles with his behavior, but when he goes over there it just clicks,” he said. “He becomes the bright, young, intelligent man that 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.

“It’s one big family,” 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.”

But Fairfax Villa 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. 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 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 to 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 the MainStreet Bank employee 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, 21 new books plus a shelf to hold them. Miss Huynh loves books and often reads with her class. And now, she’ll have lots of new stories to share.