The Fairfax County school board — located in Northern Virginia, a region that contains more active-duty military families, defense contractors, and Pentagon commuters than most states — just voted to eliminate Veterans Day as a student holiday from next year’s academic calendar. The holiday they kept? Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Somewhere in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, the grass just grew a little quieter.
Let us be specific about the geography, because the geography IS the insult. Fairfax County shares a border with Arlington County, home of Arlington National Cemetery — the most sacred burial ground in American military history. The Pentagon sits eleven miles from the Fairfax County Government Center. Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall is closer to most Fairfax schools than the nearest Costco. Marine Corps Base Quantico is a forty-minute drive south. Fort Belvoir — home of the Defense Logistics Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and roughly 50,000 military and civilian employees — sits inside the county line.
These are the families whose children attend Fairfax County Public Schools. These are the parents who deploy, who move every three years, who miss birthdays and anniversaries and first steps. And the school board just told them their holiday — the one day a year the school system acknowledges their sacrifice — is less important than a holiday that was invented in the last decade.
The board considered cutting both Veterans Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day. They could have dropped both and called it a scheduling decision. They could have kept both and moved a teacher workday. Instead, they made a choice. And the choice tells you everything you need to know about the people making it.
Veterans Day has been a federal holiday since 1938. It honors every man and woman who has worn the uniform. It is observed by every federal agency, every state government, and every branch of the military — all of which are headquartered within commuting distance of Fairfax County. Indigenous Peoples’ Day was introduced as a counter-holiday to Columbus Day in the early 2010s and has been adopted by approximately 200 municipalities, most of them in jurisdictions where the progressive wing of the school board runs unopposed.
The Fairfax board didn’t make a calendar decision. They made a values statement. And the values they stated are: the military matters less than the latest cultural signaling initiative.
This is the same school district, by the way, that spent months fighting over sexually explicit LGBTQ materials in school libraries. The same one that drew national attention for prioritizing “equity audits” over reading scores. The same one where parents have been showing up to board meetings for three years trying to get someone — anyone — to focus on math instead of ideology.
They’re not focusing on math. They’re cutting Veterans Day.
Here’s the question nobody on the board is going to answer, so we’ll ask it for them. When a military family in Fairfax County explains to their eight-year-old that daddy’s holiday got cut so the school could keep a holiday the eight-year-old has never heard of, what exactly is the eight-year-old supposed to learn? That service doesn’t matter? That sacrifice is negotiable? That the people who run the school system think your father’s deployment is less culturally significant than a land acknowledgment?
They’ll learn exactly that. And they’ll remember it.
Every school board election has consequences. Most of them are invisible — buried in line items and curriculum standards nobody reads. This one isn’t invisible. This one has a date on the calendar and a flag in the cemetery and a father in uniform who just found out his county thinks his holiday is expendable.
Vote accordingly. Or don’t. The board already made their choice. Now it’s yours.
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