One of Virginia’s wealthiest counties is considering removing Veterans Day as a student holiday for next year’s school calendar. The potential move comes after years of the county increasingly giving students and staff days off to recognize the holidays of foreign cultures.
Stafford County School Board officials held a meeting on Tuesday to discuss (among other agenda items) calendar proposals for the 2027-2028 academic school year. While one of the proposed calendars recognizes Veterans Day as a staff and student holiday, the other does not. A draft calendar for the 2028-2029 school year has also been put forward but does not denote Veterans Day as a student/staff holiday since it falls on a Saturday that year.
The calendars were seemingly drafted by a calendar committee comprised of Stafford County parents, students, community leaders, staff members, and “building administrators from existing advisory committees.”
According to the Fredericksburg Free Press (FFP), the potential move to adjust the county’s academic calendar comes as Stafford officials struggle to meet the commonwealth’s requirement that a standard school year “shall be 180 instructional days or 990 instructional hours.” While the county has regularly met the 990 instructional hours mandate, “it has not met the 180-day requirement since 2021,” the outlet reported.
As telegraphed during Tuesday’s meeting, a key factor contributing to the problem is Stafford’s increasing willingness to give students and staff days off for non-Christian holidays. The county’s 2026-2027 academic calendar, for example, includes days off for Yom Kippur (Judaism), Eid al-Fitr (Islam), and Eid al-Adha (Islam). The county also gave students and staff the Hindu holiday of Diwali off last year. (Diwali falls on a Sunday this year).
The calendars still give students and staff two weeks off for “winter break,” which includes Christmas.
Regarding discussions about whether to remove Veterans Day as a staff/student holiday, Stafford Superintendent Daniel Smith said during Tuesday’s meeting that, if the county school system were to move forward with that proposed calendar, there would be “expectations for schools that they do have an observance, have a lesson, certain materials about veterans and appreciation for veterans.”
Stafford is home to a sizeable number of retired service members, likely due to its proximity to Washington, D.C., and Marine Corps Base Quantico. The most recent U.S. Census Bureau data shows that nearly 20,000 of the county’s near 171,000 residents, or roughly 12 percent, are veterans.
“I’m conflicted here because I know that there’s a very strong population that would like to see [Veterans Day] as a holiday, even though, you know, we would recognize it and do things in the school,” said school board member Patricia Healy. “This is a tough one because we’ve added so many other holidays recognizing other groups or, you know, portions of our population here in Stafford, and I don’t want to say the veterans are less important than some of the other ones. … It just seems like we’re adding and adding, and maybe we need to take back [some of those days off].”
One of the board’s student representatives, Safdar Qureshi, said he’s not even looking at the calendar debacle “as like religious holidays or anything,” but as “days that students and staff have off.” He added that, “as a student,” he would “want to have at least one holiday, preferably two, in the month, just because that’s something to look forward to.”
“That’s something that students can use to make missing work up and take like a mental rest day almost,” Qureshi said.
The school board’s chair asked staff “to come back with a third 180-day calendar option that preserves only federal and state holidays such as Martin Luther King Jr. Day and President’s [sic] Day and removes religious holidays,” according to the FFP. The board will seemingly have final approval on which calendar is ultimately approved.
Stafford wouldn’t be the first Virginia county to ax Veterans Day as a school holiday if it were to go forward with that proposal. The Fairfax County School Board voted to do so earlier this year, while simultaneously keeping recognition of so-called “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
