Bailey's Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences

Here follows the school history as published by Fairfax County Public Schools on their website:

The history of Bailey’s Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences dates back to shortly after the founding of Fairfax County Public Schools in 1870. For the first 76 years of its history, the public school system in Fairfax County was segregated by race. School system records indicate that a one-room schoolhouse for white children at Bailey’s Crossroads existed by 1874, when Louisa A. Ball was employed as its teacher. The earliest records of a school for African-American children at Bailey’s Crossroads date to 1886 when Harriet J. Farrier was hired as its teacher. When the current Bailey’s Elementary School building on Knollwood Drive opened on September 2, 1952, only white children from the surrounding community were admitted. At that time, African-American children from our area attended a small two-room schoolhouse on Lacy Boulevard. It would be four more years before these children moved into a modernized brick building, Lillian Carey Elementary School. All racially segregated public schools in Fairfax County were closed at the end of the 1965-66 school year, marking the beginnings of the ethnically and culturally diverse Bailey’s Elementary school community we know today.

By the late 1980s the student body of about 500 included children whose families had emigrated from some 40 different countries and spoke two dozen different languages. Only a handful of students were native English speakers. Bailey’s was one of a few Fairfax County schools that initiated a partial language immersion program in Spanish. Due to the efforts of Bailey’s multicultural PTA to positively address issues of equity and quality in education, the Fairfax County School Board in a series of votes in 1991 and 1992 agreed to make Bailey’s the first elementary magnet program in the County. The magnet program emphasized interdisciplinary, hands-on instruction with labs for math and science, a performing arts program, a school museum, the use of new technologies, enhanced teacher coordination, and strong parental involvement. Baileys drew hundreds of out of boundary students to join those from the local area. Bailey’s excellent programs annually attracted hundreds of visiting educators from across the United States and around the world to observe the school. A Presidential Advisory Board formally studied Bailey’s and found it to be "an educational, social and cultural haven for students from all backgrounds" The school grew to over 1,400 students by 2014 prompting Fairfax County to develop another building on Leesburg Pike to house an “Upper School” with grades 3 to 5, while continuing to use the older Knollwood Drive building for the primary school with grades PK-2.

CETA
In 1999, Bailey’s Elementary School entered into a partnership with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of the Changing Education Through the Arts Program (CETA). As a result of this partnership, our teachers are inspired to find new and innovative ways to integrate the arts throughout the curricula.

For whom was the Bailey’s Crossroads community named?
Bailey’s Elementary School, which opened in 1952, and Bailey’s Upper Elementary School, which opened in 2014, are named for the Bailey’s Crossroads community. In 1837, Hachaliah Bailey, of Westchester County, New York, purchased 526 acres of land in Fairfax County near the intersection of Leesburg and Columbia Pikes. Bailey owned a traveling menagerie of elephants and was called “the father of the American circus” by P. T. Barnum. In 1843, Hachaliah Bailey conveyed his property to Mariah Bailey, the wife of his son Lewis. After acquiring the land, Lewis and Mariah Bailey took up farming. Their home, called Moray, once stood on what is today Durbin Place near Glen Forest Elementary School. The area around the Bailey farm eventually came to be known as Bailey’s Crossroads. During the American Civil War, in November 1861, Bailey’s Crossroads was the site of “The Grand Review” where approximately 70,000 soldiers marched in formation before President Abraham Lincoln. Because Virginia law required racial segregation in public education, after the founding of Fairfax County Public Schools in 1870, two schools were established in the Bailey’s Crossroads community - one for white children and one for African-American children. The school for white children was built on land donated by Mariah Bailey. At first a one-room structure, it was replaced in the 19-teens by a two-story building which operated until the opening of Bailey’s Elementary School in 1952. African-American children had no permanent schoolhouse until 1922, when a building was constructed on Lacy Boulevard. Local tradition tells that prior to this time the children attended school in structures where the congregation of Warner Baptist Church worshipped. The children attended the Bailey’s “Colored” School, as it was known in historic records, until 1956, when Lillian Carey Elementary School opened nearby on Summers Lane. Named for a former FCPS teacher and principal, Lillian Carey Elementary School closed in 1965, during the racial integration of the public school system. The first documented integration of African-American children into the formerly all-white Bailey’s Elementary School occurred in 1963. Today, Bailey’s Elementary School is one of the most culturally, economically, and linguistically diverse schools in Fairfax County.

Bailey’s Upper Elementary School
During the early 2000s, enrollments in the Bailey’s Crossroads community rose dramatically and area schools quickly became overcrowded. Our sister school, Bailey’s Upper Elementary School, opened on September 2, 2014. Our schools partner to educate approximately 1,300 students from the surrounding Bailey’s Crossroads community, with children from pre-school through 2nd grade at Bailey’s Elementary School and children from 3rd through 5th grade at Bailey’s Upper Elementary School.