Bailey's Upper Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences

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

Bailey’s Upper Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences opened on September 2, 2014. Our school is the first of its kind in Fairfax County – a vertically designed school located in a former five-story office building. The office building was gutted and completely redesigned into a premier educational learning environment. The construction process took just eight months to complete and Bailey’s Upper opened on time for the start of the 2014-15 school year. Bailey’s Upper Elementary School educates children from third through fifth grade, and our sister school, Bailey’s Elementary School (Primary), educates children from pre-school through second grade. Together, our schools serve approximately 1,300 students from the surrounding Bailey’s Crossroads community.

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.

Early History
The history of Bailey’s Elementary School 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 modern Bailey’s Elementary School (Primary) 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 Fairfax County public schools racially integrated 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.