The Stafford County School Board is considering a 2027-2028 academic calendar that would eliminate Veterans Day as a day off for students and staff, a change officials say is driven largely by the state’s requirement that public schools hold 180 instructional days each year.
At a meeting Tuesday, the board reviewed two proposed calendars for 2027-2028. One keeps Veterans Day as a staff and student holiday; the other does not. A third draft calendar, covering the 2028-2029 school year, also omits Veterans Day as a holiday because the date falls on a Saturday that year. The proposals were developed by a calendar committee made up of parents, students, community leaders, staff and administrators from existing advisory committees.
According to the Fredericksburg Free Press, Stafford has met the commonwealth’s 990-instructional-hour requirement but has not met the 180-instructional-day requirement since 2021. County officials pointed to that shortfall as a driving factor behind the proposed change.
The county’s current 2026-2027 calendar includes days off for Yom Kippur, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, and students and staff were given a day off for Diwali last year. Two weeks of winter break, which includes Christmas, remain on the calendar under every proposal discussed.
Stafford Superintendent Daniel Smith told the board that if the calendar without a Veterans Day holiday were adopted, schools would still be expected to hold some form of recognition. “There would be expectations for schools that they do have an observance, have a lesson, certain materials about veterans and appreciation for veterans,” Smith said.
A county with deep military ties
Stafford’s proximity to Washington, D.C., and Marine Corps Base Quantico has given the county a substantial veteran population. Census Bureau data show roughly 20,000 of Stafford’s nearly 171,000 residents, or about 12 percent, are veterans.
Board member Patricia Healy said she was torn over the proposal. “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,” Healy said. “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.”
Student representative Safdar Qureshi offered a different perspective, saying he views the debate less in terms of specific holidays and more in terms of overall time off. “As a student,” he said he’d “want to have at least one holiday, preferably two, in the month, just because that’s something to look forward to.” He added that such days give students “something that students can use to make missing work up and take like a mental rest day almost.”
The board’s chair asked staff to draft a third 180-day calendar option that would preserve only federal and state holidays, such as Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Presidents Day, while removing religious holidays from the schedule, according to the Fredericksburg Free Press. The school board will have final say over which calendar is ultimately adopted.
If Stafford moves forward with removing Veterans Day, it would not be the first Virginia district to do so. The Fairfax County School Board voted earlier this year to drop Veterans Day as a school holiday while retaining recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
