Great Falls is served by Fairfax County Public Schools. The middle and high school are the same across the community; the elementary assignment is not, and it changes mid-block on several Great Falls roads. Here is what the district's own locator returned for the 2026-27 school year, and how to check your address yourself.
Great Falls is unincorporated Fairfax County, so there is no town school system — every address here is a Fairfax County Public Schools address. What follows was checked in August 2026 by running Great Falls addresses through the FCPS Boundary Locator, which as of that month was returning assignments for the 2026-27 school year. School boundaries move. FCPS states plainly that it provides no guarantee any address will continually be served by the same schools, and the division updates the locator each July. Treat everything below as a description of what the locator said in August 2026, and treat the locator itself as the authority.
Attendance boundaries change. The district's own locator is the authority — not a listing, and not this page.
FCPS Boundary Locator →Every Great Falls address checked in August 2026 returned the same two secondary schools: Cooper Middle School, 977 Balls Hill Road, McLean, and Langley High School, 6520 Georgetown Pike, McLean. Elementary is where the community splits, and three schools carry most of it. Great Falls Elementary, 701 Walker Road, covers the village center and the Potomac side — Walker Road from the 300 through the 900 block, Georgetown Pike from roughly the 9500 through the 10300 block, lower Springvale Road, Innsbruck Avenue and Potomac Hills Street. Forestville Elementary, 1085 Utterback Store Road, covers the west and northwest — Seneca Road, Utterback Store Road, Falls Bridge Lane, upper Springvale Road, Georgetown Pike from roughly the 10800 block toward Dranesville, and the western reach of Leesburg Pike. Colvin Run Elementary, 1400 Trap Road in Vienna, covers the southeast, on the Difficult Run side toward Leesburg Pike — Colvin Run Road, Leigh Mill Road and Walker Road past the 1100 block. At the eastern edge a fourth school appears: 900 Towlston Road returned Spring Hill Elementary School in McLean.
No single road, creek or ridge separates the three Great Falls elementary areas. The lines cross the roads rather than follow them. On Georgetown Pike the assignment changed somewhere between the 10300 block, which returned Great Falls Elementary, and the 10800 block, which returned Forestville. On Walker Road it changed between the 900 block, Great Falls Elementary, and the 1100 block, Colvin Run. Springvale Road crossed two lines in its own length: the 500 and 800 blocks returned Great Falls Elementary, 925 returned Forestville, 1000 returned Colvin Run. Two houses a few hundred yards apart on the same road can be assigned to different elementary schools. ZIP code 22066 covers the whole community and predicts none of this; the mailing address predicts nothing either — Colvin Run Elementary carries a Vienna address, Cooper and Langley carry McLean ones, and all of them serve Great Falls.
FCPS assigns each address to a base school at each level, and those base schools chain upward into a pyramid. Here the elementary schools run through sixth grade, Cooper is a two-year middle school for grades 7 and 8, and Langley covers grades 9 through 12. All four elementary schools above feed Cooper and then Langley, so the pyramid is the constant in Great Falls and the elementary boundary is the variable. Advanced Academic Program centers do not follow the same map. For Great Falls Elementary and Colvin Run addresses the locator returned Colvin Run Elementary as the elementary AAP center; for Forestville addresses, Forest Edge Elementary in Reston; for the Towlston Road address, Churchill Road Elementary in McLean. The middle AAP center was Cooper in every case. Center attendance is subject to eligibility screening, so an address determines which center a student would attend, not whether they attend one.
Great Falls Elementary is an FCPS dual-language immersion school. Its Japanese Immersion Program teaches mathematics, science and health in Japanese, and language arts and social studies in English, for grades 1 through 6. Entry is by lottery in first grade; students joining in grades 2 through 6 take a language fluency assessment first. Any Fairfax County resident may apply, but the school states transportation is provided only if the child lives within the school boundary — so an out-of-boundary seat carries a daily driving commitment an in-boundary seat does not. Separately, FCPS will consider a student transfer to a non-base school for the specific reasons set out in Regulation 2230 — child care hardship in grades K-6, a sibling at the requested school, medical, emotional or social adjustment, family relocation and others. Applications run February 1 to June 1, with earlier windows for high school curricular programs and renewals. Transfers last one year, the student must be registered at the base school first, some schools are closed to transfers, and approval depends on capacity. A transfer is a request, not an entitlement.
FCPS completed its first comprehensive boundary review in nearly four decades. The School Board voted on January 22, 2026 to approve the changes proposed by Superintendent Michelle Reid; they took effect with the 2026-27 school year, which began August 24, 2026. Changes phase in under School Board Policy 8130, revised July 17, 2025: at a K-6 elementary the new boundary is mandatory for rising K-4 students while those in grades 5 and 6 may stay put; at a 7-8 middle school it is mandatory for incoming seventh graders; at a high school, for incoming ninth graders, with rising tenth through twelfth graders able to remain. Students already in a dual-language immersion program continue in it, and AAP center assignments were not changed. One timing point matters for anyone reading older material: the locator did not carry 2026-27 assignments until July 2026. FCPS has also flagged some areas for extended review with recommendations due in January 2027, and puts the next comprehensive cycle roughly five years out. The extended-review studies it has named sit elsewhere in the county, not in Great Falls — but not being named is not the same as being settled.
Check the address, not the neighborhood. Run the house number through the FCPS Boundary Locator, screenshot the result, note the date, and run it again before you write an offer — particularly if you are buying between July and the start of the school year, when the division refreshes its data. The school field on a listing sheet, in the MLS or on a portal is typed in by a person and is not verified by the school division; it is often right and sometimes stale, and neither the listing agent nor the portal is the authority. FCPS is, and it says outright that no address is guaranteed the same schools indefinitely. If an assignment is material to your purchase, say so in writing and confirm it before your contingencies expire. One thing this page deliberately does not do is rate, rank or compare the schools it names. Which school serves an address is a fact a buyer is entitled to. Judging a school is not a broker's call: published ratings track neighborhood demographics closely, and steering buyers by them is a fair-housing violation. Form your own view — visit, meet the principal, read the school's improvement plan. Our job is to tell you which school it is and where to confirm it.
More on the area in the Great Falls guide.
School assignment turns on the address, not the neighbourhood, and a listing's school field is unverified. Artur can confirm it against the district record before you write.
