Fairfax County Public Schools serves every address here. This page names which ones, shows where the line between the two high school pyramids runs, and points you at the district's own locator.
Every address in Mount Vernon and the neighboring Fort Hunt neighborhoods is served by Fairfax County Public Schools — not by the City of Alexandria division that the mailing address suggests. This page does one thing: it names the schools that serve the area, and shows you how to confirm the assignment for a specific house yourself. It does not rate, rank or compare them. Which school serves an address is a fact, and a useful one. How good that school is, is not ours to grade.
Attendance boundaries change. The district's own locator is the authority — not a listing, and not this page.
FCPS Boundary Locator (Find Your School) →Mount Vernon splits between two high school pyramids, and through the residential core the divide follows Little Hunting Creek. West and north of the creek, addresses attend Carl Sandburg Middle School and then West Potomac High School at 6500 Quander Road. The elementary schools on that side are Waynewood Elementary at 1205 Waynewood Boulevard, Stratford Landing Elementary at 8484 Riverside Road, Fort Hunt Elementary at 8832 Linton Lane, and Hollin Meadows Elementary at 2310 Nordok Place, which covers Hollin Hills and the western end of Sherwood Hall Lane. At the northern edge toward Belle Haven, Belle View and Bucknell elementary schools sit in the same pyramid, as do Groveton and Hybla Valley on the Richmond Highway corridor. East and south of the creek, addresses attend Walt Whitman Middle School and then Mount Vernon High School at 8515 Old Mount Vernon Road. The elementary schools there are Washington Mill Elementary at 9100 Cherrytree Drive; Woodley Hills Elementary, which covers Wessynton; Riverside Elementary, which covers the Old Mount Vernon Road and Wagon Wheel Road area; Mount Vernon Woods Elementary; and Woodlawn Elementary. The creek is a usable rule of thumb only near the river. Inland the line has no landmark: checked in the FCPS locator in August 2026, an address in the 7700 block of Richmond Highway returns Hybla Valley, Sandburg and West Potomac, while the 7900 and 8000 blocks return Riverside, Whitman and Mount Vernon. Throughout the area the middle school tracks the high school exactly — if the locator returns Sandburg, it returns West Potomac; if it returns Whitman, it returns Mount Vernon.
FCPS assigns a base school by home address, and base schools chain into a K-12 pyramid: one elementary school feeds one middle school, which feeds one high school. Several elementary schools in this part of the county used to be split feeders, sending part of their attendance area to one middle or high school and part to another; the January 2026 changes removed the split at Riverside Elementary, and every Mount Vernon address checked in August 2026 returned a single consistent pyramid. Three things change that default. First, Advanced Academic Program centers. Full-time AAP runs at designated centers and depends on eligibility screening, not on address alone. For Mount Vernon pyramid addresses the elementary center is Riverside Elementary; on the West Potomac side it is Stratford Landing Elementary. At middle school Sandburg is the AAP center for both sides, so an eligible student living in the Mount Vernon pyramid attends Sandburg rather than Whitman for AAP. Second, dual language immersion. Fort Hunt Elementary runs a one-way Spanish immersion program, kindergarten through grade 6, filled by countywide lottery and continuing at Sandburg. Washington Mill Elementary runs a two-way Spanish immersion program, also K-6, filled by a school-based lottery open to residents inside its own boundary, continuing at Whitman. FCPS does not provide transportation to an immersion school outside its attendance area. Third, International Baccalaureate: Whitman and Mount Vernon High School run the IB Middle Years Programme, and Mount Vernon offers the IB Diploma and Career-related Programmes in grades 11 and 12. Separately, FCPS considers student transfers for the specific reasons listed in School Board Regulation 2230, subject to capacity — most new applications run March 1 to June 1, high school curricular transfers including IB and AP from February 1 to May 1.
The FCPS Boundary Locator is the authority, and it is the reason this page exists: boundaries move, and the locator is always current. Enter the house number and the street name only — leave off Rd, Dr or Ct, which will return no result — then confirm the matched address. It returns the assigned elementary, middle and high school, the elementary and middle AAP centers, and the magisterial district with its School Board members; Mount Vernon addresses fall in the Mount Vernon Magisterial District. As of August 2026 the tool is showing School Year 2026-27, and FCPS updates it each July for the coming year. FCPS states plainly on the tool that boundaries may be adjusted by the School Board and that it gives no guarantee any address will continue to be served by the same schools. Questions go to the Office of Facilities Planning Services at 571-423-2320.
On January 22, 2026, the Fairfax County School Board approved the first comprehensive, division-wide boundary review in nearly four decades. The changes took effect for the 2026-27 school year, phased under School Board Policy 8130, which the board revised in July 2025 to allow grade-by-grade implementation — a student entering the final grade at a current school generally has the option to stay. Transportation for students who stay is not guaranteed, and that question was still unsettled when the board voted. Locally, the approved package reassigned roughly 107 Fort Hunt Elementary students to Mount Vernon Woods, eliminating an attendance island; moved Riverside Elementary students to Stratford Landing and to Woodlawn, eliminating Riverside's middle and high school split feeders; shifted one Sandburg Middle School area to Whitman; and moved one West Potomac High School area, about 54 students, to Mount Vernon High School. A single house on Douglas Street moved from Hollin Meadows to Stratford Landing. Still open as of August 2026: FCPS has flagged Riverside Elementary's AAP center for possible relocation to Woodley Hills Elementary before the next review, several areas elsewhere in the county return to the board in January 2027, and the next comprehensive cycle is due in roughly five years.
Check the address, not the neighborhood. Subdivision names, ZIP codes and the Alexandria mailing address do not track school boundaries, and two houses on the same street can fall on opposite sides of a line. Run the locator on the exact house number yourself. Treat the school fields on a listing as unverified: those entries are typed in by the listing agent, are not warranted by the MLS or by FCPS, and go stale quickly after a boundary change. This page is not a substitute for the locator either. If the assignment matters to your decision, confirm it before the offer rather than after — call Facilities Planning Services with the specific address, and if you are buying into an area that changed in 2026, ask how phasing applies to your student's grade and whether transportation is provided. One thing we will not do is rank or compare schools for you. Naming the school that serves an address is factual and useful. Grading it is not, and steering buyers toward or away from neighborhoods on that basis is a fair housing problem. Test data, school visits and conversations with the school itself are yours to weigh.
More on the area in the Mount Vernon 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.
