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?

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.

Follow the evolution of Bailey's Upper Elementary School from construction through ribbon cutting in this video series by Fairfax County Public Schools Red Apple 21 video producer Donny Haller.