FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va.—For the first time in two decades, St. Paul VI Catholic High School in Virginia has a waitlist, which is occurring not long after a move to a larger campus that expanded the school’s capacity by 20 percent, or 200 students.
Paul VI, as locals call it, has enjoyed double-digit growth for the past two years: 12 percent in the 2020–21 school year and 13 percent in 2021–22. With the current student count at 1,090, the school is anticipating another 8 to 9 percent increase in the school year 2022, according to Billy Atwell, chief communications officer of the Diocese of Arlington.
In the summer of 2020, Paul VI moved its campus to Chantilly, a city about 10 miles west and much closer to the neighboring Loudoun County, from Fairfax. Before the move, enrollment from Fairfax County was a clear majority at 64 percent during the 2019–20 school year, according to Ginny Colwell, head of school at Paul VI. Since then, the proportion of students from Loudoun has grown steadily to 47 percent from 27 percent.
In recent years, Loudoun County has become a known name nationally for locals’ fight for parental rights and against critical race theory (CRT), a quasi-Marxist framework that says the United States is systematically racist and views society and institutions through the lens of race. While Loudoun County Public School officials have repeatedly denied that its schools teach CRT, parents have argued that CRT views have seeped into the daily teaching at schools under its program of “social-emotional learning,” which has taken priority over academics.
For many parents, the pandemic, which caused schools to switch to virtual learning, offered them an opportunity to better understand what their children were being taught at school. That prompted growing protests against a range of ideas, including Marxist-rooted doctrines such as CRT being transmitted in classrooms.
As the pandemic dragged on, more parents raised objections to COVID-19 measures implemented by schools, including virtual learning and mask-wearing. Parents, including those in Loudoun and Fairfax counties, began pressing their local public schools to reopen.
Paul VI reopened with hybrid learning in the 2020–21 school year; half of the student body would be on virtual learning at any one time, done on a rotating schedule. It returned to in-person learning the next school year.
When Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order making mask-wearing optional in schools took effect on Jan. 24, Catholic schools in the Commonwealth ended their mask mandate.
