Clearview Elementary School opened on Builders Road on September 4, 1979, with about 300 students and 13 teachers. It now enrolls close to 600 children from Early Head Start through sixth grade, runs the full-time Advanced Academic Programs center for four Herndon-area elementary schools, and in October 2026 welcomed a new principal, Dr. Zadia T. Gadsden.
The school building sits just outside the Town of Herndon line, in unincorporated Fairfax County, but about two thirds of its attendance area lies inside town limits, north of Elden Street. Every address in the boundary continues to Herndon Middle School and Herndon High School.
Clearview serves close to 600 students, from Early Head Start through sixth grade
- Address: 12635 Builders Road, Herndon, VA 20170
- Grades: Early Head Start, Head Start, preschool including a Preschool Autism Class, and kindergarten through sixth grade
- Principal: Dr. Zadia T. Gadsden, since October 2026, with assistant principals Joshua Redford and Rachel Charlton
- Enrollment: 588 students in September 2025, with 603 projected for 2026-27, according to the FCPS Capital Improvement Program
- Mascot: the Yellow Jackets
- District: Fairfax County Public Schools, Region 1, Herndon pyramid
- Feeder path: Herndon Middle School, then Herndon High School
- School day: 8:50 a.m. to 3:35 p.m. for kindergarten through sixth grade
- Federal funding: Title I school
- State accreditation: Fully Accredited, according to its Virginia School Quality Profile
- Main office: 703-708-6000
- Website: Clearview Elementary School
Every FCPS school is fully accredited for 2026, Clearview included
Virginia grades its public schools through the School Performance and Support Framework, the state’s accountability system, which scores each elementary school on how many students pass state tests, how much they grow from one year to the next, and how ready they are for the next grade. Schools land in one of four categories: Distinguished, Meets Expectations, Approaching Expectations or Needs Intensive Support. The state released this year’s results on October 7.
Accreditation is a separate measure, based on the operating requirements in Virginia’s Standards of Quality, and the state rated every FCPS school fully accredited this fall. Across FCPS, 56 percent of schools earned Distinguished in fall 2026, up from 38 percent a year earlier, and 75 percent earned Distinguished or Meets Expectations, compared with 70 percent statewide.
Federal law adds a separate check. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, Virginia identified Clearview for Targeted Support and Improvement for 2025-26, a designation for schools where one or more groups of students fall short of state benchmarks, according to its Virginia School Quality Profile. The school’s improvement plan, described below, sets targets for those groups.
On the Standards of Learning tests, Virginia’s annual exams in reading, math and science, 69 percent of Clearview students passed reading, 75 percent passed math and 69 percent passed science, according to the pass rates the state used for its 2025-26 federal reporting. The school’s 2026-27 improvement plan sets four targets for June 2027, including raising the fifth-grade science pass rate from 69 percent to 75.5 percent and the third-grade reading pass rate for multilingual learners from 28 percent to 44.8 percent.
Niche gives Clearview an overall grade of B and ranks it 537th of 1,125 public elementary schools in Virginia, though third-party rankings shift whenever their formulas change.
About a third of Clearview’s students receive English learner services
FCPS counted 594 students at Clearview in June 2026, according to the FCPS school profile. That count included 195 students receiving English learner services, 141 receiving special education services and 118 in full-time advanced academics. Niche reports that 60 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.
Clearview is a Title I school. Title I is a federal grant for the schools with the highest share of students eligible for free or reduced-price meals, and FCPS uses it to pay for additional staff and resources. In the Herndon pyramid, Herndon Elementary and Hutchison Elementary also receive Title I funding, according to the CIP’s program tables.
Clearview opened in 1979 as an English for Speakers of Other Languages cluster school, and FCPS bused children who needed English instruction to Clearview from other neighborhoods, according to the school’s history. Today English learners attend their neighborhood school, and Clearview has five multilingual learner teachers. On the state’s English proficiency test, 64 percent of Clearview’s English learners made the expected year-over-year progress, above the state’s 58 percent target.
Clearview hosts the full-time AAP center for four Herndon-area schools
Advanced Academic Programs. Clearview is a Level IV center for Advanced Academic Programs, the FCPS services for students who need more challenge than the standard curriculum provides. Level IV means a full-time advanced classroom. Students found eligible in the Clearview, Dranesville, Herndon and Hutchison attendance areas attend the center here, according to the CIP’s center boundary map. The school also takes transportation exception requests for AAP siblings, SACC and daycare stops.
Spanish. Every student from kindergarten through sixth grade takes Spanish through the FLES/LTC program, short for Foreign Language in the Elementary School and Language through Content. Students get about 60 minutes a week, taught through science and STEAM, the combined science, technology, engineering, arts and math curriculum.
AVID. Clearview is an AVID Elementary school. AVID, Advancement Via Individual Determination, builds critical thinking, organization, collaboration and goal setting into every classroom.
Early childhood. The school runs eleven preschool classrooms, among them Early Head Start, Head Start, special education preschool and a Preschool Autism Class. Early Head Start serves infants, toddlers up to age 3 and expectant mothers from qualifying families.
Clubs. After-school options include Science Olympiad, Math Olympiad, robotics, theater, band, strings, chorus and Student Council. The Herndon High School robotics team also ran Clearview’s first summer robotics camp.
Sustainability. In September 2026, Clearview earned the Eco-Schools U.S. Green Flag, the highest of four certification levels in the National Wildlife Federation program. Students tend pollinator gardens, bird habitats and a worm composting project, and a fourth-grade class planted 375 native plants on an eroding hillside with Fairfax County’s stormwater program.
The PTA makes sure every student can go on field trips at no cost to the family.
Clearview’s school day runs from 8:50 a.m. to 3:35 p.m.
Kindergarten through sixth grade starts at 8:50 a.m., and students may arrive no earlier than 8:40 a.m. Dismissal is 3:35 p.m., or 1:35 p.m. on a two-hour early release day, according to the bell schedule. FCPS cut elementary early-release Wednesdays from eight to four for 2026-27.
Fairfax County’s School Age Child Care program, known as SACC, runs before- and after-school care at Clearview, and the 2018 to 2021 renovation built dedicated rooms for it. Ask SACC about space as soon as you have a closing date. For kindergarten in 2026-27, a child must turn 5 on or before September 30, 2026.
FCPS opened Clearview in 1979, then renovated and expanded it from 2018 to 2021
V.F. Pavone Construction built the original school for $2.4 million. The classrooms opened on schedule, but the cafeteria and gym were not ready for the first day. A classroom addition followed in 1982. Construction on a six-classroom wing for preschoolers with special needs began during the final year of Bernie Gross, the second principal, who left in 1989.
Sheila Bertrand, principal from 1989 to 2003, watched enrollment swing as FCPS opened Dranesville Elementary in 1988 and McNair Elementary in 2001 and moved boundaries each time. “One year you would have 760 students and the next, 520,” she said in an interview quoted in the school’s history. The library carries her name.
The 2017 school bond referendum paid for a $26.2 million renovation and expansion that ran from late 2018 to 2021. The project added a wing for primary grades, expanded the library, built music, art and SACC rooms, and redesigned the bus loop.
Stephanie Almquist led Clearview from 2021 until she retired in 2026. Dr. Gadsden arrived in October after more than 20 years as principal of Takoma Park Elementary School in Maryland, and The Washington Post named her its Principal of the Year in 2024, according to the school’s administration page.
Clearview’s teaching staff is experienced by the state’s measures. In 2025-26, 3 percent of its teachers counted as inexperienced under the state’s definition and 3 percent taught outside their field, compared with 4.5 percent and 6.5 percent across FCPS, according to the School Quality Profile.
Clearview has open seats while Herndon Elementary and Hutchison run tight
FCPS rates Clearview’s program capacity, the number of students the building can hold given the programs it runs this year, at 754 seats. With 588 students in September 2025, the school ran at 78 percent of that figure, and FCPS projects enrollment to peak at 613 in 2027-28 before easing to 585 by 2030-31.
Hutchison Elementary ran at 98 percent of its program capacity with 12 temporary classrooms in 2025-26, and Herndon Elementary, which is under renovation, would sit at 111 percent without its 10 modular classrooms, according to the adopted FY 2027-31 CIP.
About two thirds of the Clearview boundary lies inside the Town of Herndon
Clearview’s attendance area covers about 1.1 square miles. Elden Street forms most of its southern edge, Sterling Road, Alabama Drive and Center Street trace parts of its other sides, and Herndon Parkway runs through the middle. The school itself stands just outside town limits, in unincorporated Fairfax County, so a Builders Road address and a Herndon Parkway address can share a school while paying different local taxes. Homes inside the town pay the Town of Herndon’s real estate tax on top of Fairfax County’s.
Detached houses make up most of the housing in the boundary:
- Kingston Chase, the neighborhood around the school in unincorporated Fairfax County, holds about 440 detached homes built in the 1970s, including colonials and split-levels, with a homeowners association that runs a community pool.
- Inside town limits, Treeside, Westfield, Benicia Estates, Mosby Heights and Vinehaven are mostly detached single-family neighborhoods. Parts of Potomac Fairways and Broad Oaks also fall in the boundary.
- Townhouses cluster in Tralee, off Dublin Place and Wexford Court, and in Bluemont and Towns on the Greens. A handful of multifamily buildings sit near Elden Street and Alabama Drive.
Prices inside the boundary vary widely between the townhouse communities and the detached neighborhoods. If you want the last 12 months of sales on the streets you are considering, reach out to us and we will pull them for you.
The boundary also takes in Herndon Centennial Golf Course, the Herndon Community Center on Ferndale Avenue and the Dulles Park shopping center on Elden Street.
Every Clearview address continues to Herndon Middle and Herndon High
The FCPS school profile places Clearview in Region 1 and the Herndon High pyramid, and the whole attendance area sits inside the Herndon Middle School and Herndon High School boundaries. The pyramid’s other elementary schools are Aldrin, Armstrong, Dranesville, Herndon and Hutchison. Our Aldrin Elementary guide covers the north Reston side of the same pyramid.
The Skyview High School boundary study, which the School Board settled on July 16, 2026, covered the Centreville, Chantilly, Oakton, South Lakes and Westfield pyramids and left the Herndon pyramid alone. FCPS plans to present recommendations for further schools and communities in January 2027, and proposed changes appear on its school boundary adjustments page.
Sixth grade stays at Clearview, so a child who starts kindergarten here spends seven years in the building before moving to Herndon Middle for seventh grade.
Check the boundary locator before you write an offer
FCPS assigns students by street address, and attendance lines do not always follow ZIP codes, town limits or neighborhood names. Before you make an offer on a home you want partly for Clearview:
- Enter the exact address in the FCPS Boundary Locator. It returns the assigned elementary, middle and high school.
- Treat the school fields on a listing as a starting point. Listing agents fill them in, and they can lag a boundary change.
- Separate the base school from the AAP center. Clearview’s center also enrolls Level IV students from the Dranesville, Herndon and Hutchison areas, so a Clearview classroom can include children from outside the boundary, and a Clearview child found eligible for Level IV stays in the same building.
- Call the main office at 703-708-6000 with specific questions about class sizes by grade, SACC availability and whether your street falls in a walk zone or a bus zone.
Clearview pairs a renovated building and an AAP center with a Herndon pyramid assignment
Clearview is a 1979 school renovated and expanded in 2021, with a full-time AAP center, Spanish for every grade, a Title I program, eleven preschool classrooms and a new principal who arrived this fall. Its boundary runs from Kingston Chase south to Elden Street, and every address in it leads to Herndon Middle and Herndon High.
If you are weighing homes north of downtown Herndon and want to know which addresses land at Clearview, reach out to us. We can pull the boundary for any listing you are considering and walk you through the feeder path before you make an offer.
See something missing or wrong? Email us at [email protected] and we will check it and update the post.
