The school year is now well underway, and so far, Falls Church City Public Schools stands out as the only school division in the region that has not experienced a significant decline in enrollment this fall. That broader regional trend is expected to continue, and potentially worsen, as layoffs among federal government employees and contractors take their toll. Even Falls Church’s modest net gain of fewer than three dozen students fell short of projections made before the full impact of those layoffs began to emerge.
The challenge for our school division is not simply to prevent further erosion in enrollment, but to do so while remaining committed to broader social values and educational objectives. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence presents an extraordinary challenge, one that cannot be addressed through lip service or familiar educational slogans alone. For a school system situated in the heart of the nation’s data center industry, access to emerging technologies and expertise is practically at its doorstep. The question is how best to put those resources to work for students.
At the same time, there is considerable value in the experience and judgment of educators who understand the importance of critical thinking, communication and traditional journalistic standards. Two former News-Press employees now play important roles in the Falls Church school system: Meridian High School Principal Peter Laub and English teacher and student newspaper adviser Beau Fay.
Both have fond memories of their days at the News-Press, stories that inevitably resurface whenever an informal reunion takes place. Such gatherings have become less frequent, in part because advances in technology have reduced the number of people needed to produce the newspaper each week, even as the volume of news content continues to grow.
It is in that spirit that we welcome the opportunity to publish the work of Meridian High School’s student journalists in our pages, a partnership that began last year. We look forward to continuing that tradition with a new issue of The Lasso scheduled for publication at the end of this month.
But determining which AI technologies genuinely benefit students, while maintaining appropriate protections and guardrails and creating pathways to better futures, requires constant vigilance, careful evaluation and ongoing oversight. Technology should strengthen students’ ability to think, question and create, not simply perform those tasks for them.
As our Nick Gatz writes, “We do not use Canva or any of its associated design tools in our production workflow at the Falls Church News-Press. That is a deliberate professional decision based on our experience, technical requirements and the standards we maintain for commercial printing. Perhaps one day Canva will become the gold standard for professional design and print production. Technology evolves, and we are certainly not opposed to that progress.”
He adds, “Having access to a tool does not mean understanding the industry in which that tool operates. Owning a camera doesn’t automatically make someone a professional photographer.”
The same principle applies to education. Teaching students to operate increasingly sophisticated software is not the same as teaching them to understand what they are creating, why it matters or whether the result is accurate. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in classrooms and workplaces, those distinctions will only become more important. The future of education must be about developing the judgment and critical thinking necessary to use technology wisely, rather than allowing technology to do the thinking for us.
