Flint Hill School

Flint Hill School, founded in 1956, is a private, co-educational, college preparatory school, in Oakton, Virginia, serving grades JK–12. The school has separate upper and lower school campuses about a mile apart in Fairfax County, approximately from Washington, D.C. In 2021, Niche ranked Flint Hill School 9 out of 2489 private schools in the United States, making it the best in Virginia. History Flint Hill School was founded in 1956 by Don Niklason as the Flint Hill Preparatory School, a co-educational day school with 18 students in grades K–8. The school's origins date back to the state of Virginia's resistance to the Supreme Court of the United States' 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision holding that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. In 1956, the year of the school's founding, Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. declared a policy of Massive Resistance against compliance with Brown v. Board of Education, and the Virginia Assembly enacted the Stanley Plan, a package of thirteen statutes designed to ensure Virginia's public schools remained segregated. In 1959 the Fairfax County School Board approved tuition grants for 60 students to attend private schools and thereby avoid desegregated public schools. Of those initial grants, 44 went to students attending the Flint Hill School. Fairfax County Public School Assistant Superintendent George Pope remarked to the Washington Post, "We've just about put that school in business."