The Back-to-School Need Hiding in Plain Sight in Alexandria
Northern Virginia Family Services will provide grade-level school supplies to about 60 Alexandria children this year—nearly twice as many as last year.
ALEXANDRIA, VA – Alexandria is a city of considerable wealth, with a median household income of $119,681. But need is woven through the community: 7.9% of residents live below the federal poverty line, according to U.S. Census data.
At Alexandria City Public Schools, 45% of the system’s 15,928 students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals—about 7,200 children. For many families, the cost of clothes, child care and classroom supplies can make the start of a new school year especially difficult.
For some families, a backpack filled with the right notebooks, calculators and classroom supplies is not a small convenience. It is one less back-to-school expense competing with household bills.
This year, Northern Virginia Family Services will provide backpacks filled with grade-level supplies to approximately 60 children in Alexandria—nearly double the number served locally last year—as part of its annual Back2School campaign. Across Northern Virginia, the organization has assembled more than 1,400 backpacks tailored to students’ grade-level supply lists.
“We want to make sure that children have all that they need to start the school year,” said Kathleen McMahon, executive vice president of development and communications at Northern Virginia Family Services, the region’s largest human-services organization. “This project helps offset costs for other household needs.”
A Practical Start to the School Year
As the first day of school approaches, families are stretching already-tight budgets to cover after-school care, new clothes for growing children, and the classroom supplies students need to thrive.
The NVFS backpacks are filled according to supply lists from local school districts. Depending on a student’s grade, the contents may range from composition notebooks and colored markers to calculators and noise-canceling headphones.
“Each of the backpacks is filled using local school districts’ supply lists specific to each grade level—whether you’re in kindergarten to 5th to 10th to 12th grades,” McMahon said. The effort began in June with a supply drive and outreach to local stores, corporate partners, and faith-based groups.
Backpacks are provided directly to children receiving services through NVFS. Case managers who know the families they serve help register children for the program and ensure the supplies reach those who will benefit most before school begins.
NVFS has been distributing backpacks and school supplies since at least 2011, McMahon said. The organization distributes them through its own programs rather than through schools or recreation centers.
Volunteers Pack 1,400 Backpacks
The campaign is supported by companies, community organizations, clubs, faith groups, and individuals who donate backpacks, supplies, and financial contributions. Volunteers then sort materials and pack each backpack with a complete set of essentials.
Over the past two weeks, 19 shifts of corporate volunteers have worked at an office building on Fairview Parkway in Falls Church to organize the materials.
During an on-site visit by The Zebra, volunteers from Dev Technology moved among roughly a dozen tables stacked with calculators, colored markers, composition notebooks and other customary school items, assembling backpacks one at a time from grade-level lists.
Major sponsors of the 2026–27 NVFS backpack project include Amazon Web Services, Dev Technology, Evans Inc. and NoVEC.
The Back2School Drive is one of several seasonal community efforts by NVFS. Its Fall Food Drive helps stock the organization’s pantry ahead of the holidays; the Holiday Drive provides gifts and essential items to children and families; and a Spring Food Drive helps replenish the organization’s Hunger Resource Center in Manassas after the busy winter months.
Those campaigns complement NVFS’s year-round work in early childhood education, youth mentoring, mental health and trauma recovery, food assistance, workforce development, housing stability and community health.
For more than 100 years, NVFS has served Northern Virginia families. Today, the organization reports serving more than 40,000 neighbors annually through more than 30 programs.
The numbers in Alexandria show why the backpack drive matters: prosperity is real here, but so are the families for whom the start of a new school year requires a little extra help.
