Dive Brief:
- Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools is giving students the opportunity to get hands-on with quantum computing. The school system has launched a curriculum on the topic at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology that it plans to roll out districtwide, and it is installing a quantum computer at Skyview High School that will be ready for use in early 2027.
- “In the next decade, there are projected to be over 800,000 quantum-related jobs, and not as many qualified applicants for those jobs,” said Michelle Reid, superintendent of the district, which is partnering on the quantum curriculum with the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority and George Mason University. “There’s a recognition that creating a workforce pathway in the quantum field is critically important.”
- The moves put Fairfax in the small minority of school districts that have a quantum curriculum, said Jake Baskin, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association and a former teacher in Chicago Public Schools, as the field is still mostly theoretical but approaching a time of more practical uses.
Dive Insight:
Virginia provided startup funding for curriculum and teacher preparation for quantum programs, Reid said. And the imaging department from a local hospital group recently contacted the district to discuss developing a quantum-related workforce development pathway in the health sciences.
The district is designing both courses and hands-on modules, which Reid said will enforce what students have learned in math and science courses like Algebra 2, trigonometry, chemistry, physics and computer science.
“Fairfax County is on the leading edge of this sort of work,” Baskin said, adding that the National Q-12 Quantum Partnership — a consortium launched in 2020 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation — supports districts in this work.
While students at Skyview High School will have the most direct access to Fairfax County Public Schools’ quantum computer once it’s installed, Reid said she envisions learners from the district’s other 26 high schools having the opportunity to visit. And educators from around Fairfax County — the country’s ninth-largest school district — will be trained on quantum “so they’re able to take the quantum concepts back … to make sure these students understand the principles.”
The district also wants to make the quantum curriculum accessible to many students and not set up too many barriers with prerequisite requirements, Reid said.
“We’re trying to build a program for access and not selecting kids out of the opportunity,” she said. “For different courses, there will be different skills that the staff will be looking for.
"Part of the excitement of having a quantum machine is that it makes visible the subatomic particle movement for creative uses — and for students to be able to work with it, to learn how quantum systems behave by actually operating one, similar to the way chemistry students might understand chemical reactions by doing an experiment in a lab.”
Determining the right prerequisites is always tricky, Baskin said, adding that he imagines a foundational computer science course could help build the computational thinking and understanding skills needed. Quantum computing also overlaps significantly with physics, so “ensuring collaboration with physics education would be essential,” he said.
But “at the high-school level, no matter what, this isn’t about being bogged down in the advanced physics of the quantum realm,” said Baskin. “That’s very much postgraduate work.”
Instead, the coursework should help students understand what a quantum computer is and how it can process information differently from a classical computer.
