Hayfield Secondary School - History

History

The land that Hayfield Secondary sits on was at one time part of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate. Because of a small natural spring underneath the school, the land literally served as a hay field. The land itself changed hands numerous times, until 1956 when developers constructed the nearby Hayfield Farm subdivision, the first of many housing developments in the region. Hayfield Secondary opened its doors to middle school (7th and 8th grade) students as well as 9-10th grades during the 1968-1969 school year, while still under construction. Floyd W. Worley was the first Principal and permitted the first four classes to choose both the school's colors and nickname via individual voting during physical education classes using a ballot which included the Head Football Coach Jim Walthall's alma mater The University of Tennessee's moniker, "Volunteers," and colors, orange and white. While the UT's colors collected the young Hayfield community's consensus choice, the alliterative "Hawks" became Hayfield's "head rhyming" mascot. The school is erroneously mentioned in Remember the Titans as being "all white." While at the time of the desegregation of the City of Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School, a large majority of Hayfield's students were white, it was racially integrated from the day of its first opening in 1968, drawing the majority of its students of color from the children of military men and women at nearby Fort Belvoir, home to the U.S. Army's Corp of Engineers. The desegregation encouraging word "Diversity" even headed a section of the '73 yearbook, the fifth volume of the "Harvester." As the region which it serves grew, overcrowding became a major issue at Hayfield, and by the late 1990s it routinely exceeded its intended capacity with 4000+ students. A renovation of the school began in 2002 and was completed in 2005. Further helping to relieve the pressure on Hayfield was the opening of South County Secondary School, also in 2005. However, due to overcrowding at South County in its second year of operation and under-utilized capacity at Hayfield, Hayfield accommodated more students again from a boundary change with South County approved for the 2007-2008 school year. The school is expected to continually grow substantially until the 2010-2011 school year as all grades from the rezoning settle in.