Woodson Principal Jeff Yost announces retirement

Yost

Jeff Yost, the principal of W.T. Woodson High School will retire at the end of September. Dan Meir will serve as acting principal until a permanent principal is named.

Meir, the former principal of Robinson Secondary School, has been at Woodson since April as part of a mental health support team brought in by Fairfax County Public Schools to help the school deal with an unusually high number of student suicides—six in the past three years, although not all of those deaths have been officially confirmed as suicides.

That initiative, sparked by the deaths of two Woodson students in February, was part of a larger effort by FCPS to improve outreach to troubled students and inform students and parents about the available of mental health services.

“The Woodson community has touched me very deeply,” Yost wrote in an Aug. 18 letter to the Woodson family announcing his retirement. “We have laughed together and cried together but this is a job I would not have traded for any other. I truly feel that I was supposed to be here during these times of highs and lows and to support and celebrate with our students.”

Yost has been principal of Woodson for seven years. He was a math teacher at Marshall High School from 1983 to 1999.