Dr. Marjorie F. Hughes was a public health physician in the public school system in Arlington County, Virginia.

The Marjorie F. Hughes Fund for Children was founded in 1992, on the occasion of Dr. Hughes’ retirement, to honor her work with Arlington County Public Schools (APS) students. Dr. Hughes moved to Arlington, Virginia, from San Francisco in 1956 and served as the Chief of School Health Services for 35 years. In addition to being a Cornell-educated pediatrician, she received her master’s degree in Public Health. She raised her six children here in Arlington and praised our school system for being forward-thinking and “so much fun.”

Some of Dr. Hughes’ accomplishments in Arlington Public Schools included:

• Establishing a budget for school clinics to purchase health supplies such as cotton swabs and Band-Aids. Before her tenure, nurses “sat around a big table in the summertime and made their own supplies.”

• Participating in the desegregation of schools by switching nurses’ school assignments so that both White and Black nurses were not assigned to schools by race.

• Appealing to the School Board in the late 50s-early 60s to ban students from smoking in schools and abolish the outdoor “smoking courts”.

• Writing the School Health budget on a yearly basis

• Instituting vaccination and TB test requirements for APS students

• Shaping and developing School Health policy from, in her words, “hav[ing] somebody at the school who could take care of the bruises that occurred out on the playground or some kid who was vomiting or whatever,” to the comprehensive program it is now. “…Once you get into it, [school health] is very, very, deep and complicated in many ways. I changed a lot of things in terms of school health [by] adding to it tremendously.”