Implementation plans
How the test is actually run in a division: which grades, which events, what a testing window looks like in a building that also has to teach a curriculum.
Virginia · State adoption
The Presidential Fitness Test in Virginia Schools
Virginia has ordered the restored Presidential Fitness Test into its public schools, with divisions implementing for 2026-27 and the Commonwealth fully adopted by mid-2027. Here is what the order actually says, what the published test contains, and what a PE teacher should nail down before the first testing day.
OrderExecutive Order 55
SignedNov 5, 2025
Divisions implementSY 2026-27
StatewideJuly 1, 2027
Where things stand
Virginia's order at a glance
Virginia is one of a small number of states that has ordered the test rather than left it optional. The order is settled; the operational detail is set by the Department of Education and by your division.
- Instrument
- Executive Order 55, signed November 5, 2025
- What it directs
- Implementation of the Presidential Fitness Test in Virginia public schools
- Who is working on it
- The Virginia Department of Education, through a Presidential Fitness Test Task Force
- Recommendations due
- To the Board of Education by May 1, 2026
- Divisions implement by
- The start of the 2026-27 school year
- Statewide adoption by
- July 1, 2027
Last reviewed: August 13, 2026
The order
What Executive Order 55 actually says
Executive Order 55 was signed on November 5, 2025 and directs implementation of the Presidential Fitness Test in Virginia public schools. An order sets direction — it does not hand a teacher a protocol.
The Virginia Department of Education stood up a Presidential Fitness Test Task Force to turn the order into something a division can run. The task force was charged with developing implementation plans, professional development resources and reporting mechanisms, and its recommendations were due to the Board of Education by May 1, 2026.
Two dates govern the calendar. Divisions are to implement by the start of the 2026-27 school year, and statewide adoption follows by July 1, 2027. Read together, 2026-27 is the year your division's plan has to exist and be running; 2027 is the year no division in the Commonwealth is still waiting.
Professional development
Resources for the teachers doing the testing. Most Virginia PE teachers have never administered this battery, and the 2026 version is not the one they took as students.
Reporting mechanisms
What gets recorded and where it goes. This is the piece that decides how carefully you have to handle student-level results, so it is the piece worth asking about first.
The published test
What Virginia teachers are actually giving
Whatever your division's plan says about scheduling, the test itself is defined by the standards published in May 2026: three categories, two event options in each, and a student performs one event per category.
Core & Abdominal Strength
Curl-Ups or Plank
Cardiorespiratory Fitness
One Mile Run or 20m Beep Test
Upper Body Strength
Right-Angle Push-Ups or Pull-Ups
Scoring is criterion-referenced. Every age from 6 through 17 and older has a fixed published number for each event, separately for boys and girls, and a student either reaches it or does not. There is no percentile and no ranking against a national sample, which also means no student's result depends on anyone else's.
Three events per student rather than six is the reason a Virginia class can get through the whole battery in a couple of periods instead of a week. See the full benchmark tables by age in the guide.
Practical steps
What to do now
Four things worth settling before your first testing day — none of them take long, and all four are easier to answer in September than in April.
Confirm what your division decided
The executive order sets direction; your division sets the schedule. Ask your division's health and physical education coordinator which grades are testing, which of the two options in each category the division picked, and whether the plan is written down anywhere you can read it.
Get the reporting answer in writing
The task force was charged with developing reporting mechanisms, so assume the question of what gets collected has an answer somewhere. Ask for it by email: what fields, at what level of detail, submitted by whom, and how long the school keeps its copy.
Put a window on the calendar early
A fall baseline and a spring re-test is the pattern most departments land on, and it needs booking against the same gym and track everyone else wants. Three scored events for a class of thirty will not fit in one period if you run them one at a time.
Work from the published standards
Whatever the memo in your inbox says, the events and benchmark numbers come from the standards published in May 2026. Build your station plan from those, and flag the difference to your coordinator if guidance you were sent describes something else.
Requirements around this program are still moving. Confirm current requirements with the Virginia Department of Education and your division before scheduling — and get the answer in writing, because whether results are reported upward changes how you handle the data.
Take it further
The guide, the letter, and test day
Everything on this site about the 2026 program is free and needs no account.
The full 2026 guideEvery event, the published benchmark tables by age, how to run stations, and how to score a class without losing a week.Read the guideJaguar AthleticsThe ITS mobile app conducts the beep-test cadence, the core timers, and the scoring — then prints the certificates. One way to run test day if you would rather not keep the book by hand.See how test day runsParent letter templateA short letter explaining what the test is, what is recorded and what it is not used for — the questions Virginia families are already asking.Use the template
The mile is the one event hardware can take off your hands. JagTrax times every finish automatically if you run it as a timed event. See JagTrax