Voters across Fairfax County received a flyer last week supporting the $435 million bond referendum for its schools on the ballot for the 2023 election . The flyer came not from the Fairfax Democrats but from Fairfax County Public Schools.

Aside from covering the costs of the election material and the postage, the 181,000-student public school district also used student data for the mailers. The return address was the school the child residing in the house attends. The child’s name was listed under the voter’s name as the addressee on the envelope. Basically, the school district is manipulating voters into opening the envelope because they suspect there would be information, perhaps an interim report, about their children coming from their schools.

The bond referendum is arguably a partisan matter. The Fairfax Democrats explicitly support the bond referendum on their sample ballot. Meanwhile, many Republicans have concerns about the waste occurring in the district’s budget and the $100 million of unspent COVID-19 funds from the federal government.

Fairfax County’s residents are also hesitant about the pricey bond referendum because our taxes have skyrocketed in the last few years. My vehicle, for example, was worth more in 2022 than when I purchased it new in 2018, according to our local government’s assessment. With combined rate and assessment increases, the property tax on it went up by 45% between 2019 and 2022. The same is true for houses. The assessment value of our house increased by 30% from 2020 to 2023. In real terms, the monthly property tax differential in this time period is enough for an additional car payment.

In the face of these astronomical tax increases and its already inflated $3.5 billion budget, Fairfax County’s public school district administrators want even more money. Not only is the school district sending partisan mailers with regard to the 2023 election, but administrators also provide support for the bond initiative and sample ballots on the district’s website .

What’s next? Will the school board use our tax dollars to help fund the campaigns of its Democratic-endorsed incumbents? I have filed a complaint with the school district’s Office of Auditor General, but as with many of the district’s top administrators, the objectivity and independence of the auditor general, Esther Ko, is in question .

Our overpaid district administrators and the 12 Democratic-endorsed school board members in Fairfax County are loyal soldiers for the Democratic Party. The leadership has used every available opportunity to defy Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA). They are explicitly refusing to implement Youngkin’s model policies, in which bathroom use is based on sex rather than gender and school districts are not allowed to keep secrets from parents regarding their children’s gender identities.

Fairfax County Public Schools’s rebellion against Youngkin began on his first day in office. Despite Executive Order 1 , the school system continued teaching divisive concepts to our children in their schools. They also disregarded Executive Order 2 , which allows parents to make decisions about their children wearing masks, and suspended many children across the district for multiple days when they removed their masks. Indeed, the district’s leadership’s Democratic partisanship began long before they started using our tax dollars to fund election materials.

Democratic operatives in close contact with the district’s leadership took their activism a step too far when they filed a false child protective services report against a Republican Virginia Senate candidate and teacher, Julie Perry, and then contacted her school’s principal. Perry’s political opponent, Stella Pekarsky, who is currently a school board member, was involved in the incident. Pekarsky’s involvement is likely one of the factors that has prompted Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares to launch an investigation into what seems increasingly like election interference in Fairfax County.

A public school district should be focused on educating our children in the fundamentals, a task at which the public schools in Fairfax County are failing miserably. Parents have known for a while that the school district’s administration is deviating from this mission to be overtly political, but we must definitively draw the line when it uses our taxpayer dollars to fund election initiatives.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and a member of the Independent Women’s Network.