This Thursday, the Fairfax County School Board is set to vote on controversial changes to the district’s sex education curriculum. The vote likely will include whether to start instruction on gender ideology in elementary school, as recommended by the district’s ideologically homogeneous Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee.
As a strategy, the district’s leadership is known for its questionable timing on controversial votes and notifications. Most recently, the superintendent, Michelle Reid, waited until 4:27 p.m. last Friday to inform parents that they would need to find babysitters on seven Monday afternoons next academic year due to increased allowances for teacher training. The date and time of the message were far from coincidence. Reid strategically sent the notification late in the afternoon at the end of a work week, after children were released from school for the summer and many families were already on vacation.
The district leadership redundantly claims to be for inclusion and transparency, but its actions suggest the opposite. From my personal experience as a parent in the district, leadership’s goal is to include only all the parents and residents who agree with its plans and withhold information from and ignore the rest. For example, I was forced to pay $280 on a Freedom of Information Act request for my son’s “social emotional learning” curriculum materials. It also did not seem to want to share its mandatory lesson on white privilege for eighth graders.
The school board’s members have the same tendency as Reid regarding strategically inconvenient timing of major decisions and notifications. Members of the last board scheduled votes on controversial policies, such as the bias incident reporting system and suspending students for misgendering, in the summer months, when parents are less likely to be paying attention to local school matters.
This time, the Fairfax County School Board, with Karl Frisch at the helm as its chairman, is voting on changes to the sex education curriculum in the summer and during the historic presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Even the families not on vacation will be more likely to pay attention to the presidential debate as the board, in all likelihood, votes against our interests.
And really, it is abundantly clear to Fairfax County’s residents how the board will vote. Last year, 84% of the respondents to the district’s survey indicated they were against combining the sexes during family life education. In response, during a work session meeting, Reid foreshadowed that the district was going to press ahead with it anyway. She said, “Honestly, the majority doesn’t always dictate, right?”
As she basically said herself, if the majority’s opinion goes against Reid’s predetermined agenda, it is ignored. Despite overwhelming survey opposition in the district last year and this year, Reid and her tyrannical minority have decided to implement a pilot program in 14 schools for a sex-combined family life education curriculum in elementary schools for the 2024-2025 academic year. The district has yet to notify Fairfax parents which 14 schools will be affected. There is speculation it intends to implement the program in poorer schools with more ESOL students and less engaged parents to reduce criticism of the pilot program and open the path for expansion.
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The evaluation criteria of this extremely unpopular pilot program are unclear. Some residents are speculating that the school district’s leadership has already determined the program is a success and will be expanded districtwide without a vote.
Reid was correct to foreshadow that the majority of parents don’t get to choose what they want for their children. Instead, Reid and the school district’s tyrannical transgender activists do.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.