Fairfax County’s 12 Democratic-endorsed school board members, along with Superintendent Michelle Reid, have a dream for our children: equal outcomes at all costs. The goal is not a secret. In fact, equity is the central component of the district’s strategic plan.
Fairfax County’s voters across the political spectrum are upset by what this dream entails under Policy 8130. School board members have voted to redraw school boundaries every five years through an “equity lens” and without a stability clause that ensures students remain at their current schools when new boundaries are drawn.
To many of Fairfax County’s Democratic voters, equity probably sounded like a nice word around the time of the last local election, in November 2023. But now they’ve discovered what it entails. One of the criteria for redrawing public school boundaries is to redistribute resources among schools, meaning that children from families with higher incomes intentionally would be redistricted to lower-performing schools.
Much of what school board members have been able to accomplish in the last several years, including its ballooning and wasteful $3.8 billion budget, requires an oblivious and disengaged constituency. And Democratic-endorsed school board candidates in Fairfax County seem happy to sail into office on the coattails of the national Democratic Party in a heavily blue district. Meanwhile, voters appear satisfied to take information shortcuts with blue sample ballots. Most of them cannot even name their school board members.
At the school board level, there are incentives to keep the local population relatively ignorant. So, they try. For example, during the school board meeting on July 18, board members spoke at length about overcrowding and long commutes to justify redistricting but stayed relatively quiet about the underlying rationale for drawing new boundaries: the desire to implement the Left’s vision of “equity” across the county, and the very real likelihood that some of Fairfax County’s schools will lose accreditation if they don’t.
Despite school board members’ attempts to camouflage their motivation, Fairfax County’s constituents noticed and are justifiably outraged. Many of them paid higher house prices in a particular area because of the schools. Grassroots groups are springing up all over social media to protect their communities and save their schools. And school board members likely are surprised that their tribe, the Democratic voters, are revolting against their redistricting plans.
School board member Sandy Anderson sent an email to her entire district on July 30 that advised her constituents on what they ought to read and to trust only the district leadership’s resources.
“I would encourage those looking for more information to be careful about where you are getting your information,” she wrote. “Some articles and sources are posting false information meant to rile up members of our communities for their own gain. … For now, please see and continue to check the FCPS website for current information.”
“For their own gain” is an interesting choice of words. As a friend of mine said, “For our own gain? If [Anderson] means to keep our kids in the schools they are zoned for and to maintain the value of our property, then yes. I suppose that is for our own gain.”
Under Anderson’s self-serving instructions, I checked the district’s YouTube channel last week to once again review the meeting, where Anderson and several of her colleagues voted for the equity redistricting policy and against a stability amendment. As of publication, the link to the July 18 meeting has vanished from the front page, where most recent meetings are supposed to appear.
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Anderson and her colleagues are telling Fairfax County’s constituents to trust the district’s leadership as their sole source of information. Meanwhile, they are provably misleading us and deleting politically inconvenient information.
Fairfax County’s voters are starting to wake up to the irony of being told to trust the people who are clearly and intentionally hiding pertinent information from them. I have three words for Anderson and the district’s leadership: Trust is earned.
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.