Category: Opinion

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for IW Features, The Federalist and the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. Her articles have also appeared in National Review, Fox News Digital, The Daily Signal and Townhall. Originally appeared in The Washington Times.

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Public education is meant to serve the needs of students, not act as an employment program for overpaid bureaucrats.

Despite year-over-year budget increases and a steady decline in student enrollment, leaders of Virginia’s largest public school district can never seem to get enough money. In response, they tend to cut services for students first. Fiscal year 2028 does not appear to be an exception.

On Sept. 8, Fairfax County Public Schools Chief Financial Officer Leigh Burden, whose annual salary is $289,565, informed the district’s budget committee that fiscal year 2028 will be a “difficult budget year.”

Ms. Burden’s presentation suggested that required reduction levels will be closer to the fiscal year 2026 amount, $154 million, than the $118 million required in fiscal year 2027.

Among the possible cost reductions, Ms. Burden said, is increasing class sizes by one student. The move, she said, would provide the district with savings of $35 million.

Similarly, reducing needs-based staffing by 1%, thereby reducing flexibility in schools, would save the district another $1 million.

Board members at the meeting also discussed middle school sports and after-school programs, implying that those might also be on the chopping block.

In fairness, alongside these proposed solutions that do a massive injustice to children, Ms. Burden’s presentation also recommended that central offices propose a 5% reduction option.

There it is. Let us explore that a little more.

I bet the district’s leadership can easily do better than 5% across the entirety of central office spending. A conscientious school board could eliminate so much waste in central office spending that it would not need to reduce student services.

In fiscal year 2026, the district employed 2,346 non-school-based central administrators with salaries that totaled $272 million annually, not including benefits.

The employees at the top of this fiefdom get privileges about which teachers can only dream. For example, Superintendent Michelle Reid’s chief of staff, Marty Smith, is compensated with an annual salary of $306,154.

Dozens of other top administrators receive annual salaries of more than $200,000, overly generous non-local travel budgets and district-funded Ph.D.s.

Meanwhile, in fiscal year 2026, “Queen” Reid had an annual salary of $445,353 — and a car allowance. The district also employs four full-time personal security guards to see to her safety around the clock.

It is too bad that district leaders did not have the same concern for children’s safety at the beginning of this year, when they eliminated crossing guards at high schools.

Amid the central office bloat, FCPS leadership has also expanded its green initiatives into a sprawling administrative apparatus spanning multiple departments and layers of staffing. Last year, salaries for staff in these green initiatives alone totaled $2.2 million.

While all these administrative perks were fully funded, the school board delayed purchasing new hard-copy social studies textbooks for fourth-graders this year.

With the superintendent’s salary and perks, it is abundantly clear that Ms. Reid’s love of “equity” — the central theme of the district’s strategic plan — is meant to be applied only to others. Equity for thee, but not for me.

In fact, about 2 in 5 of the district’s economically disadvantaged students failed their reading, math and science Standards of Learning tests last year. Increasing class sizes would be particularly disadvantageous to them and certainly not an equitable solution.

In the last seven years, FCPS has also spent $58.4 million on white-shoe law firms, mostly because of controversies of its own making. In fiscal year 2026, the district set a record, spending $14.4 million on lawyers.

Aside from waste on bureaucrats and lawyers, last year the district’s leaders also bought a school they did not need — for $150 million. Although they have touted the former King Abdullah Academy (now Skyview High School) as a great facility, they are having a tremendously difficult time enticing students and filling it to capacity.

Meanwhile, other high schools in the district, such as John R. Lewis High School, are also not filled to capacity.

FCPS leaders blame the Trump administration, the state of Virginia, the board of supervisors and inflation for its budget problems. In reality, the main contribution to the district’s so-called shortfall for multiple years is irresponsible leadership and poor decision-making.

Fairfax County’s taxpayers must demand an independent external audit of the budget so children are not forced to pay the price for the district’s terrible leadership.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for IW Features, The Federalist and the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. Her articles have also appeared in National Review, Fox News Digital, The Daily Signal and Townhall. Originally appeared on The Washington Times.

Fairfax County Public Schools has spent more than $12 million in legal fees so far this academic year.

As part of this jaw-dropping bill, the district has paid attorneys up to $1,850 per hour to “independently investigate” multiple scandals plaguing it.

This year, for example, 13 brave girls at Fairfax High School stepped forward to alert school administrators that Israel Flores Ortiz — an adult illegal immigrant from El Salvador who was enrolled as a junior at the school — sexually assaulted them in the hallways during school hours.

In April, Mr. Ortiz was sentenced to 360 days in jail for multiple counts of assault and battery. After his arrest, Fairfax County Public Schools leaders hired law firm McGuireWoods to conduct a comprehensive review of this matter.

In a statement Monday that came as no surprise, Superintendent Michelle Reid, who earns $445,353 this year, announced, “The external investigation confirmed that our administration acted promptly and appropriately to stop this behavior.”

Of course it did.

Indeed, Fairfax High School’s serial groping case is not the first time a Fairfax-subsidized “independent” investigator has found no wrongdoing by school or district administrators.

In fact, a finding against the very people paying the bills would be the more surprising outcome.

It is like a candy company funding a study on the relationship between sugar consumption and Type 2 diabetes. The public is assured that the process is objective, the experts are independent and the conclusions are evidence-based. Then the study finds little cause for concern. Nothing to see here.

This pattern extends well beyond Fairfax High School. When school officials delayed notifying students at Thomas Jefferson High School of their National Merit Scholarship “Commended” status in 2023, Fairfax County Public Schools hired a law firm to investigate.

When Hayfield High School faced allegations of football recruiting in 2024, district leaders brought in outside counsel. When a teacher raised concerns regarding a student abortion scandal at Centreville High School, the district once more turned to attorneys.

The most serious problem is that these firms are often presented as neutral fact-finders when they are anything but. At the same time King & Spalding was conducting an “independent” investigation for Fairfax County Public Schools, the firm was also representing the district in a related whistleblower lawsuit — a clear conflict of interest that raises serious questions about the credibility and impartiality of its findings.

Monique Miles, the whistleblower’s attorney, said, “King & Spalding can’t be both neutral fact-finder and defense. There is an inherent conflict of interest in King & Spalding representing FCPS as counsel in both matters.”

Not surprisingly, all these “external” investigations concluded that Fairfax leaders acted appropriately. Yet the public record suggests a much more complicated reality.

In the Fairfax High School case, for example, records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request indicate that school administrators failed to make Title IX referrals after multiple students reported being sexually assaulted in a school hallway.

At the end of the day, Fairfax County residents deserve greater transparency and accountability from their school system. Instead of spending taxpayer dollars on expensive investigations that appear designed to validate predetermined conclusions, district leaders should focus on addressing misconduct and restoring public trust.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for IW Features, The Federalist and the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. Her articles have also appeared in National Review, Fox News Digital, The Daily Signal and Townhall. Originally appeared on EdNews Virginia.

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Fairfax County’s school board members are scheduled to vote today on the fiscal year 2027 $4.1 billion budget. Although there will be a $197 million increase in funds from last year, district leaders are still pointing to what they describe as a $28 million “budget gap,” referring to the county’s Board of Supervisors not transferring FCPS’s full requested amount. 

Rather than addressing administrative bloat, district leadership is shifting resources away from classrooms to close the so-called “budget gap.” A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that FCPS spent $272 million on salaries for 2,346 non-school-based administrators in fiscal year 2026.  Meanwhile, the district plans to reduce school reserve staffing by $8.8 million, eliminating 70 positions, which raises serious concerns. As class sizes increase in Fall 2026, some grades may require additional teachers, but reducing reserve staffing will limit flexibility to respond to enrollment shifts and will ultimately contribute to larger class sizes and reduced instructional support.

Increasing administrative spending while simultaneously cutting school-level resources and increasing class sizes raises serious concerns about fiscal priorities. And a 36% increase in the superintendent’s salary since 2019, as shown in the table below, has not coincided with improved student outcomes. In fact, since 2019, Fairfax County Public Schools’ average SAT score has declined by 35 points.  

Fiscal Year	Cost Per Pupil	Total Budget	Superintendent Salary		Avg. SAT Score
2019	$15,293	$2.9B	$340,000	(Brabrand)	1218
2020	$16,043	$3.0B	$350,000	(Brabrand)	1211
2021	$16,505	$3.1B	$360,000	(Brabrand)	1201
2022	$16,674	$3.3B	$365,000	(Brabrand)	1185
2023	$18,772	$3.5B	$385,000	(Reid)	1181
2024	$19,795	$3.7B	$400,000	(Reid)	1178
2025	$20,940	$3.9B	$424,146	(Reid)	1183
2026	$22,644	$4.0B	$445,353	(Reid)	N/A
2027 (Proposed)	$23,722	$4.1B	$463,167*	(Reid)	N/A

*Estimated 4% increase

While the table shows a 55% rise in per-pupil spending since 2019, that growth has not been matched by measurable improvements in student academic outcomes. Overall, spending trends are increasingly out of step with performance outcomes. 

As the school board considers another multi-billion-dollar budget today, the central issue is not whether FCPS is receiving more funding, but whether those resources are being deployed in a way that directly supports classrooms and student achievement. Without an alignment between spending decisions and measurable academic outcomes, continued budget growth is becoming an exercise in scale rather than effectiveness—where more money is spent, but not in ways that improve results for students. 

The district urgently needs a comprehensive, independent, external audit of its budget.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for IW Features, The Federalist and the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. Her articles have also appeared in National Review, Fox News Digital, The Daily Signal and Townhall. Originally appeared on The Washington Times.

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In August 2025, Fairfax County Public Schools purchased the former King Abdullah Academy in the western part of the county for $150 million. The purchase adds to a growing set of data points highlighting the district’s irresponsible leadership.

Skyview High School, the name school board members unanimously approved for the new school in February, has been in the district’s capital budget planning since 2015 to address overcrowding and expectations of an increasing student population.

Those projections, however, didn’t account for the mass exodus of students fleeing from a public school district in significant decline.

From 2015 to 2025, Fairfax County Public Schools experienced the largest decrease in student enrollment of any district in the state. It lost 6,894 students, according to the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. From 2020 to 2025 alone, enrollment fell by 11,348 students.

The district’s enrollment is expected to decline by an additional 6.6% from 2025 to 2030, according to Weldon Cooper Center projections.

In 2015, when the county’s leaders anticipated that a new high school would be necessary, student enrollment was about 186,800. Ten years later, the district’s enrollment was 177,007 and was slated to be 165,325 in 2030.

Taxpayers are puzzled about why a new school is needed when there is a projected drop of 20,000 students from 2015 to 2030. The county’s Board of Supervisors also had questions about Skyview High School as it worked on the fiscal year 2027 budget.

Supervisor Pat Herrity, a Republican representing the Springfield district, requested that the district’s leaders “detail the proposed increase in operational expenses, including the costs that are associated with the new high school (e.g., principal salary).”

The district responded with what Mr. Herrity, in an email, called “a completely unacceptable, garbage answer that excluded many of the costs.”

District leaders wrote that the costs for fiscal year 2027 would total $4.7 million, including $3.8 million for personnel, $700,000 for utilities and $200,000 for hourly and logistics funding.

In an effort to better understand the new high school’s actual costs, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request seeking additional information on costs associated with building renovations, athletic facilities, parking lot modification, installation of technology infrastructure, transportation, and furniture and equipment.

The (notoriously abusive) FOIA office determined that the cost of providing a taxpayer with such information would be $455. I emailed Superintendent Michelle Reid and Division Counsel John Foster, who oversees FOIA matters, to request a more reasonable FOIA fee and greater transparency regarding the new high school.

Not surprisingly, they haven’t responded.

Although the district paid $150 million for the school and additional costs are significant — perhaps much higher than it is willing to disclose to the county’s Board of Supervisors and taxpayers — it is having trouble finding students to fill the classrooms.

District leaders planned a phased opening of Skyview High School, aiming to enroll approximately 500 freshmen and 500 sophomores for the 2026-2027 school year and reach full enrollment of about 2,000 students by the 2028-2029 school year.

The intended feeder patterns primarily included the Centreville, Chantilly and Westfield pyramids, with portions of the Oakton and South Lakes pyramids also considered in boundary scenarios. Although the initial opt-in deadline was Jan. 16, the district sent a systemwide email to all FCPS families on April 28 promoting the “opportunity” to be part of the inaugural Skyview community.

It is abundantly clear to taxpayers that Skyview High School is not as highly coveted as school board members had hoped. Whereas there was supposed to be a lottery system if more than 1,000 students applied for the school when it opened, district leaders are now desperately trying to poach students from other schools, likely to justify their unnecessary purchase.

Adding insult to injury, the county is in financial trouble because its tax revenue is declining. Waste is problematic even in times of abundance, but it is even more egregious when fiscal conditions tighten and competing demands on public funding increase.

Taken together, these decisions reflect reckless leadership. The purchase of Skyview High School, combined with declining public school enrollment and rising costs, raises serious questions about the district’s fiscal stewardship and planning discipline.

At a time when enrollment trends point downward and county revenue is under pressure, major capital commitments of this scale warrant heightened scrutiny, clearer justification and stronger accountability to taxpayers.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for IW Features, The Federalist and the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. Her articles have also appeared in National Review, Fox News Digital, The Daily Signal and Townhall. Originally appeared on EdNews Virginia.

On March 23, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) Superintendent Michelle Reid announced that she is enlisting the services of yet another law firm, McGuireWoods, to “investigate” the district’s latest scandal — allegations that an 18-year-old illegal immigrant fondled the genitals of several female students in Fairfax High School. The district’s legal bills are mounting.

In her announcement, Reid said she retained “an independent outside law firm to conduct a comprehensive review of this matter.” The district’s contract with McGuireWoods, however — authorizing attorneys’ fees of up to $1,850 per hour — suggests a role less “independent” than described.

“McGuireWoods was retained by Client on March 19, 2026, to conduct a confidential, attorney-client privileged investigation concerning allegations of sexual harassment and/or assault of students at Fairfax High School,” the contract states. “The investigation has been undertaken for the purpose of providing legal advice to Client.”

READ THE CONTRACT (OBTAINED THROUGH FOIA):

Newly released figures reveal that even before FCPS’s contract for McGuireWoods to provide legal advice, not “conduct an independent investigation,” on the matter of alleged sexual assault in Fairfax High School took effect, February 2026 became the district’s costliest legal month on record at $3.8 million — driving total legal spending for fiscal year 2026 to more than $12 million.

One firm in particular, King & Spalding, accounted for $3.1 million of the district’s legal expenses in February alone, and $7.5 million so far this fiscal year. The district’s division counsel, John Foster, signed a contract with the firm agreeing to pay attorneys up to $1,850 per hour to investigate allegations related to an abortions-related scandal at Centreville High School.

Before that “independent” investigation was completed, the district retained the same firm to represent it in a lawsuit filed by a whistleblower.

Reid’s contract to run Virginia’s largest school district began on the first day of fiscal year 2023. Since then, the district’s legal expenses have risen substantially — totaling roughly 50% more from fiscal years 2023 through 2025 than during the previous three years under her predecessor. In a district marred with scandal, and fighting the federal government for boys’ “rights” to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms at school, fiscal year 2026 is on track to set a new record for the highest legal expenses in the district’s history.

At a time when Fairfax County Public Schools is confronting repeated controversies, its reliance on costly outside legal firms has pushed spending to unprecedented levels. With fiscal year 2026 on pace to set a new record, taxpayers are left to weigh whether these escalating legal bills reflect necessary accountability — or a pattern of reactive governance, poor leadership, and efforts to obscure internal failures.