Category: Opinion

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. This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner.

---

Last week, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for simple demographic information pertaining to students at Fairfax County’s six failing high schools. It is likely that the information exists in the district’s Student Information System database. If the data were available in the Virginia Department of Education’s School Quality Profiles, which it is not, it would take about 10 minutes to collect.

The district’s FOIA office has a long history of overcharging Fairfax residents for access to information. This incident appears to be no exception. On Aug. 9, a FOIA officer sent me an email that said, “The estimated costs to respond to your request under VFOIA are $105.00 (3 hours at the rate of $35/hour).” 

Later that day, I questioned the cost. I wrote: “I’m confused about the estimated labor time of three hours. If this data were publicly available on the Virginia website, it would take me less than 10 minutes to pull. Why is this request so labor intensive on your end?”

Up until the time of publication of this article, the FOIA office has not answered my question regarding the inflated labor estimate.

As one of my friends pointed out, exaggerated labor estimates at the high rate of $35 per hour might not just be a deterrent from requesting information, but also how the district tries to cover its extensive legal fees when parents discover its corruption.

On Feb. 9, 2022, for example, Debra Tisler, a former school board candidate and mother, submitted a FOIA request for documents regarding procurement card purchases, which would have been likely to prove fraud, waste, and abuse by county officials.

In response, the FOIA officer made her request cost-prohibitive. Tisler received an email that said: “The estimated labor time to fulfill this request is substantial. FCPS estimates that it will be required 800 hours of staff time to fulfill these items. The estimated costs to respond to items 1 and 2 is $28,000.00 (800 hours at the rate of $35/hour).”

There are state and federal laws in place to prevent the overcharging of residents for access to information that legally belongs to the public. For example, Section 2.2-3704 (F) of Virginia FOIA law states that fees charged for access to public records shall not exceed the actual cost of accessing and copying such records.

I have reached out to the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council to request a deep, multiyear audit of Fairfax County Public Schools’s FOIA office to determine whether or not there is systemic abuse of the district’s residents. Many requesters believe that, contrary to Virginia’s FOIA law, they are charging excessive FOIA fees in order to prevent access to public information, particularly to those of us who hold views contrary to the district’s “equity at all costs” strategic plan.

I also contacted Esther Ko, the district’s internal auditor general. Ko, whose salary was $225,656 in 2023, rarely, if ever, finds evidence of waste and abuse in her “investigations.” Although I requested a deep audit of FOIA fees, she wanted specific examples. I have many, but I thought that she should do her job and find all of them in an honest internal audit.

Within five hours, Ko responded with a “nothing to see here” email. She wrote: “We have reviewed your claim and without specifics could not find credible evidence of fraud, waste, and abuse as outlined in School Board Policy 1107 and FCPS Regulation 1410.”

Her findings are not surprising. Ko also did not find any wrongdoing when the FOIA office charged me $280 to access my son’s curriculum materials, a right guaranteed under the federal Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment.

In April 2023, Karen Keys-Gamarra, a former at-large school board member, praised Ko. “I personally wanted to thank you for being a partner … and for making us look good,” she said. That sums up the situation well. Fairfax County’s internal auditor general is clearly prioritizing making the district “look good” over finding even the most obvious incidents of fraud, waste, and abuse.

Fairfax County Public Schools’s FOIA office and its $3.8 billion budget need an external audit for the sake of transparency. Whether we’ll get one is another question entirely.

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. This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner.

---

Last week, I sent an email to Fairfax County Public Schools leaders, inquiring whether they intend to implement President Joe Biden’s revisions to Title IX on Aug. 1. It’s a simple question with a “yes” or “no” answer. But, as with many other important decisions involving our children, the district’s leaders seem to be ignoring parents.

As of the publication of this article, the district has not responded to my inquiry.

Highly paid bureaucrats with little accountability to the district’s taxpayers are making these controversial decisions. The bureaucratic apparatus, under the direction of its superintendent, Michelle Reid, who made $399,836 in 2023, is responsible for the decision about implementing the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX.

On July 9, my school board member informed me that she had sent my inquiry to John Foster, the district’s chief legal counsel. Foster, whose salary was $246,672 in 2023, is notably among those responsible for the district’s administrative bloat and the county’s skyrocketing taxes.

Title IX’s sweeping changes, which Foster does not seem to want to discuss with the district’s inquiring parents, conflate gender with sex, thereby removing the original intent of the law — to protect females in education, in sports, and in vulnerable spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms. The revisions also remove due process rights for those accused of harassment.

Much like the leadership in Fairfax County’s public schools, the Biden administration is blinded by its activism and willing to desecrate the law to achieve its end goal, sacrificing the safety and comfort of the majority for the whims of the tyrannical transgender minority. The courts have stepped in and are thwarting those plans for now. So far, five federal courts have ruled against the nonsensical revisions to Title IX, meaning that the changes are now blocked in 14 states, including Virginia.

On June 18, following the court’s injunction, Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera sent a letter to Reid arguing that Fairfax County’s public schools should not implement Title IX’s revisions. She wrote, “Given that the Final Rule is enjoined in Virginia, I urge all public schools … to immediately cease implementation of the Final Rule and its accompanying regulations pending the lawsuit’s resolution.”

If Reid and Foster choose to ignore Virginia’s state officials regarding the Title IX revisions, it certainly would not be the first time. They willfully ignored Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) executive orders on mask freedom and the prohibition of divisive content in public school curricula. They also ignored the Youngkin administration’s model policies for public education, which include the designation of bathroom and locker room use based on sex, not gender identity.

In other words, Fairfax County’s administrators seem to rule as they wish, without consideration of parents’ wishes or even state or national law. This is likely why the district’s legal fees are so high.

In reality, Fairfax County has already implemented many of the components of the Biden administration’s Title IX revisions. Males are allowed in female bathrooms and locker rooms in Fairfax County’s schools. Boys are permitted to compete in girls’ school sports. And preferred pronouns are already mandated under penalty of school suspension, thereby compelling speech in violation of students’ First Amendment rights.

Perhaps the better question is not whether FCPS will implement Biden’s leftist agenda on Aug. 1 because the leadership already has for the most part. The more pointed question is: Will Fairfax County’s leadership respect federal courts’ rulings on this issue and eliminate the policies that violate our children’s rights and undermine the original intent of Title IX?

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, a member of the Coalition for TJ, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. This piece originally appeared in The Federalist.

---

Like many left-leaning public school districts across America, the leadership of Fairfax County Public Schools just outside our nation’s capital is majority white, despite the region’s racial diversity. Meanwhile, the district’s white, leftist leaders, who incessantly claim to be inclusive, are ironically ignoring parental objections to teaching radical gender ideology in schools.

At the end of June, the school board voted to include gender ideology in its seventh-grade sex-education curriculum. In response to a survey in which 84 percent of respondents opposed co-ed sex education, the white activist superintendent, Michelle Reid, is unilaterally implementing a pilot program in 14 elementary schools doing just that.

Why? Because it is important to white leftists that nonwhite children think like them, even if their parents disagree and it violates their religious beliefs. And across the nation, minority parents overwhelmingly disagree with radical gender ideology being taught in schools. 

The Pew Research Center’s opinion polling, conducted April 8-14, 2024, shows that 70 percent of black respondents and 62 percent of Hispanic respondents say that “gender” is determined by sex at birth. Muslims have also recently mobilized around this issue in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Dearborn, Michigan.

Socialist Indoctrination in Lieu of Education

The purpose of public education should be to fundamentally educate our nation’s children, but public schools are failing our children in this most basic mandate. Although graduation rates have increased from 74 percent to 87 percent between 2007 and 2020, the average SAT scores have substantially decreased, showing that students are faring worse over time and that standards have declined.

Instead, school district leaders are advancing a cultural Marxist agenda designed to indoctrinate children from the most resistant families through radical gender ideology and other controversial topics.

On Jan. 10, 1963, Rep. Albert S. Herlong Jr. D-Fla., read the 45 communist goals for America into the congressional record. Among them, No. 17 states:

Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for Socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers associations. Put the party line in text books.

You have to give them credit. Cultural Marxists played the long game, and it seems they have finally found their pawns, as white leftists have become more concerned with pushing the transgender agenda than they are about their commitment to quality education or even racial equality.

To indoctrinate the younger generation with radical gender ideology, leftists facilitate the colonization of the minds of nonwhite children, whose parents statistically are more resistant to gender ideology than white parents. To that end, communist goal No. 41 states:

Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

Done and done. Muslim parents and all other parents objecting to the LGBT indoctrination of young children are referred to by the socialist rainbow mafia as bigots and homophobes. Meanwhile, parental access to and influence over what their children learn at public schools is being diminished.

To achieve the goal of distancing children morally from their parents, districts such as Fairfax County are often opaque about their curricula and objectives. In fact, many left-leaning school districts have policies explicitly forbidding children’s school administrators and teachers from notifying their parents if they claim to have a “gender identity” that is different from their sex. Instead, public schools usher the children into socially transitioning, while keeping the parents in the dark.

In places such as Montgomery County, parents are not granted the right to opt out their children from the most controversial lessons in gender ideology, even in elementary school.

And then there are the obscene and controversial books readily available to our children in their public school libraries.

White Trans Author Instructs Kids on Sex App and Islam

Communist goal No. 25 provides another insight into the cultural Marxist playbook. It reads:

Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

The goal did not stipulate that the promotion of obscene materials needed to occur in K-12 public schools, but ambitious white leftists have elevated the old directive to a new level. 

Take This Book Is Gay, for example. The book, which instructs its readers on how to navigate an adult sex app, is available in many K-12 public school libraries across the nation, including in Fairfax County. Apparently, we are no longer concerned about child trafficking and endangerment so long as it expands the dating pool for LGBT Americans. The book is also endorsed by the National Education Association, one of the teachers unions that has helped to introduce the cultural Marxist agenda into schools.

The book’s author, Juno Dawson, is a white British male who identifies as a woman. In true colonizer fashion, Dawson attempts to write with authority on Islam. Unfortunately for Dawson and other white leftists, the transgender identity cannot void whiteness or the colonial history of the British they would love to forget. Even still, Dawson sanctimoniously pretends to understand Islam better than Muslims and wrote a section of the book titled, “How to Argue with Muslims.” In it, the omniscient colonizer informs readers that “the Quran is on your side.”

Many Muslims, including TikTok user @Luqmann_97, disagree with Dawson’s interpretation of their religion. But the even larger problem is that left-leaning school districts are promoting inappropriate books to young children, which are intentionally used to drive a wedge between the moral foundation of children and their parents. In this strange version of today’s reality, the rational and conscientious objectors are publicly villainized by the tyrannical minority that supports these absurdities.

But we cannot say the left didn’t warn us about what they were going to do. This plan was documented in the halls of Congress over 60 years ago. If we are going to protect our children, we need to take these leftists at their word and unite with minority communities in doing something about it.

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. This piece originally appeared on Washington Examiner.

---

Last Thursday, as the first presidential debate was making national headlines, Fairfax County School Board members held a meeting during which they voted on controversial changes to family life education curriculum. The takeaway for the few of us able to attend or watch it virtually was that the district’s leadership hates parents — or, at the very least, is severely inconvenienced by us.

Darcy Healy, one of the speakers during public comment, delivered an impassioned statement that represents how many parents in Fairfax County are feeling. She said, “We are parents, and we want you to listen to us, but we feel that that’s just not happening. … The survey that was done in May and June [shows] 80% are against this co-ed situation. Let’s continue to debate this. Don’t do it over the summer. And don’t do the vote on the evening of the presidential debate. This is an important topic. Show us that you want it to be important.”

Healy is right. In surveys both this year and last year, parents and community members made it clear that they did not support co-ed sex education or gender ideology instruction in their children’s elementary classrooms. Several community members made this exact point during the last two school board meetings’ public comment periods on June 13 and June 27.

Instead of being inclusive and accepting community feedback, the Fairfax County School Board was hostile — most notably among them, the board’s vice chairwoman, Melanie Meren.

First, Meren spoke indignantly about the curriculum’s opt-out option. She said, “And, you know, what I want to convey is that we need to make decisions of curriculum for the benefit of, you know, as many children as possible. And this is why parents and families have the option to opt out if they don’t feel the content is appropriate for their children when it comes to family life education.”

But why include unwanted, political nonsense such as gender ideology in a public school district’s sex education curriculum and then place the burden of opting out on the parents? Here’s why: because district leadership knows that many parents are preoccupied with our many other obligations and will forget to complete the extra administrative task of opting out our children from curriculum lessons.

District leaders should not be experimenting with our children, but since they seem to insist on doing so, this curriculum should require parents to opt in rather than opt out.

Meren then delivered an angry rant about the illegitimacy of the community’s feedback mechanisms. She said, “I also do want to underscore that the comments that have been referred to as a survey, um, it actually was not a survey. There was a call for public comments. … There was also not a methodology to ensure that comments were unique contributors. So, of the 2,500 comments, it’s unknown how many were contributed more than once.”

The takeaway is that if the district’s leaders don’t like community feedback, they blame the comment forum. Last year, for example, Karl Frisch, the school board chairman, similarly dismissed the survey as feedback from “Reddit warriors.”

In contrast, Ilryong Moon, a school board member who does not appear to be completely disgusted and inconvenienced by the district’s parents, seemed to realize the absurdity of his colleagues’ comments right away. The at-large member responded that if there was a problem with the feedback mechanism for community input, it was the board’s responsibility to fix the process. Moon further said he valued community input and thanked the 2,539 survey respondents for their time.

Unfortunately, in spite of the negative feedback on the proposal, school board members, including Moon, voted to include gender ideology instruction in the seventh grade family life education curriculum. And they did not vote against gender ideology indoctrination for elementary school children. They instead postponed that decision — perhaps in the hopes that they can pass it when fewer parents are paying attention.

Or even worse, they will include such measures surreptitiously and without a vote. Acting on her “majority doesn’t always dictate” philosophy, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle Reid has already used a back-door, anti-democratic, administrative method to introduce co-ed instruction for sex education in the district’s new pilot program in 14 elementary schools that she likely intends to expand. 

And so, to Healy I say, I feel your pain, and we will continue to debate this. But sadly, it seems that Reid, Frisch, Meren, and their tyrannical leftist activist minority have already decided what is best for our children. They seem to believe that we, the parents, are roadblocks obstructing their path, to be circumvented or run over.