Fairfax County wants to use our children as guinea pigs in an equity experiment
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.
Fairfax County’s school board members say that the recently passed redistricting initiative is about transportation efficiency and overcrowding, but they are lying to us. The equity-based boundary redrawing effort is meant to redistribute families with higher household incomes to schools with fewer resources, with what appears to be little regard for geography.
Earlier this week, after I published an op-ed detailing the passage of the district’s Policy 8130, a friend reached out to me with credible information from Gatehouse, the school district’s headquarters. My friend informed me that there are tentative redistricting maps illustrating that Hunt Valley Elementary School, located on the western edge of the West Springfield High School pyramid, will be redistricted to Lewis High School in East Springfield.
Such a change would be shocking because Hunt Valley is much farther away from Lewis High School (5.9 miles) than it is West Springfield High School (3.3 miles). In fact, students living in the Hunt Valley area would literally pass by West Springfield High School on their way to Lewis High School as they doubled their commute to school, even though reduced commute time was one of the reasons cited by many of the school board members who backed redistricting.
Though my source was credible, I was hoping to dispel the nonsensical information as a rumor, so I immediately emailed my school board member, Sandy Anderson, and cc’d Michelle Reid, the superintendent.
As I expected, Reid, the architect of this “equitable access” policy, remained quiet. Meanwhile, Anderson did not dispel the rumor either. She replied: “I also know that West Springfield and Irving are over capacity, so something needs to be done to ensure we can fix that regardless of any specific policy changes. Having said this, one of the goals of updating the boundary policy was to allow for reduced busing, commute time, and transportation costs.”
“One of the goals” is the operative phrase.
During their public meeting, as school board members (including Anderson) voted against the grandfather clause for student stability in the redistricting process, they said efficiency was the goal while staying silent on their more pressing “equity” goal looming in the background.
At one point during the meeting, Anderson stated that she “violently opposed” the notion that one school was better than another. The market seems to disagree. Just compare housing prices in the West Springfield High School district to those in the Lewis High School district.
Sandy Anderson then voted against fellow board member Ricardy Anderson’s stability amendment to grandfather children into their existing schools. For several of the school board members, it seems that stability and efficiency are fair prices to pay for the sake of equity — so long as it is not with their own children, I presume.
Sandy Anderson’s children are in a safe district and within one of the most reputable elementary schools in that pyramid. I doubt she would be willing to shuffle them to a lower-rated school, particularly not during their high school career. She might also not appreciate what redistricting would do to the value of her home.
Six other school board members, Seema Dixit, Kyle McDaniels, Ryan McElveen, Ricardy Anderson, Mateo Dunne, and Melanie Meren, also have children who attend Fairfax County’s public schools or will soon be there. Many of us are curious about how these elected officials feel about their own children being used as guinea pigs and subjected to a massive equity experiment under Reid’s direction. The remaining five members notably either have grown children or no children at all.
If the redistricting policy were truly about overcrowding and transportation efficiency, a situation that would actually warrant a school board to analyze boundaries, there should be not one example in which children are redistricted to a school farther away from their home. The case of Hunt Valley Elementary School, and likely many others throughout the district, proves that the district’s leadership is willing to uproot and move our children around like chess pieces for equity, not efficiency.
