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Hayfield football scandal exposes incompetence of superintendent

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


The Hayfield Secondary School football recruiting scandal has shown us that there is absolutely no oversight of Michelle Reid, superintendent of the Fairfax County School Board in Virginia, from our elected school board members, the county’s Board of Supervisors or the internal auditor general.

It has also highlighted that Ms. Reid is either incompetent or ill-intended. Addressing Hayfield’s mass recruiting violation was a test of Ms. Reid’s leadership, and she failed.

What began as a local injustice regarding fairness in high school sports has echoed in warning nationwide. The scandal is not just about school athletics; it’s about poor district leadership.

After school administrators hired coach Darryl Overton this past January, 31 students transferred to Hayfield Secondary School in time for football season. Many of them were Mr. Overton’s former players from across county lines. Hayfield students, parents and staff posed questions about the many student-athlete transfers to their school. Such a significant number of talented football players transferring to one public school within months of one another is undoubtedly suspicious.

Fairfax County residents looked to the district’s senior leaders to investigate the matter. Ms. Reid announced that the district would conduct an internal investigation in early May.

Two months later, when Ms. Reid’s internal “confidential investigation” regarding residency checks was still ongoing and summer training had already begun, other high school football coaches drafted a letter to raise their concerns about fairness in Hayfield’s recruiting process.

At the end of August, mere days before the season opener against West Springfield High School, Ms. Reid announced that her investigation had cleared Mr. Overton and school district administrators of wrongdoing.

One school board member, Mateo Dunne, didn’t buy it.

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Fairfax County leadership’s legacy is likely to be one of nepotism and waste

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 the Washington Examiner.


Last week, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors sent a letter to Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) begging the state for more money, particularly for K-12 public education. If he does consider this request, Youngkin should introduce a condition requiring an external audit of the county’s “critical services.”

Alternatively, Fairfax County’s supervisors, could, if they actually care about local costs, reconsider their sanctuary policy passed in January 2021, which is not only substantially increasing expenses for the county but also sinking our public schools.

The problem with Fairfax County’s request for more money is that the county’s elected leadership admittedly has relinquished any power to ensure that local public school funds are spent in a responsible manner with a clear focus on student outcomes. On Aug. 12, 2024, Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay sent me an email acknowledging that “the Board of Supervisors is the largest funder of FCPS but does not have authority over operations.”

So who is monitoring the school district’s budget that has ballooned from $3 billion in fiscal 2020 to $3.7 billion in fiscal 2025, even as the student population decreased from 188,355 to 181,701?

Esther Ko, the district’s auditor general, does not seem to be looking for fraud, waste, and abuse. Instead, it appears she is in lock-step with the district’s other leaders to boost imaging. In fact, former school board member Karen Keys-Gamarra told Ko at a school board meeting in April 2023, “I personally wanted to thank you for being a partner … and for making us look good.”

The truth of the matter is that the district’s budget, which accounts for more than half of the county’s spending, is on a runaway freight train with irresponsible leaders as the conductors. Specifically, Superintendent Michelle Reid, who has an annual salary of more than $400,000, bloats the school district’s bureaucracy with overpaid, non-school-based administrators who are not from the area and have little to no local knowledge of the district.

Meanwhile, student test scores have plummeted, and the performance of multiple schools has declined. Reid’s priorities are bringing in her buddies and politicizing public education with equal outcomes at all costs, not improving student achievement and genuine education. Our elected school board members should address such gross negligence and waste, but they do not seem to understand that they are in charge of Reid, not the other way around.

Here are just a few examples of Reid’s questionable decision-making with regard to the budget and the district’s imported senior leadership.

In July 2022, Reid announced a new senior position and entire bureaucratic department for her friend and former colleague from Washington’s Northshore Schools. Lisa Youngblood Hall, the district’s new chief experience and engagement officer, will earn an annual salary of $239,468 in fiscal 2025. Though it remains unclear what she or her office does, Hall’s budget is more than $8.2 million and includes 70 non-school-based, full-time employees.

Hall is not the only interstate import. In March 2023, the Texas Education Agency announced that the state was removing Houston Independent School District’s leadership and taking charge of the state’s largest school district due to its poor performance over multiple years. A few short months later, Reid announced Fairfax County’s new chief of schools, Geovanny Ponce, who was formerly a district administrator in Houston’s failing public school system.

Geovanny Ponce has held the position of Fairfax County’s chief of schools since July 2023, during which time his annual salary increased from $186,000 in Houston to $253,665 in Fairfax County. The fiscal 2025 budget shows that under Reid’s and Ponce’s leadership, the Office of the Chief of Schools more than doubled its expenses from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2025, increasing from $16 million to $40 million.

Also joining us from Houston’s failing school district is William Solomon, the district’s chief human resources officer since June 2024. Under Reid’s tenure, the non-school-based human resources expenditures have increased from approximately $12 million in fiscal 2022 to $16.7 million in fiscal 2025.

Fairfax County’s school district’s senior leadership is unimpressive, and their budget management is an embarrassment. The answer to our school district’s problems is not more money from skyrocketing local taxes or from the state. Rather, the district’s budget needs an external audit. 

Reid and her friends clearly are lemons. Fairfax County residents would be better served to find competent leaders who have a genuine vested interest and stake in our local public schools. 

What will it take for public school officials to start caring about student needs?

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 public schools have an unprecedented problem with chronic absenteeism. Students considered chronically absent are those who miss more than 10% of school days in a year. 

Chronic absenteeism is problematic because it affects academic performance, creates problems for teachers in their flow of instruction and curricula, and increases the likelihood that students will drop out of high school.

However, the district’s leadership did not appear to be worried about these matters when they closed the schools to in-person instruction for 1 1/2 years during the pandemic. Or, even more personally, when they suspended my three sons for 39 cumulative days for not wearing their masks after Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) signed Executive Order Two, which gave parents the right to choose whether to send their children to school wearing masks.  

Now, however, Fairfax County’s Democrat-endorsed leaders are concerned because chronic absenteeism is one metric that affects a school’s accreditation in Virginia, and its COVID-19 waiver expired this year.

Each of Fairfax County’s 199 schools is graded in every accreditation category on a level one to level three rating. A performance rating of level one indicates “at or above standard,” level two is “near standard,” and level three means a school is performing “below standard.” Any school that earns a level three for chronic absenteeism, or any other category for that matter, is put on probation or “accredited with conditions.” The conditions are that the school needs to follow the state’s guidance to improve performance for that indicator, or the school will subsequently lose its accreditation.

Of Fairfax County’s 199 schools, 98 schools received a level two in chronic absenteeism for the 2023-2024 academic year, according to the Virginia Department of Education. Meanwhile, 10 schools (eight elementary schools and two middle schools) received a level three, or “below standard,” in the chronic absenteeism category. If that were to happen again this year without the waiver in effect, those 10 schools would be “accredited with conditions.”

When Fairfax County’s leaders followed teachers unions’ demands and locked our children out of their schools, they proved they are not particularly concerned about students not attending school. But what they are obsessed with is perception. Even when our schools are failing, they want people to believe they are great and proclaim it ad nauseam.

When the Virginia Department of Education announced an opportunity to allow in-person flexible instructional hours to adjust schools’ chronic absenteeism calculations this year, Fairfax County’s school district leaders, particularly Geovanny Ponce and Marie Lemmon, were smart to jump at the chance to alleviate this clear problem. The concern is that they are abusing the program. There is little to no oversight by the regional assistant superintendents to ensure the flexible instruction is administered by a licensed teacher, it does not exceed appropriate pupil-to-teacher ratios, and instruction is tied to Virginia content standards, as Virginia’s Department of Education’s guidelines mandate.

Instead, school administrators quietly whispered stories of what actually happened in several schools. Dozens of children stared at their phones in cafeterias across the county as principals changed attendance sheets to meet the preferences, and likely the demands, of county administrators.

The intended purpose of providing flexible instructional hours is to support our district’s chronically absent students. Done the right way, school and district leaders might be able to prevent colossal learning gaps and worse. 

Sadly, Fairfax County’s school board members and district administrators are again failing our most vulnerable children in their attempts to make the district appear to be performing better than it actually is. What will it take to shift the school district’s focus from bureaucrats’ wishes to children’s needs?

Mass Immigration Is Destroying This Top Public School District 

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor to 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. This piece originally appeared in the Federalist.


This year, a quarter of the public high schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, located just outside of our nation’s capital, are likely to lose state accreditation. The declining performance of students, particularly concentrated in six failing high schools, coincides with the rising number of non-English speakers in the district after the board of supervisors passed a sanctuary policy titled “The Public Trust and Confidentiality Policy (Trust Policy)” in January 2021. By 2023, students classified as English-language learners accounted for 26.5 percent of the district’s students.

Fairfax County is among the last places one would expect to see failing schools. It is an affluent area with a median household income of about $145,000. Within commuting distance to Washington, D.C, the county is home to a high percentage of residents with advanced degrees, has one of the largest public school districts in the nation, and is one of the top per-pupil public school district spenders (totaling about $20,000 per student in fiscal 2024). For decades, Fairfax County has drawn families in search of quality K-12 public education for their children.

Virginia’s Performance Indicators for Accreditation

A look at Virginia’s accreditation metrics and the recent arrival of students who are not proficient in speaking and reading English sheds light on the significant decline of Fairfax County’s public schools. In Virginia, public school districts are assessed on the following school quality indicators: academic achievement, academic achievement gaps, chronic absenteeism, dropout rates, the Graduation and Completion Index, and the College, Career, and Readiness Index.

Each school is graded in every category on a level one to level three rating. A performance rating of level one indicates “at or above standard” and level three means a school is performing “below standard.” Any school that earns a level three for any of the quality indicators is put on probation, or “accredited with conditions.” The conditions are that the school needs to follow the state’s guidance to improve performance for that indicator or the school will subsequently lose its accreditation.

The institutionalized secrecy associated with the sanctuary policy in Fairfax County makes assessing which English-language learners are in the country legally or illegally difficult. It is clear, however, that the number of English-language learners has increased substantially since the implementation of the sanctuary policy. With this rise in migrant students, the school district is facing an intensifying problem with two particular state accountability metrics — chronic absenteeism and drop-out rates. 

Non-English Speakers Have Flooded the Failing High Schools

Fairfax County’s Justice High School, for example, is currently accredited with conditions and is at imminent risk of losing accreditation. According to data provided by the Virginia Department of Education, its dropout rate was 13.99 percent in 2023. Meanwhile, its rate of chronic absenteeism, defined as the percent of students who missed 18 or more school days in the school year, was 24.63 percent. Justice High School’s dropout rate is rated at a level three, and it’s at level two in chronic absenteeism, the College, Career, and Civic Readiness Index, and the Graduation and Completion Index.

Like many of the failing schools in Fairfax County, Justice High School experienced a substantial increase in English-language learners following the sanctuary policy. Information obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request shows that in 2020, the high school had 705 English-language learners. By academic year 2023-2024, 1,907 students (79 percent) of the school’s 2,406 students were English-language learners, and 312 students (13 percent) were newly arrived from other countries and enrolled for their very first year in an American school.

The five other failing high schools in Fairfax County share the same trend as Justice High School with the rise of English-language learners, or multilingual learners as they are labeled in Fairfax County.

Compounding Fairfax County school district’s problems, the Virginia Department of Education granted its public schools a three-year waiver for chronic absenteeism in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that waiver expired this academic year. Chronic absenteeism and drop-out rates are more significant problems for children who have recently crossed our southern border.

In addition to the expiration of the chronic absenteeism waiver, this year, the Virginia Department of Education revised the state’s accreditation standards to hold public schools accountable for teaching their English-language learners. Instead of an 11-semester waiver (more than five years) for newly arrived students to take the standardized English reading test, they now are granted a waiver for three semesters. This means that more of Fairfax County’s English-language learners will be taking the state’s standardized reading test this year, likely decreasing already low-performing schools’ overall test scores and increasing their academic achievement gaps.

The data clearly indicate that Fairfax County’s once thriving school district is struggling as it is being flooded with newly arrived English-language learners. Rather than taking up the issue with the board of supervisors for its problematic sanctuary policy, the school district’s leaders are complaining that tests are not sufficient to measure knowledge, that the state’s standards are unfair, and that Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin released the standardized test data prematurely (despite it being in line with the U.S. Department of Education’s requirements). 

Hiding Low-Performing Students to Bolster the School District’s Image

Fairfax County’s 12 Democrat-endorsed school board members and the superintendent, Michelle Reid, further support measures to hide low performance among students, such as equity grading and performance-based assessment projects to replace standardized testing. Some students further are offered make-up days to show up to school on non-school days in order to reduce the appearance of chronic absenteeism. During these “make-up” days, attendance is called, but there is little to no accountability for student learning.

These strategies are meant to make schools appear that they are performing better, rather than to facilitate the genuine education and learning of the district’s most vulnerable students. The goal of Fairfax County’s public schools is clearly to reduce the standards for the sake of appearances. The notion of “equal outcomes” is at the center of the district’s strategic plan. What that seems to mean is that the district’s leadership is fine with students learning little and faring poorly together, as long as the district looks good.

This strategy is failing because many of the newly arrived students who are not proficient in English are concentrated in certain areas of the county. So, the district has introduced Policy 8130 to completely redistrict Fairfax County. Some high-performing students with great attendance will be shuffled to low-performing schools, and many of the chronically absent, low-performing students likely will be moved to higher performing schools.

Fairfax County’s public education system is a cautionary tale for school districts across the country. Even the most affluent counties’ school districts cannot perform well when they are inundated with newly arrived English-language learners from other countries. Trying to hide poor performance and refusing to address the root cause of school failure is only doing a disservice to our taxpayers, and more importantly, to our children.