Issue: Schools

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, 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 on Washington Examiner.

The Loudoun County School Board has a concerning parallel to George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984. After voting to turn off the cameras during public comment this week, the district’s school board members are now considering additional measures to further limit and silence dissent during their meetings.

The majority of the school board members would like to teach their beliefs, such as the acceptability of allowing males to use females’ school bathrooms and locker rooms, and suppress parents’ ability to say otherwise. On Thursday, Democratic-endorsed school board member April Chandler outlined more ways they might restrict parental input. Claiming that these ideas have precedent in Virginia, she raised the following for the board’s consideration: allowing only 20 minutes for public comment, requiring that members of the public speak only once on a topic, cutting the microphone if speakers become too emotional, requesting that speakers first take their problems to the superintendent before bringing them to the board, and requiring speakers to submit their comments to the chairwoman, who would then determine if the comments were fit to be made public.

Chandler seems to have much in common with dictators at all levels of government who have preceded her. She clearly does not understand the meaning of the word transparency and has conveniently forgotten that she works for her constituents.

Fellow Democratic-endorsed school board member Anne Donohue supported Chandler’s discussion of additional restrictions on parents’ free speech.

“I do fear that it can at times distract from or derail our work as we try to get through all of our agenda items in a board meeting,” Donohue said.

It’s really too bad when parents and other constituents are obstacles to the omniscient school board members’ agenda. We, the parents, should simply sit back quietly and trust that these elected officials know what’s best for our children — at least, that seems to be the suggestion here.

What Chandler and Donohue also fail to understand is that many of these dictatorial ideas are unconstitutional and violate free speech rights. Chandler did not specify which districts implemented the restrictions to public comment she hopes to emulate, but many of these new rules likely would face legal challenges in Loudoun County.

In 2019, for example, the Houston Independent School District School Board proposed a policy that would require members of the public to submit written comments 48 hours in advance of board meetings in order to speak during the public comment period. This measure did not even include the extra step Chandler would like to take, in which the school board’s chairperson would decide if the constituents had the right to share their thoughts after reviewing their written comments. The new policy faced backlash from community members and advocacy groups who argued that it violated their free speech rights and stifled their ability to discuss problems facing the school district. In the end, the school board decided to allow both written and verbal comments at its meetings.

The impulse to cut the microphone because parents are “too emotional” about matters such as their children’s safety in bathrooms and locker rooms is also concerning. It implies that emotional expression is not valid in public discourse. The father of the girl who was sexually assaulted in a Loudoun County school bathroom, for example, had a right to express himself publicly. It is important for constituents to be allowed to speak up, especially about something as personal as their children’s education and safety, without fear of censorship or retribution.

Someone ought to remind Chandler that she is an elected representative of parents and their students. She does not get to implement her tyrannical ideas and then prevent us from discussing them. And the more Chandler and other elected officials abuse their power to limit free speech rights and suppress dissent, the more public their dysfunction and tyranny will become.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, member of the Coalition for TJ, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. Suzanne Satterfield, IWN member and Loudoun County Chapter Leader, also contributed to this article.

Originally appeared on Washington Examiner.

Last week, the Loudoun County, Virginia, School Board voted against transparency when members decided to turn off the cameras during public comment. The decision was made along party lines, with the six Democratic-endorsed members voting to turn off the cameras, and the three Republican-endorsed and independent members voting in favor of transparency.

Many Loudoun County parents are speculating that this decision was based on the desire to silence debate. The chairwoman of the Loudoun County School Board, Malinda Mansfield, tried to justify the decision by claiming that the inability to control what members of the public wear and the signs they carry meant that they “could have all sorts of things that we could get in trouble with [the Federal Communications Commission] on.”

When a reporter asked if the FCC had contacted the school district in the last few years, there was no response. Parents in Loudoun County argue that what the board members are actually worried about is the presentation of signs with messages inconvenient to the board’s leftist initiatives, such as those objecting to bathroom use based on gender identity, or others pointing out students’ shockingly low proficiency in reading and math, and another that reads “Stop Funding DEI.”

Loudoun County School Board member Sumera Rashid suggested that turning off the cameras during public comment was to avoid drama and for safety reasons.

“I’m trying to avoid a Jerry Springer show type of episode,” she said. “So, for that reason, I can’t support that the camera be on the speaker, but mainly it’s the safety issue.”

Rashid’s comment is particularly ironic given that the motion to turn off the cameras came following parents’ attendance at the Feb. 27, 2024 meeting to object to males being in female bathrooms. According to Rashid, it seems the real safety issue is video cameras showing parents speaking — and not the sexual assaults that have occurred and are likely to happen again in their children’s school bathrooms under the district policy.

Another school board member, April Chandler, argued that turning on the cameras during public comment “invites and undermines the work of the school board and the transparency of the school board.” Clearly, someone needs to explain to her what transparency means and remind her that she works for her constituents.

It is also laughable that school board members take issue with speakers’ political grandstanding. At the meeting last week, Mansfield said, “I’m not interested in this being a political grandstanding, which has been happening a lot lately.” And yet school board members in Loudoun and Fairfax counties spend a great deal of time offering platitudes for symbolic resolutions. It’s not political grandstanding with which Mansfield and others take issue. These school board members simply do not like when they are not the ones with the microphone.

For that same reason, school board members in Loudoun and Fairfax counties also reduced speaking time during public comment as their priorities increasingly shifted from education to leftist politics. A few years ago, both districts offered speakers three minutes to share their thoughts. The Fairfax County School Board now offers only two minutes, while Loudoun County’s time allotment shifts anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes depending on the meeting and what seems to be the chairwoman’s whims.

In both school districts, the cameras now point to the dais in a widescreen shot rather than at speakers’ faces, likely to deemphasize their arguments. The Fairfax County School Board made an exception to this at a meeting where students involved with Pride Liberation spoke against Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) Model Policies, which include bathroom use based on sex rather than gender. Apparently, some rules are flexible if the school board members agree with the speaker’s argument.

The flip side to that coin is that school board members might suppress testimony if they disagree. The Fairfax County School Board refused to play my video testimony, which contained arguments against shared-sex bathrooms and locker rooms in our district’s schools. After exposing the board’s suppression of my testimony, I resubmitted it, and members were forced to play it at the following meeting.

Indeed, when the camera goes dark during public comment at Loudoun County’s future school board meetings, and likely soon at Fairfax County’s school board meetings as well, given the two dysfunctional districts’ corruption competition, I will think of the slogan of a newspaper the school board members likely read: “Democracy dies in darkness.” And these elected officials are at the front lines willingly killing it.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, 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 on Washington Examiner.

As Fairfax County Public Schools increases its budget to $3.8 billion, up 8.6% from fiscal 2024, taxpayers have been put on notice that they will be hit with more property tax increases. Fairfax County residents’ property tax bills are expected to increase again by an average of $524 per household in 2025.

Meanwhile, district administrators are gaslighting taxpayers about per-pupil spending. On March 6, they sent an email to parents complaining that Virginia’s public school districts receive less state funding than public schools in other states. That might be intended to distract us from the fact that per-pupil spending in Fairfax County is substantially higher than the national average. In the 2024 budget, the annual cost per K-12 public school pupil in Fairfax County was $19,795. The national per-pupil average the same year was $12,612.

While Fairfax County’s school board members and administrators would like to focus on why other states in the South Atlantic region allocate 4% more in funding for their public schools, the better and more pressing question is why our district’s per-pupil spending is so exorbitantly high. In fact, the per-pupil average cost is higher at Fairfax County’s public schools than the tuition at many of its higher-performing private schools. And the taxpayer’s return on investment is questionable at best.

Fairfax County used to be known for its reputable schools. But in a recent survey, the district didn’t even make the top 100 most desired schools in the nation. FCPS ranked No. 128, falling behind both Loudoun County Public Schools, No. 60, and Arlington Public Schools No. 93. Standardized testing also proves the increases in per-pupil spending are not yielding better academic proficiency.

But let’s take a look at the district’s legal costs over time. From fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2024, the district has spent about $26 million just in legal fees. In fiscal 2024, the adopted budget allocated $1.975 million for legal fees, but the revised spending ended up being $7.974 million. In the fiscal 2025 adopted budget, the district gaslights us with a repeated $1.975 million allocation for legal fees, but it likely will be much higher.

The district’s legal fees are astronomical and contribute to the swelling per-pupil spending. They are also a direct consequence of our school board members and administrators prioritizing leftist politics above fundamental education, parental preferences, and the law.

The district, for example, was forced to pay for its decision to close our schools for a year and a half after bowing to pressure from the teachers’ unions. A federal investigation found that FCPS failed to provide thousands of disabled students with the educational services they needed. The district also had to retain legal representation for its decision to ignore Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) Executive Order Two and force students to continue to wear masks.

FCPS administrators and school board members also have blatantly ignored the Youngkin administration’s Model Policies stipulating that, among other things, bathroom use in schools is based on sex rather than gender and that preferred pronoun use cannot be required. America First Legal announced this month that it is suing the district for religious discrimination and the violation of free speech rights. It seems that with its repeated willful violation of the law, FCPS will be spending at least as much on lawsuits in fiscal 2025 as it did the previous year.

The district’s bias incident reporting system is also ripe for a legal challenge. These types of snitch lines allow students to report classmates and teachers for perceived intended and unintended incidents of biases. Bias incident reporting systems chill free speech and are facing many legal challenges across the country.

FCPS also had to retain counsel for its blatant racism against Asian students in admissions processes to the county’s magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School. School board members moved from a merit-based system to an equity-based admissions system to intentionally reduce the number of Asians in the school. Federal Judge Claude Hilton notably ruled that the new admissions system intended to promote racial balancing was “patently unconstitutional.” The district pressed on legally and fought for its racism against students of Asian descent, incurring even more legal fees in the process.

There are many problems with FCPS’s ballooning budget. Taxpayers should note that the high legal fees among those problems are symptomatic of the district’s dysfunctional priorities. Leftist politics shouldn’t be valued above educating our children.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, 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 on Washington Examiner.

Last Friday evening, the assistant principal at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Shawn Frank, sent a message to families, notifying them of a new confidential reporting form at Fairfax County’s magnet school. Frank told TJ families, “The form is designed to allow TJ students and staff to confidentially report incidents of discrimination, bullying, racism, harassment, slurs, or hate speech.”

The new reporting system is redundant, given the school district’s existing pathways to report such incidents. Fairfax County Public Schools already has a standard system to report and store general incidents of bullying, called the “bullying and harassment management system.” But, the same school board members who changed the admissions standards at TJ because of their problem with too many Asian students being admitted also decided that this system was not enough. Apparently, the school board’s priority is monitoring students’ unintended, perceived biases to shape them better ideologically.

Last year, for example, Fairfax County’s school board members voted to implement a bias incident reporting system in addition to the bullying and harassment management system. The purpose of the district’s Orwellian system, like many facing legal challenges across the country for chilling free speech, is to keep a database of incidents that involve the perceived intended or unintended biases of students and teachers. 

It might be that TJ administrators are unaware such a system exists at the district level. Or perhaps TJ administrators don’t have faith in the district administrators’ competence to implement and oversee such an invasive system. Either way, they’re now implementing a legally questionable system at the school level that already exists at the district level.

The school’s initiative is ironic, given its public support of racism and discrimination against students of Asian descent. In 2021, Fairfax County Public Schools moved from a merit-based admissions system to an equity-based admissions system at TJ for the sake of “racial balance.” Not surprisingly, the decline in admissions standards, including the elimination of an entrance exam, has led to the school’s slip in the national ranking. It is widely expected to fall even more after the last merit-based class graduates this June.

The admissions changes at TJ are regressive, which is the opposite word of the so-called progressives who advocated them. In fact, the district’s shift in policy reminds me of the adversity one of my college professors faced when applying to graduate schools in the 1960s. Although she was a highly qualified candidate, an Ivy League university explicitly informed her in its rejection letter that it had already reached its quota for women for the year. It denied her admission not because of her merit but because of her gender.

Similarly, among Fairfax County’s school board members, it appears that Asian students are seen as a problem for the magnet school because they do too well academically. To solve that problem, district and school administrators worked together to craft an anti-merit admissions policy explicitly intended to reduce the number of Asian students. Some of the school board members even acknowledged their clear racism in their communications. In a text message, one of the members said to another, “I mean, there has been an anti Asian feel underlying some of this, hate to say it lol.”

I wonder if some of the Asian students at TJ will justifiably submit reports in the form TJ’s assistant principal has advertised. In spite of the institutionalized racism at TJ, those students were still admitted to the school. Perhaps more well-intended, truth-seeking school administrators would also open up their ironic reporting system to the Asian students who were excluded from TJ despite their merit.