School board members across the nation have the important responsibilities of ensuring that public school students receive a quality education, managing the district’s senior staff, and approving the budget. Too often, these elected officials neglect their duties in favor of a heavily politicized agenda. Fairfax County, Virginia, is no exception.
Despite a multitude of problems in Fairfax County’s public schools, the board members of Virginia’s largest school district are focused on their political initiatives at the expense of their primary duties. Last week, for example, Fairfax County’s school board voted 12-0 to pass an LGBT history resolution that “proclaims October 2024 as LGBTQIA+ History Month in Fairfax County Public Schools.”
Afterward, a friend asked me, “Wait, don’t they already have a month?”
They certainly do. In March 2023, the school board passed a proclamation labeling June as LGBT Pride Month “to respect and honor our diverse LGBTQIA+ community and to build a culture of inclusivity and equity, not only during LGBTQIA+ Pride Month but throughout the entire year as well.”
Much like their counterparts across the country, the local alphabet people apparently were not satisfied with just one proclamation that explicitly recognizes them throughout the entire year. One LGBT activist stood in front of the school board last week during the meeting’s community participation period and preached with religious fervor about the importance of celebrating Harvey Milk.
The same activist disparaged organizations that likely disagree with educating children in public schools about Milk, a man who, as his friend Randy Shilts described him in The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, had a “penchant for young waifs with substance abuse problems.” Among Milk’s victims was a 16-year-old runaway from Maryland, Jack Galen McKinley, whom the 33-year-old abused.
The inappropriate commemoration of pederasty in K-12 public schools aside, how many months do the alphabet people need to be celebrated? While many other, clearly less narcissistic, groups do not get any months of recognition, the rainbow mafia demands several.
Perhaps more interesting is that a school board with many significant fiscal and performance problems is wasting its meeting time on symbolic resolutions to distract the public. Fairfax County Public Schools students are failing standardized tests in droves. Meanwhile, six high schools are on the verge of losing accreditation as a result of Fairfax County’s sanctuary policy passed in January 2021.
The school district’s administrators are also spreading a whispered panic about next year’s budget. They will not be receiving federal COVID-19 funds, and they have an unprecedented senior administrative full-time employee bloat in their headquarters. With such inefficiencies, $3.7 billion just isn’t enough for their waste and inflated salaries.
Speaking of incompetence, there also are questions about Superintendent Michelle Reid’s selection of Thru Consulting as the vendor to conduct a school boundary review in Fairfax County for $500,000. Not only does it appear that Thru lacks experience in boundary reviews, but its consultants do not live in Fairfax County and likely have little to no local knowledge of the area. Even worse, Reid seems to have bypassed county procedures when she selected Thru.
When a reporter contacted the superintendent’s office for comment about the district’s contract with Thru, Fairfax County Public Schools spokeswoman Julie Allen said, “Should [Reid] be available, we will be sure to let you know.”
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Reid is undoubtedly busy with her pseudo-listening tours in which she pretends to care what the district’s parents say or think about redistricting and destabilizing our children as she uproots them from their schools. But surely she could make time to comment on the Thru contract if she had a reasonable defense.
School board members are supposed to be responsible for ensuring a quality education and supervising the district’s administrators. Fairfax County’s residents would be better served if their elected officials focused more of their attention on dealing with colossal learning losses from closed schools and managing incompetence and the budget and less time passing symbolic resolutions and posing for photo ops. In the words of coaching legend Bill Belichick, “Do your job!”
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 article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
