Parents rebel against school board ideologues in Virginia’s toniest precincts
Timothy P. Carney
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McLEAN, Virginia — “I’m voting for my daughter, basically,” said Don, a Vietnamese immigrant and father, outside Chesterbrook Elementary in Fairfax County. Don’s daughter isn’t running for anything — she’s not even in Kindergarten yet. He’s voting for her future, Don explained.
“The school board is my concern. I don’t like their policies.”
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Don spoke of the inappropriate books the Fairfax County Public Schools are giving to elementary school and middle school students but also more broadly about the school system’s lack of respect for parents’ opinions.
The Election Day ballot in Virginia included races for state senator, state delegate, the county board of supervisors, and a $435 million bond issue, but nearly every single voter I spoke to said that the school board elections were their primary concern.
“I’m concerned,” voter Brian Burke told me. “Having a young son, I’m concerned about the public schools around here.” These are shocking words to hear if you know the history of the area. McLean is the kind of place you move, and pay a pretty price, because of the public schools.
“The direction to the schools are not where they were when my children first started coming,” Paul, a voter with grown children, said after voting. “It was really the place to be 25 years ago.”
I asked every voter I could what was their main motivation for voting. One woman cited “the tree canopy” and that she mostly was voting against the chairman of the county board of supervisors.
Two other women simply said “abortion” and “choice” and that they were voting mostly for pro-choice state legislators.
The overwhelming majority of voters, however, were voting to try and take back the Fairfax County board of education from the current liberal majority. My exit interviews outside the two precincts voting at Chesterbrook Elementary in wealthy McLean are obviously not representative of the electorate’s leanings, especially because Democrats are more likely to vote early or vote by mail. But they are illuminating as to the priorities of centrist and conservative voters.
“School board” was Paul’s two-word answer.
“The schools,” said Natasha, who was voting with the youngest of her three young children.
“Still schools,” said Sarah, a mother of two. The still was a reference to the gubernatorial election two years back when Republican Glenn Youngkin pulled off an upset over Terry McAuliffe, who had the backing of the teachers unions.
These voters are part of the parental reaction against the takeover of local schools by liberal ideologues who reject any idea of balance or neutrality in order to elevate “equity” and gender ideology over academic rigor.
“The school board in Fairfax County is sneaking stuff in in the middle of the night,” Natasha said. “They are not keeping parents involved or informed of decisions, and they’re kowtowing to a woke agenda.”
“Some of these books that they have now, it’s borderline pornography for very young children,” Burke said.
“The need to keep things like sex and sexual persuasion out of the classroom,” Paul said. “Stick to the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and stay out of social politics.”
But most voters in McLean either avoided culture-war issues or spoke of them obliquely and almost apologetically. Paul wanted to make clear he wasn’t calling for right-wing social teachings in the classrooms but that he just thinks the school system as it is has gone too far. “You would hope that they’re at least not getting indoctrinated,” Paul said.
Sarah objected to “more liberal policies” and pointed around the neighborhood. “I think we’re all fairly moderate,” she said. “At the end of the day, there are, like, outliers on the Right and the Left, but we all want to be caught in the middle.”
Sarah and her husband, Todd, pulled their children from public schools during the pandemic because “remote learning wasn’t working.”
“The lack of dealing with discipline or having any kind of discipline in the system,” Sarah said. “That was troubling for us.”
Todd added that the new “equity” focused approach to grading was an abandonment of academic rigor.
In one high-profile incident, the principal at Thomas Jefferson High School refused to or decided not to inform students they had won National Merit Scholarships. After the school Superintendent Michelle Reid called it a “one-time” mistake, other principals admitted they had done the same. The district also refused to comply with a state investigation into the issue and hired $2,200-an-hour lawyers to help them resist handing over the results of their internal investigation.
McLean is one of the most expensive localities in the Washington, D.C., area, and the Chesterbrook Elementary district is one of the most sought after. Some residents there look at the ideological takeover of the schools and express buyer’s remorse.
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“My sisters and my husband all went to school here,” Natasha said. “We would have assumed the children would have gone to public schools, but unfortunately, things have not taken a turn for the better.”
“We moved houses and tried to stay in this school district, which is tiny. There’s like three communities,” Sarah said, her voice shaking a bit with regret. “So we spent four years trying to find a house that kept us in Chesterbrook Elementary school district. And one of our kids never even came here, and our other kid did kindergarten here, and that’s it. If we could rewind and do it again, I think we would have made different choices.”