Pictured: Fairfax County School Board Chairman Karl Frisch
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora | June 25, 2024
(Washington Examiner) — This Thursday, the Fairfax County School Board is set to vote on controversial changes to the district’s sex education curriculum. The vote likely will include whether to start instruction on gender ideology in elementary school, as recommended by the district’s ideologically homogeneous Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee.
As a strategy, the district’s leadership is known for its questionable timing on controversial votes and notifications. Most recently, the superintendent, Michelle Reid, waited until 4:27 p.m. last Friday to inform parents that they would need to find babysitters on seven Monday afternoons next academic year due to increased allowances for teacher training. The date and time of the message were far from coincidence. Reid strategically sent the notification late in the afternoon at the end of a work week, after children were released from school for the summer and many families were already on vacation.
The district leadership redundantly claims to be for inclusion and transparency, but its actions suggest the opposite. From my personal experience as a parent in the district, leadership’s goal is to include only all the parents and residents who agree with its plans and withhold information from and ignore the rest. For example, I was forced to pay $280 on a Freedom of Information Act request for my son’s “social emotional learning” curriculum materials. It also did not seem to want to share its mandatory lesson on white privilege for eighth graders.
The school board’s members have the same tendency as Reid regarding strategically inconvenient timing of major decisions and notifications. Members of the last board scheduled votes on controversial policies, such as the bias incident reporting system and suspending students for misgendering, in the summer months, when parents are less likely to be paying attention to local school matters.
This time, the Fairfax County School Board, with Karl Frisch at the helm as its chairman, is voting on changes to the sex education curriculum in the summer and during the historic presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Even the families not on vacation will be more likely to pay attention to the presidential debate as the board, in all likelihood, votes against our interests.