Stephanie Lundquist-Arora | October 20, 2025
In response to a Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) teacher’s allegations that staff at Centreville High School arranged and funded an abortion for a minor student without her guardian’s knowledge, the district’s leadership hired a notoriously expensive law firm – King & Spalding – to investigate. Many of the county’s residents believe, however, that FCPS hired a fixer instead of trying to genuinely expose the truth. The firm’s predictable findings are consistent with that viewpoint.
After FCPS spent $980,515.14 of taxpayer money on its “investigation” in August and September this year, the law firm’s report concluded that the whistleblower’s allegations are “likely untrue.” Such a conclusion is not surprising. In fact, it’s as predictable a cigarette company funding research to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. Though politically expedient, the fact that the highly paid authors of the report were unable to definitively say that the allegations are untrue means, by definition, that another expensive FCPS “investigation” was inconclusive.
The costly investigation adds insult to injury for Fairfax County’s exhausted taxpayers. More than half of the county’s budget funds the $4 billion FY2026 price tag of the district’s public schools. As our property taxes skyrocket, so too do the district’s legal fees. In fact, according to a Freedom of Information Act request, from 2019 to 2025, FCPS spent $44 million on legal fees.
In a time of local economic uncertainty and FCPS’s $121 million FY2026 budget shortfall, taxpayer dollars are better spent on academic outcomes for students, rather than lawyer fees related to politically expedient image campaigns for district leadership.
Ms. Lundquist-Arora is a Fairfax parent and leads the county’s Independent Women’s Network chapter.