Stephanie Lundquist-Arora | November 15, 2024
(The Federalist) — Last month, Ann Bonitatibus announced that she was resigning from her position as principal of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), a magnet school located in Fairfax County, Virginia, the state’s largest school district.
Before her leadership, TJ was the top-ranked high school in the nation for about a decade. Bonitatibus aided in the overhaul of TJ’s selection process in 2020 from merit to equity, thereby compromising the once highly prestigious school’s rigor, and sinking its ranking from first to 14th in the nation on its undoubted freefall journey.
Prior to the admissions changes in 2020, which were explicitly implemented to reduce the number of Asian Americans and racially balance the student population, TJ leadership selected students across the region based on an admissions exam, grades, test scores, and aptitude for mathematics. Following the policy change, admissions are now based on middle school quotas, admissions essays that have little to nothing to do with STEM and can be subject to viewpoint discrimination, and a low-level cut-off grade point average of 3.5.
Consequently, this year, following the graduation of the final class of merit-selected students, the school notably had fewer than half the number of national merit semi-finalists that it had under the merit-based admissions system, and its lowest number in over a decade.
Not only did Bonitatibus facilitate the destruction of the once flagship institution by lowering its standards for admission, TJ administrators also handed over blueprints and student research projects to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has since cloned the school by the dozens in China.
In fact, the timing of her resignation suggests that Bonitatibus likely resigned from her position in the middle of the school year as a result of these controversies with the CCP, which some have even considered to be traitorous. Bonitatibus and others destroyed America’s premiere public school, while helping China to replicate what it once was.
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