Advisory Committee Excludes Stakeholders, Lacks Transparency
Fairfax County resident Stephanie Lundquist-Arora sent the following open letter to Superintendent Michelle Reid on December 28, 2024:
Dear Dr. Reid,
I write to you today as a concerned parent and community member. In an attempt to establish credibility for your decisions with the redistricting initiative in Fairfax County Public Schools, you have engineered a “community” boundary advisory committee that excludes key stakeholders. The intentional exclusion of different perspectives is not only unethical, but a rudimentary mistake suggesting this initiative is far beyond the capabilities of current district leadership.
While I understand that the inception of the Boundary Review Advisory Committee is an attempt to create trust in the community after district leadership destroyed it in the Hayfield Football scandal cover-up, it is actually doing the opposite.
First, the inclusion of certain organizations and the exclusion of others is suspicious. For all the district’s time spent on “understanding biases” in its training and curriculum, we expect more from the superintendent’s advisory committees. The organizations included in this committee are politically left of center and many have preexisting relationships with the superintendent and school board members. That matters because they come to the table with a viewpoint that supports and likely advocates redistricting for the sake of equity, rather than drawing boundaries simply based on transportation efficiency or student enrollment numbers.
Now, consider the organizations that you have excluded. Fairfax County’s Board of Supervisors allocates the school district’s budget. For the sake of responsibility and oversight, if nothing else, they should be included.
The boundary committee also excludes many other voices. FairFACTS Matters, for example, is a large and active group of concerned parents who want a voice in redistricting, but they were excluded, probably on purpose. Other important community groups which should have been offered a seat at the table include: Chinese American Parents Association of Northern Virginia, United Against Antisemitism, Black Student Fund, Hispanics for STEM, Fairfax County Parents Association, Virginia Education Opportunity Alliance, Coalition for TJ, and the Independent Women’s Network’s Fairfax Chapter.
When a community member emailed School Board Member Robyn Lady about the selection of particular groups and the exclusion of others, she replied, “It is my understanding that all of the special interest groups are affiliated with FCPS.” In reality, though, the groups I mentioned above are just as “affiliated” with the district as the ones you have personally selected.
The exclusion of these voices reveals your inherent biases. There are several administrators working at Gatehouse Administration Center who earn substantial annual salaries, around $244,000, tasked with implementing mechanisms to alleviate institutional and personal biases. Considering the abundance of resources directed to that mission, it is especially disappointing to see the obvious partiality in the superintendent’s own advisory committee.
Some of the individual members of the committee are personally, not randomly, selected. Vanessa Hall, for example, is listed under Woodson High School. She is also a long-serving member of the school board’s Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. You could have selected her as the representative for FCPS Pride, given that she is its co-chair. Instead, you ironically reserved that spot for Robert Rigby, who no longer has an official leadership position in FCPS Pride, does not live in Fairfax County, is a close friend of the school board’s chair, and has no children. And are we to believe that you randomly selected Vanessa Hall’s name out of the pool of Woodson parents who were committed to serving on the boundary review advisory committee? The process for erecting this committee is not transparent and most certainly does not work toward rebuilding the trust that the district’s leadership publicly has violated in the Hayfield Football scandal.
The cherry on top of all of this is the non-disclosure agreements (NDA) that you forced the community committee members to sign. They are nonsensical given that sharing privileged student information with committee members is a violation of Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Instead, you are making members of this committee sign NDAs to prevent them from discussing information the leadership deems “confidential,” simply because you say it is. The NDA states, “You will be able to identify Confidential Information because it reasonably appears to be of a non-public and sensitive nature, or because we advise you of its confidential nature by labeling it as such or by informing you verbally.” And really, nothing says transparency like an NDA in which district leadership has the privilege to say anything at all is “confidential.” This appears to be an intimidation tactic to silence dissenting committee members.
It seems that you are trying to assert everything said in the committee is confidential. The district’s leadership has informed parents that the committee is exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws. FCPS Chief Experience Officer, Lisa Youngblood Hall, a friend of yours from your previous district, wrote to a parent, “You ask whether the Advisory Committee is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. In order for a committee to be considered a public body, it must have been created by another public body. The Advisory Committee was created by the Superintendent. She is not a public body. Accordingly, the Advisory Committee is not a public body and is not subject to FOIA.”
The superintendent is a public employee, though, so I would think that this committee would be subject to Virginia’s FOIA laws. Further, the fact that you are not allowing public observation of the advisory committee’s meetings might be in violation of Virginia’s open-meeting requirements. As you walk this legal tightrope, and as your continued secrecy becomes public, the committee is not doing much to rebuild community trust.
Given your stated commitment to transparency, trust, and impartiality without biases, I kindly request that you reconsider the constitution of your Boundary Advisory Review Committee, as well as the public’s access to what is happening behind the curtain.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora
Ms. Lundquist-Arora is a Fairfax parent and leads the county’s Independent Women’s Network chapter.