Posts by Mark Spooner
FCPS’s Advisory Committee “Reforms” Avoided Real Reform
Earlier this year, the Fairfax County School Board made several changes to its policies and procedures relating to its Community Advisory Committees, but the Board didn’t address the most important problem with these bodies: They tend to echo the preexisting views of Board members rather than being a source of independent advice. Background Over the…
Read MoreGood Riddance to TJ’s Principal
Earlier this week, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) announced that Ann Bonitatibus, the principal of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”), was “resigning” to take a new position in the central office. The announcement followed the release of data showing that TJ’s number of National Merit semifinalists had plummeted from 165 last…
Read MoreAlert: FCPS Students Will Be Automatically Enrolled in Unpopular Unisex Sex-Ed Classes Unless Parents Opt Out Soon.
In 2022-23, when transgender advocates urged the Fairfax County School Board to eliminate gender-separate sex-ed classes for boys and girls, 84% of the community opposed the idea in a public survey. The School Board therefore ducked the issue and didn’t vote on it. Nonetheless, FCPS administrators thereafter quietly decided to proceed with a version of…
Read MoreMore Citizens Express Concerns about School Board Actions
The Fairfax County School Board and FCPS administrators have become increasingly contemptuous of its constituents. As reported in recent posts on this site, they have recently enacted highly controversial measures, ignoring the results of their own surveys showing massive opposition by the community. For inexplicable reasons, the Board and the administration seem to care principally…
Read MoreSchool Board’s Contempt for Parents on Full Display
A perceptive journalist, Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, just eliminated a project I had planned for today. I intended to write an article about last week’s meeting of the Fairfax County School Board at which the Board once again dismissed the results of a community survey because the results were not to its liking. The Board also decided,…
Read MoreImportant School Board Meeting — June 27
The Fairfax County School Board will be meeting this Thursday, June 27, to consider important issues affecting family rights, sexualization of children, and the agenda of the tiny-but-powerful transgender lobby. In particular, it will be voting on sex-education recommendations made by the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee (FLECAC). These proposals include showing graphic videos…
Read MoreThe Transgender Agenda at FCPS — What’s Next?
The Fairfax County School Board will be voting on several recommended changes to the sex-ed curriculum for Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) at its next meeting, on June 27. For this reason, several community members addressed the issues at the Board’s June 13 meeting. Two speakers, including myself, voiced concerns about some of the Family…
Read MoreUnisex Sex-Ed Classes Are Being Implemented in FCPS Elementary and Middle Schools
The Fairfax County public school system (FCPS) has one of the most far-reaching transgender policies in the nation. Under it a student can change his or her name and gender-indicative pronouns without parental consent, and all other students and school personnel must use those altered designations. If a student exhibits gender dysphoria at school, FCPS…
Read MoreTJ Drops in Quality Rankings, Again
Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) used to be the #1 high school in the country in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. It achieved this status in three consecutive years — 2020, 2021 and 2022. But it slipped to #5 in 2023. And it has dropped to #14 in…
Read MoreHas the TJ Experiment Been a Success?
We are more than three years into the TJ experiment, but the Fairfax County School Board hasn’t yet addressed its successes and failures. Whether an objective analysis will ever be conducted is questionable, for the program was adopted primarily for ideological reasons, and the Board may be reluctant to subject its ideological assumptions to scrutiny. …
Read More