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…

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Good 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…

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Alert: 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…

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More 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…

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The 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…

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TJ 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…

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Has 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. …

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Beware the Social Studies Curriculum — Part 2

Documents obtained under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act reveal a disturbing ideological bias in the social studies curricula of Fairfax County public high schools (FCPS). The first article on this subject, which is HERE, discloses that after the current School Board took office in 2020, the curricula were extensively revised to view history and government…

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