Superintendent Michelle Reid told Fairfax County parents their schools handled it perfectly. She will not show them the report that says so.
The facts are settled. Over several days in late February and early March, a Fairfax High School student — an 18-year-old adult, in the country illegally — assaulted underage girls inside the building. Twelve girls came forward.
In April, he was convicted on nine counts and sentenced to 360 days. The conduct is not in question.
What the school did about it is. FCPS paid an outside law firm to review its own staff — and the firm concluded the district acted “promptly and appropriately.”
Then the district refused to release the report, citing attorney-client privilege and student-privacy law. The public gets the verdict. Not the evidence.
Reid said her staff “responded with the utmost urgency” and that the moment the student was identified, he was “immediately removed from class and separated from the general student population.”
The families remember the weeks before that moment differently. The parents of the girls told WJLA the district “attempted to diminish what happened to these girls” and “attempted to sweep it under the rug.”
They are not the only ones unconvinced. The U.S. Department of Education opened its own Title IX investigation into Fairfax schools in March, after the twelve girls came forward. It is still open.
So Fairfax County Public Schools investigated itself, cleared itself, and sealed the file — while the one investigation it cannot control continues.
A district sure of its own conduct could release the report and end the doubt. It chose privilege instead. Taxpayers paid for that review; they are not allowed to read it.
Two reviews now exist. One was hired by the district, cleared the district, and is sealed. The other was opened by the federal government, answers to no one in Fairfax, and is not finished. Only one of them is hidden from the families who live in these schools.
For those families, the question was never whether their daughters were believed in court. It was whether their school stood with them. A sealed report is the district’s answer.
Superintendent Reid is not elected. The twelve members of the Fairfax County School Board are. They hired her, they set her budget, and they answer for her schools. On this case, not one of them has said a word.
School Board Chair Sandy Anderson has not called for the report’s release. Neither has anyone who serves with her. Twelve elected officials, and not one will ask in public what the taxpayer-funded review actually found.
So why the silence? Either the politics of this case are inconvenient — the offender was in the country illegally — or this is what one-party rule looks like when no one has to answer for it.
The School Board that runs these schools is Democrat-endorsed, and every seat is on the ballot in November 2027. Until then, parents have the district’s word on itself — and not one page of the report.