By Mark Spooner | March 20, 2026
In May 2025, the Fairfax County Times reported that the School Board, at a closed meeting in February, had secretly authorized its members to hire personal “staff directors” at salaries exceeding $120,000 per year. Fairfax Schools Monitor was concerned because Virginia law requires all discussions of subjects like this to be made open meetings, not behind closed doors. Another concern was that the reported salaries, for positions that wouldn’t even require a college degree, would exceed the salaries of almost all FCPS teachers. The timing suggested that the Board may have been trying to avoid scrutiny of self-serving spending while budgetary constraints were forcing FCPS to pare back raises for teachers and other employees.
For these reasons, we decided to seek more information about what had occurred. Our inquiries were met with silence, stonewalling and denials.
We began by sending emails to four of the Board members (then-Braddock representative Sizemore-Heizer and at-large members McDaniel, McElveen and Moon), asking whether they had authorized the new positions and, if so, whether this had been done in an open session of the Board. None of the four would answer these simple questions, even after follow-up inquiries.
We then submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for relevant documents. This was stonewalled by the FCPS Division Counsel, John Foster, who claimed the Board considered no documents, other than ones exempted by law from disclosure, in connection with the staff director positions.
We then filed suit in Circuit Court. At trial, Mr. Foster admitted there had been a closed meeting in February, but he claimed the meeting did not involve any discussion or decision by the Board members about hiring new staff aides. He claimed that any decisions regarding the need for additional personnel would have been made by the human resources department and/or by the FCPS Superintendent, not by the Board.
Mr. Foster’s denials didn’t ring true. Public records show that whereas each Board member had one personal “staff aide” in 2024, they were hiring additional “staff directors” at the $120,000+ salaries in the spring of 2025, shortly after the closed meeting in February. The total payroll of staffers reporting directly to the Board members almost doubled as a result, increasing from $1,198,340 at the end of 2024 to $2,226,831 for the 2025-26 school year. Wouldn’t the Board necessarily have been involved in deliberations about this, since the added employees would be reporting directly to them? Nevertheless, given Mr. Foster’s sworn testimony, the court ruled we hadn’t proven that FCPS failed to produce documents required to be disclosed under FOIA.
Fairfax Schools Monitor reported on these efforts in two prior articles, here and here. It seemed we had exhausted what could be done to uncover what had really happened.
But just recently, out of the blue, FCPS has finally acknowledged that the School Board did engage in closed-door self-dealing regarding its staffing.
The agenda materials for the recent February 26, 2026 meeting of the School Board contain a summary of how the Board has utilized its “flexibility reserve fund” in recent years. It discloses that the fund was used last year to pay for the expensive aides to the Board members. According to the FCPS document, the Board approved this action at a closed meeting in February 2025. Finally!
The approval at a non-public meeting was a blatant violation of Virginia’s open meetings statute. Perhaps this revelation was inadvertent. Members of big bureaucracies don’t always know what has been previously denied by other members of the organization. But the truth can’t now be put back in the bottle.
The Board members should admit their wrongdoing and apologize. Budget issues should be decided with candor and tough decisions in public, not deception and self-dealing in secret, unlawful meetings. Citizens, teachers and other employees of FCPS deserve leaders who hold themselves to a higher standard than how they acted in this case.
In addition, Mr. Foster should be fired. He violated his duty to ensure that Board decisions are made in public; he abused his FOIA obligations; and he misled the public and the court with his sworn testimony.
I spoke about these issues at last evening’s meeting of the School Board. [The video of the meeting is here; my statement begins at the 32:06 time-stamp.]