What You Need To Know:
The numbers. In a September 3 piece for The Daily Signal, Fairfax mother and writer Stephanie Lundquist-Arora pulled the 2025–26 SOL results from the state’s own School Quality Profiles. In Fairfax County Public Schools, 20% of students failed reading, 20% failed math, and 24% failed science. Among economically disadvantaged students — now 41% of FCPS enrollment — the failure rates were 39%, 38% and 42% (The Daily Signal). Loudoun’s numbers are nearly identical.
Where the money goes instead. In FY2026, FCPS employed 2,346 non-school-based central administrators with combined salaries above $272 million — more than 130 of them “instructional specialists” at the Gatehouse headquarters earning $110,000 to $160,000. Superintendent Michelle Reid tops the list at $445,353 (EdNews Virginia). That report was hers, too.
Enrollment is falling. The budget is not. FCPS entered this year facing a $28.9 million gap and closed it by cutting a staffing reserve, delaying technology, and trimming math curriculum materials — while central administration stayed largely untouched (FFXnow). As she put it: “Budgets are more than spreadsheets — they are statements of priorities.”
And the lawyers. Her earlier reporting found FCPS on pace for a record $12 million in legal spending in FY2026 — $3.8 million in February alone — and roughly $56 million since 2020, up about 50% under Reid (Bacon’s Rebellion). That is money spent defending the School Board’s choices in court instead of teaching kids to read.
Who is responsible. Michelle Reid is not elected. She is hired, directed, and paid by the Fairfax County School Board — twelve Democrat-endorsed members led by Chair Sandy Anderson, with Karl Frisch (Providence) among the longest-serving. Every budget, every administrator, every legal bill runs through their votes. This problem exists because they chose the priorities of activists and the central office over the reading scores of regular families’ kids.
What she is asking for is not radical. Her closing line: “A school system’s first obligation is to educate its students. When academic performance is struggling, taxpayers deserve to know that their dollars are being directed toward that mission — not toward expanding the bureaucracy that surrounds it.”
The whole School Board is on the ballot in November 2027. That is fourteen months away, and the FY2028 budget fight starts this winter. Read her work. Share it. Show up to a School Board meeting with her numbers in your hand. Common-sense Virginians have a parent doing the research. What we need now is more parents willing to use it.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora did not set out to become the most persistent watchdog of the Fairfax County school system. She is a mother of three who lives in Fairfax County, writes for The Federalist and the Washington Examiner, and leads the Fairfax chapter of the Independent Women’s Network (The Daily Signal).
In February 2022 she was one of the parents who sued FCPS over its mask mandate after Governor Youngkin’s executive order made masks optional (Independent Women’s Voice). Since then, the work has been less dramatic and more useful: Freedom of Information Act requests, budget testimony before the School Board, and a steady stream of reporting that turns FCPS’s own documents into numbers normal parents can understand (Independent Women’s Network). She even wrote a guide for other parents on how to file an effective FOIA request with their school district.
That is what reform looks like at the county level. Not a rally. A spreadsheet.
Put her three reports side by side and a picture emerges that the School Board has never presented to the public in one place.
The kids are not learning. One in five FCPS students cannot pass the state reading test. For low-income students — two out of every five kids in the system — it is closer to one in two and a half. These are not federal tests with unfamiliar standards; they are Virginia’s own minimum bar.
The adults are multiplying. FCPS has 2,346 employees who do not work in a school building. Their salaries alone would fund roughly 2,700 starting teachers at the district’s own $61,747 scale — or, put differently, a reading specialist in every elementary classroom in the county with money left over.
The lawyers are busy. Fifty-six million dollars in legal fees since 2020, driven by controversies the School Board created or mishandled: a Title IX investigation over bathroom and locker-room policy, a whistleblower suit, an abortion-related scandal at Centreville High School (Bacon’s Rebellion).
None of these facts came from the School Board. All of them came from a parent reading documents the School Board would rather you did not.
Fairfax County’s School Board is twelve Democrats. The Board of Supervisors that funds them is nine Democrats and one Republican. Superintendent Reid answers to the first group and is paid by the second. There is no Republican in the room when priorities are set — which is exactly how a district ends up with record legal bills, a growing central office, and one in five kids who cannot read at grade level.
The 2026 midterms on November 3 are the warm-up. Every FCPS School Board seat, and every seat on the Board of Supervisors, is on the ballot in November 2027. The candidates who will run for those seats are deciding right now whether to do it. Stephanie Lundquist-Arora has already done their opposition research for them.
Read her piece. Send it to a parent who thinks FCPS is fine because their school is fine. And the next time the School Board asks for more money, ask the question she asks: what did you do with the last $272 million?