Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), one of the largest school districts in the country, has been slapped with a federal civil rights complaint over its relentless racial discrimination regime.
Defending Education (DE), a grassroots education advocacy organization, filed a formal Title VI complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on Tuesday morning, seeking a formal investigation into the nation’s ninth largest school district (and Virginia’s largest), which serves over 183,000 students in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
The district, known infamously alongside its neighbor Loudoun County, serves the children many federal government employees, D.C. lobbyists and politicians and has used its $3.7 billion budget, with a $19,795 average cost-per-pupil, to pursue some of the most far-left social engineering and indoctrination schemes in the country.
“Fairfax County Public Schools has a history of race discrimination a mile long. In their most recent ‘equity’ experiment, the nation’s ninth largest school district has crafted a race-based ‘equity’ plan that has become worse over time,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at Defending Education, told The Federalist. “From racial affinity groups to contracts for ‘equity’ consultants to race-based disciplinary policies to race-based hiring and more, FCPS’s history of malfeasance and race essentialism is jaw-dropping. We are hoping the Department of Education swiftly launches an investigation into this behemoth that has used its clout to devastate merit, equality, and color-blindness in Fairfax County schools.”
FCPS has had a “racial equity” policy since 2017 called “One Fairfax,” which requires that the district pursue “‘policies, practices and strategic investments’ designated to eliminate ‘racial disparit[ies]’ and guarantee equal ‘outcomes.’” It “commits [FCPS] to consider equity in decision making and in the development and delivery of future policies, programs, and services,” and trains employees in “‘the use of equity tools’ and requires ‘[a]ll organizations and departments’ to advance racial equity by ‘conduct[ing] analysis, devis[ing] plans, set[ting] goals, and tak[ing] actions through specific practices, policies, and initiatives,’” the complaint states.
That policy, the complaint adds further, is “used to discriminate on the basis of race.”
A case that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but was rejected to be heard by a majority of the justices, was that of Thomas Jefferson High School — the country’s top public high school of which, by 2020, FCPS “became consumed with transforming the racial composition.”
In order to reach racial quotas and diminish the mostly-Asian student body, FCPS changed the competitive, merit-based admissions system to a “holistic review,” in order to artificially change the racial demographics of the student body.
Upon the Supreme Court’s rejection of certiorari, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in dissent, “What the Fourth Circuit majority held, in essence, is that intentional racial discrimination is constitutional so long as it is not too severe. This reasoning is indefensible, and it cries out for correction.”
The Thomas Jefferson High School case is one of the more high profile to come out of FCPS’s One Fairfax policy. They are shelling out hundreds of thousands in taxpayer money to “equity consultant” grifters, too.
An October 2022 contract saw $455,000 go to an “equity consultant” which promised over the course of nine months that FCPS would see “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.”
The district then adopted an “‘Educational Equity Policy,’ which ‘applies to all FCPS policies, programs, and practices’ and requires ‘[d]ifferentiated distribution of resources and access to facilities’ for students who are ‘underserved.’” Underserved means “race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin,” but as the complaint notes, the term “underserved” is “commonly used as a DEI code word for differential treatment based on race or ethnicity” — often, not white, not male, not heterosexual.
The racially “equitable lens” extends to school disciplinary policy, where the 2024-2025 iteration of the student conduct and disciplinary code was altered to pursue “equitable implementation of discipline policy, regulations, and practices across all schools, educational programs, and varying demographic categories.”
An “equity audit” undertaken by FCPS drove them to try to stop “discipline disproportionality,” or somehow fabricate disciplinary outcomes to be more racially representative of demographics as a whole, rather than simply disciplining students who need to be disciplined.
“As the Seventh Circuit held in similar circumstances, attempts to racially balance disciplinary outcomes are invariably unlawful because they require ‘systematically overpunishing the innocent or systematically underpunishing the guilty’ on the basis of race,” the complaint states.
FCPS employs “equitable grading” in order to “skew grading based on racial considerations” the complaint continues, and includes critical race theory-style curriculum “encouraging students to feel ‘guilty’ about their race, showing videos that depict white students as ‘mosquitos … taking bites out of people of color,’ and teaching an ‘Oppression Matrix’ that elevates some races over others in a hierarchy of racial struggle.”
It also promotes racial “affinity groups,” which deliberately segregate and exclude students on the basis of race.
Michelle C. Reid, the district’s superintendent, has described these initiatives as “both central and intentional in [its] work,” and this year, FCPS paid DEI staff a total of $5.76 million to implement the racialized policies, as DE reported.
However, with the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology, and racially discriminatory schemes from far-left school districts, it is possible that the suburb of the nation’s capital will be next in line.
Breccan F. Thies is a correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
