Image CreditBreccan F. Thies / The Federalist
After five far-left Northern Virginia school districts refused to stop forcing “transgender” policies on their students, the U.S. Department of Education is proceeding with suspending or terminating federal funding.
The Education Department announced Tuesday that the five Washington, D.C.-suburb districts — Alexandria City, Arlington County, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, and Prince William County — would be placed on “high-risk status,” meaning they will be forced to pay education expenses up front, and the federal government will only reimburse them.
More than $50 million in grant funding, including formula, discretionary, and impact aid grants, will be under the reimbursement status, meaning the districts will have to prove that federal dollars are being spent consistently with federal law in order to get federal funding.
The move comes after all five districts were found in violation of Title IX for maintaining their “transgender” policies allowing students to use the restrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex based on “gender identity,” forcing students and teachers to use “preferred pronouns” at the threat of disciplinary action, and other far-left gender theory policies.
After the Education Department attempted to enter a resolution agreement with the districts to stop their endangerment of children, each of them rejected the agreement in order to adhere to the warped ideology.
“States and school districts cannot openly violate federal law while simultaneously receiving federal funding with no additional scrutiny. The Northern Viriginia School Divisions that are choosing to abide by woke gender ideology in place of federal law must now prove they are using every single federal dollar for a legal purpose,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “We have given these Northern Virginia School Divisions every opportunity to rectify their policies which blatantly violate Title IX. Today’s accountability measures are necessary because they have stubbornly refused to provide a safe environment for young women in their schools.”
While the high-risk and reimbursement statuses are most often used against entities with bad financial management, historically unstable finances, or a poor performance track record using federal funds, the five districts in the D.C. area are some of the country’s most wealthy and most populated.
Fairfax County, for example, is the country’s ninth most populous school district with nearly 200,000 students. Fairfax, Loudoun, and Arlington are all in the top 15 richest counties in the country, with Loudoun and Fairfax being the fifth and eighth, respectively.
In order to maintain federal funds, all the five districts would have to do is stop endangering children with their obsession over “transgenderism” and recognize that male and female are biological realities — something they seem incapable of doing.
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.
