To outsiders, the northeastern corridor of Virginia, particularly its schools, could appear to be in a perpetual state of scandal.
It’s as if a new controversy leaks out of Loudoun, Arlington, and Fairfax counties — an affluent, liberal area in northern Virginia, known locally as NOVA — every few weeks.
In Loudoun County, three sophomore students were accused of sexually harassing a biologically female transgender classmate for privately expressing discomfort with the classmate’s presence in a male locker room, which was permitted pursuant to school gender identity guidelines. The students were ultimately punished.
In Arlington County, transgender inclusion policies allowed a convicted child predator to repeatedly access the school district’s community locker rooms and reportedly expose himself to young girls on multiple occasions.
And in Fairfax County, under similar policies, the same serial sex offender, once on the state’s most wanted list, was able to access the county’s female-only facilities, where he allegedly flashed children as well.
Firestorms over these incidents ignited within weeks of one another, all occurring this year alone.
The latest incidents, occurring years after critical race theory and transgender policies in the area burst into the national conversation, raise questions as to how one corner of the country can be embroiled in so much controversy. Its inhabitants know that several sociopolitical factors make NOVA a fertile ground for political turmoil.
An ‘autocracy’ awash with Washington, DC, politics
NOVA’s volatile nature is, in large part, due to its proximity to Washington, D.C.
Neighboring the capital, northern Virginia is home to a vast array of federal bureaucrats, lobbyists, wealthy left-wing politicos, academic elites, and media types, many of them spillovers from the district who settled in the suburbs.
The cultural climate surrounding the Beltway’s suburban sprawl is supercharged by this convergence of left-aligned ideologues asserting their outsize influence over the metropolitan region.
“Here, we have a hub of Democratic Party power, money, and ideological fanaticism,” said Asra Nomani, author of Woke Army, a book chronicling the culture war in northern Virginia.
Speaking with the Washington Examiner, Nomani described “an autocracy” of political operatives deeply entrenched in the Democratic Party who rule over the region and capture its institutions — chief among them, the public school system.
For instance, Fairfax County Public Schools board member Karl Frisch, previously the policymaking body’s chairman, used to be Media Matters’s communications director and, before that, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s press secretary. FCPS District Director Stephanie Sedgwick is currently vice chairwoman of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee, which is responsible for the party’s branding, messaging, and strategizing.
Under this one-party reign, progressives consolidated power with little resistance — until recently.
Pandemic-era pushes for mask mandates, critical race theory curriculum, and the erasure of single-sex spaces politically awakened a local contingent of parents, some of whom have become weary of the prevailing party’s ever-encroaching demands.
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Beforehand, local leadership was “relatively unobtrusive in our lives,” recalled Nomani, a Fairfax County transplant who relocated her family from Washington, D.C., in the late 2000s.
“Most parents do not sign up to become frontline warriors,” she said. But incensed by the ambitious agendas of the area’s nominally “non-partisan” school boards, the parents assembled.
Some parents drawn to the fight against progressive politics in schools are likewise steeped in politics, law, and public policy. From launching pro se litigation to obtaining public records through Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act, they have harnessed the skills necessary to go on the offensive, often risking their professional careers in the process.
The powers that be “picked a fight with some of the strongest parents in the country when it comes to getting on the news, filing a lawsuit, or staging a counter-protest,” Nomani noted.
The heightened political acumen on both sides of the NOVA school fights has set the region apart from the similar disputes that arose in school districts around the country in the post-pandemic era.
School board meetings served as the battle’s staging grounds, viral videos of which were widely circulated beyond Virginia. NOVA soon emerged as an epicenter of parental clashes with activist educators, and ever since, it has cemented its reputation as a controversy capital.
Dissidents and defectors turn the tide
Northern Virginia is situated at a national crossroads, seen both as a harbinger of the future of K-12 education, given that many of its schools are among the most watched in terms of academic achievement, and a bellwether for American suburbia at large. Strife over ideological matters in the area tends to be read as emblematic of broader trends to follow: what unfolds in the commonwealth, so goes the rest of the republic.
Since 2020, the surrounding schools have been used as a petri dish for political experimentation.
During the racial justice resistance of 2020, diversity, equity, and inclusion zealots set their sights on Fairfax County’s top-performing state-chartered school: Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the crown jewel of American education, previously ranked No. 1 in the nation.
At the time, Asians made up a majority of the school’s student body while black and Hispanic students only comprised 1.8% and 3%, respectively.
Proponents of affirmative action sought to eliminate merit in the magnet school’s admissions process, replacing the standardized testing requirement with accommodations for “underrepresented” applicants. Doing so set a national precedent, long before the Supreme Court ruled that race-based quotas at the collegiate level are unconstitutional.
That racial redistribution effort, which slashed the freshman class from 73% Asian to 54% the following school year, galvanized the area’s Asian Americans, a steadily growing demographic and the largest ethnic minority group in Fairfax, constituting more than one-fifth of the county’s population.
At the forefront of the “UnFairfax” movement stood Nomani, an Indian-born mother of a TJ junior who is now an alum.
She said this reckoning marked a turning point for the Asian community in northern Virginia, “who are on the wrong side of brown,” cast aside by progressives as “white-adjacent resource hoarders.”
VIRGINIA ATTORNEY GENERAL FINDS FAIRFAX SCHOOL DISCRIMINATED AGAINST ASIAN STUDENTS
These minority parents, many of them first-generation immigrants, thought that a place as purportedly progressive as NOVA would be inclusive toward their children. Such was the case when Nomani, hitherto a lifelong Democrat, moved to northern Virginia. She saw it as a welcoming home for a single Muslim mother.
“The irony for me as a minority person in Northern Virginia,” Nomani said, “is that I have experienced more racism, bigotry, and callousness from white, woke, mostly women school board members who just put a hit on minority families who don’t align with their agenda.”
Arab, African, and Hispanic households of Muslim and Christian faiths have also found themselves in the school administration’s crosshairs for raising religious objections to educational programming that conflicts with their family values.
In nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, hundreds of parents, mostly Muslim and Ethiopian Orthodox, successfully fought for an opt-out option to pull their elementary-aged children from mandatory LGBT-themed lessons. Though the county is similarly a Democratic stronghold, some progressive-leaning parents have swung right after the 2022 policy change.
“I was seriously considering moving out of the country because I don’t feel the Democratic Party considers me to be a human being,” Kirubel Fresenbet, an Ethiopian Orthodox father of three who unenrolled his children from Montgomery County Public Schools because of the required instruction, told Interfaith America Magazine.
“The way the Democratic Party is going,” Fresenbet continued, “it’s like ‘Hey, you produce children, you give them to us, and then we decide what they learn.’”
NOVA notably has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the country, with major mosques such as Loudoun’s All Dulles Area Muslim Society and Fairfax’s Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center serving thousands of Muslim families.
“Democrats will likely have an increasing problem keeping their typically faithful Muslim voting base because they are increasingly at odds with orthodox Muslim beliefs on gender issues,” Josh Hetzler, legal counsel at the Family Foundation of Virginia’s Founding Freedoms Law Center, told the Washington Examiner.
Hetzler, who specializes in defending religious freedom, is representing the three students, one of them Muslim, who had disciplinary proceedings initiated against them by Loudoun County Public Schools for not wanting to share a locker room with a biological girl on faith-based grounds.
LCPS Policy 8040 allows students to access sex-specific school facilities that correspond with their “consistently asserted gender identity,” regardless of biological gender.
While using the male locker room, the transgender student secretly filmed Hetzler’s clients questioning among themselves why a girl was there.
“I’m so uncomfortable there is a girl [in here],” a boy can be heard saying in the clip, as some students are seen in various states of undress.
However, LCPS officials used the undercover recording, captured in violation of school rules about videotaping and, possibly, of state privacy law, to bring Title IX charges against the 15-year-old boys, accusing them of sexually harassing the transgender student.
In May, community members of differing political stripes flooded the monthly LCPS school board meeting in support of the accused boys at risk of suspension. With the attendance line out the door, more than 100 supporters signed up to speak during the public comment period, which school administrators shut down.
LOUDOUN COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD CLAMPS DOWN ON PARENTAL PUSHBACK AMID TRANSGENDER TITLE IX DISPUTE
“People of all faiths seem to be waking up to the radical nature of the now-mainstream Democratic position on gender ideology, and unless they come back towards sanity, they should expect to lose more and more of their key constituencies who simply cannot go that far,” Hetzler said.
Unstoppable force matched against an immovable object
Five years after northern Virginia achieved national notoriety, NOVA’s scandal-laden schools are still under a microscope.
The parental coalition continues to roar loudly and visibly whenever conflict arises, partly the reason why each episode in the saga is so amplified in the public eye. Neither have the school districts ceded ground in this yearslong power struggle.
In fact, the school boards are doubling down despite state-level investigations into their Title IX practices and threats from the federal government that crucial funding will be withheld if they refuse to scrap policies permitting open access to sex-separated spaces.
VIRGINIA SCHOOL DISTRICTS IGNORE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S DEMAND TO CHANGE TRANSGENDER POLICY
Why all the noise now? The schools going rogue signify an affront to the GOP-led state government, especially ahead of Virginia’s high-stakes elections in which the governorship will be up for grabs and is likely to shift back into Democratic hands.
“With the backing of then-governor Ralph Northam, Northern Virginia schools were all too happy to sign on to gender-expansive policies and engage in the kind of social experimentation that gave us horror stories of sexual misconduct and assault,” Sarah Parshall Perry, an Arlington mother and the vice president of the parental rights organization Defending Education, told the Washington Examiner.
Their refusal to respect the wishes of the constituency, even in the face of litigation, encapsulates how beholden Democrats are to the transgender agenda, Perry said.
She urged parents to speak up at every opportunity.
“School officials and elected leaders are accountable to the taxpayers who install them,” she said. “That includes parents — now, more than ever.”
Still, the standoff between parents and school boards persists. Elected officials remain immovable on the very matters that spelled defeat for Virginia Democrats in 2021, and their unwillingness to budge on hot-button issues could cost them again this time around.
Some dissidents believe that ousting school board members at the ballot box is the only way to bring about change in northern Virginia and see sustained stability.
However, breaking up the political homogeneity through the democratic process proves difficult, as Democrats regionally outnumber Republicans 2-to-1, according to the 2024 election results.
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In spite of the odds, NOVA’s crusade of parents has hope that their mobilization power will carry over this election cycle, as demonstrated in 2021, and create a ripple effect up and down the ballot.
“This is a voting bloc they have dared to awaken, the mama bears and papa bears,” Nomani said. “I imagine it’ll impact not only this year’s election, but elections for years to come.”
