This week, Fairfax County’s school board is scheduled to adopt its fiscal 2025 proposed budget, totaling $3.8 billion, an 8.6% increase of $301.8 million from fiscal 2024. Rather than adding tax dollars to an already egregiously inflated sum, the local school district desperately needs a zero-based budgeting process, an external audit, and continued oversight.
The fiscal 2025 budget increase includes a 6% market scale pay increase for all employees, totaling $170.7 million. While a market scale pay increase might make sense for lower-paid employees such as teachers and bus drivers, given inflation, it is not at all clear why the district’s administrators need a pay increase.
Fairfax County’s public schools’ administrators’ salaries are already much too high. In 2022, Superintendent Michelle Reid’s annual salary was $380,000, more than double Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s salary the same year, $164,394. In comparison, the average national public school superintendent’s salary in 2022 was $121,209.
In fact, many of Fairfax County’s school district administrators are earning more than the governor of the commonwealth. At least 21 of the district’s administrators made significantly more than Youngkin in 2022. For example, the chief equity officer, Nardos King, made $232,074.
Despite being a controversial pick for the arguably unnecessary administrative position, and her already suspiciously high salary, King is unresponsive to the district’s parents. Still, as one of the local school district’s employees with a salary already higher than the top-paid federal administrator at the Department of Education, she will enjoy an almost $14,000 raise in the proposed school budget.
Fairfax County’s per-pupil spending is also significantly higher than the national average. In the fiscal 2024 budget, the cost per K-12 public school pupil was $19,795. Meanwhile, the national per-pupil average the same year was $12,612. With over-crowded classes of more than 30 pupils per classroom in some elementary schools, and limited middle school sports options, the Fairfax County’s taxpayer’s dollar value is questionable.
To fund the ballooning expenditures in our public schools, Fairfax County’s residents are witnessing their property taxes increase at an alarming rate. The tax increases are directly correlated to what seems to be the school district’s flagrant spending. More than half of Fairfax County’s property taxes are allocated to public schools. Substantial increases in home and vehicle assessment values, coupled with high tax rates, mean that the monthly property tax increases from 2019 to 2023 amount to the cost of an additional car payment for many of the county’s families.
Despite these tax increases, in part to fund exorbitantly high administrative costs, legal fees, and significantly above national average per-pupil spending, Fairfax County’s children do not seem to be getting much in terms of a return on investment. For the past few years, the district’s students fared poorly on their standardized tests. Last year, 25% of Fairfax County’s public school students failed their math test, 43% failed the writing test, 22% failed reading, and 38% failed the history standards of learning test.
Many private schools that are charging less than what Fairfax County’s public schools receive per pupil are performing much better in terms of students’ performances on standardized tests. Such enhanced performance in private schools at a lower per-pupil cost greatly supports the argument for school choice, in which taxpayer dollars follow students instead of failing systems. But we must first agree that the purpose of taxpayer-funded education is to teach children, not to employ overpaid administrators and follow orders from teachers unions.
The idea that Fairfax County Public Schools’s overpaid administrators and Democratic-endorsed school board members can buy their way out of the colossal learning loss problem they caused with an increasingly inflated budget is both misguided and irresponsible. Throwing hard-earned taxpayer dollars at Fairfax County’s public schools does not automatically result in student achievement any more than it yields competence from district administrators.
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Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, a member of the Coalition for TJ, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.
