Fairfax County Public Schools is paying a high-dollar Pennsylvania Avenue law firm millions of dollars in Virginia taxpayer money to fight federal and state mandates on transgenderism.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, the Fairfax chapter leader for Independent Women, found that Fairfax County spent $44 million on legal fees between fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2025.
She revealed to the Washington Examiner that the school district paid the law firm King & Spalding $980,515.14 between August and September alone. In a FOIA request, she found Fairfax County had a contract paying $1,850 an hour for services rendered in August and November.
“Ironically, November is the same month that the district filed Rule 68 in Jane Doe’s case to ‘save money,’” Lundquist-Arora said.
FCPS will pay Jane Doe, represented by America First Legal, nominal damages of $50 and her attorney fees. The case centered on a complaint from Jane Doe that a biological boy was allowed to use the female locker room in West Springfield High School, even though he identified as gay, not as transgender. When Jane Doe complained, she was told to use a single-use restroom.
When other female students began to complain on social media, court documents showed the boy wrote an Instagram post, saying, “My counselor and principal both said I’m allowed to go in there, I don’t even look at any of you, I go in a stall. You go to a public school, not everything is catered to you.”
In her latest piece for iWFeatures, Lundquist-Arora wrote, “Cultish trans fervor aside, it doesn’t take a legal eagle to know that boys presenting as boys and not even claiming to be transgender are not legally permitted in girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. The male student Jane Doe encountered in the locker room identified as gay, not transgender, according to the lawsuit.”
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, a spokesman for FCPS said the district resolved the dispute for a nominal amount to “safeguard public resources and save taxpayers thousands of dollars in legal fees and costs,” saying the school district’s Title IX policies “continue to align with state and federal law.”
In court filings, the school district’s attorneys emphasized the offer “is not an admission of liability or wrongdoing by the School Board and is inadmissible in any proceeding as evidence of any such admission,” adding that it “is not an admission of any of the facts alleged in the complaint.”
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) is working with the Virginia Board of Health to set regulations preventing biological males who identify as female from participating in women’s sports and from using women’s locker rooms.
State and federal mandates already say these private spaces must be separated by biological sex, or it is a Title IX violation. Schools in several counties in northern Virginia have refused to change their open bathroom policies and have been assigned a “high risk” status, meaning the districts must request reimbursement for federal funds instead of automatically receiving them, which has led to more lawsuits against the Department of Education.
Lundquist-Arora submitted a video testimony to a FCPS school board meeting, calling out what she describes as a misuse of funds.
“Given your exceedingly high payments on legal fees, it’s funny that your media office claimed that you essentially forfeited the bathrooms and pronouns keys to ‘safeguard public resources and save taxpayers thousands of dollars in legal fees and costs.’ Wow,” Lundquist-Arora said. “The same month, division legal counsel John Foster signed the contract with King and Spalding, agreeing to pay its lawyers nearly $2,000 an hour.”
“Maybe if you focus spending on student outcomes, rather than directing so many resources to district administrators, salaries, and lawyers, students would perform better,” she continued.
Lundquist-Arora said she believes things will only get worse once the new Democratic administration takes office.
“Jay Jones made it his entire campaign to go after the Trump administration. It’s like he forgot that he was running for office in Virginia,” Lundquist-Arora said. “The resources Jones would have access to in order to litigate things, in an activist way, against the Trump administration, I think it’s going to be a really large financial burden to Virginia’s taxpayers, absolutely.”
