[This article was first published September 29, 2021. September 30, 2021, a Fairfax County Judge ordered that Debra Tisler and I not disseminate the materials she received in response to a FOIA request. I took down the article, which included documents from the FOIA response. This came after Fairfax County School Board (FCSB) took legal action against me and Debra. Today, November 16, 2021, after over a month of Debra and I being censored, Judge Richard Gardiner struck down FCSB’s unconstitutional attempts to shut down our speech. Hence, this article is live again. Not exactly a breach of children’s or personnel privacy as FCSB tried to indicate, is it?]
A May 13, 2021, Hunton Andrews Kurth invoice notes that attorney SE Haynie ($395 rate) drafted a message “re: misuse of bond proceeds” and later there’s a mention of Haynie corresponding “re: status of NDA review.”
Please join me in asking Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) to disclose the “misuse of bond proceeds”.
What bonds?
What proceeds?
What misuse?
AND: why is $395/hour being put toward writing a message. Is this not something FCPS’s in-house counsel can handle?
Per the NDA agreement, just color me curious on that one.
(Thank you to fellow FCPS parent Debra Tisler who did the FOIA request that made sharing this information possible. An extra thank you to her for pointing out the “misuse of bond proceeds” on this invoice.)
Click on the image below to view the invoice page noted above.
FCPS does not appear to be well managed and the board overseeing it is focused too much on issues like critical race theory indoctrination and class equity and racial privilege matters when they really should be focused on the financial mismanagement of our county’s funds. What you are doing is peeling back the outer layer of the board and the school administration’s malfeasance! Privacy issues like those you have uncovered are symptomatic of larger issues of mismanagement that are mentioned in the not redacted documents you post. I love that some of the lawyers are charging $750 per hour for their services to our public schools which quite frankly is nothing more than price gouging given the small tasks for which they have billed FCPS.
Tom,
Thank you for your comment.
My main focus has always been on the provision of special education services. More money should be invested into training the teachers, hiring more teachers, and addressing the unique needs of the students. Instead, FCPS is spending millions to fight against these families. In my own case, a hearing officer ruled that FCPS proposed the wrong reading program for one of my kids four school years in a row. The teachers complained about my years pushing back in meeting after meeting, yet I was right all along – just as other parents have been, too. The practice of prioritizing litigation over literacy must stop.
In addition, from where I sit, FCPS seems to be run by lawyers, not educators. When lawyers are bcc’d on emails between teachers and students, there’s a problem. (Read: FCPS Lawyer bcc’d on Student’s Emails; Claims He is a School Official; Says it’s “Appropriate” for Him to Have Access)
Callie
Tom, FCPS does not teach critical race theory, You can erase that from your list of concerns, because it is a non-issue. No K-12 school in the entire state teaches that, feel free to read the Standards of Learning (SOLs) published on the Virginia Department of Education website, and you can see for yourself what the required curriculum is for the state. That’s what we teach.