Category: Going Local: Virginia (page 7)

Fairfax County Public Schools educators and students are in crisis as FCPS withholds damning data from the public and students with disabilities continue to be disproportionately disciplined.

Data collected from a survey of administrators and staff at FCPS’s five day schools—Burke, Cedar Lane, Key Center, Kilmer School, Quander Road—indicates the schools are understaffed, under-resourced, and woefully unable to meet the academic, functional, and behavioral needs of their students. In addition, staff are struggling on a day-to-day basis with their workloads, while simultaneously being concerned about the safety of the students and of themselves.

7.17.20: Article first published. 1.18.23: New introduction added (in italics below). 3.15.23: Updated to include a third paragraph to the introduction below, addressing the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to expand monitoring of Virginia Department of Education and its continued noncompliance.

As I type this, oral arguments for the case Perez v Sturgis are being held in the Supreme Court. Reading about Sturgis Public Schools’ failures to address the unique needs of Miguel Luna Perez is both heartbreaking and horrifying. It is a reminder, too, that the special education system is broken. The recourse offered isn’t adequate and the agencies and individuals responsible for holding state and local education agencies accountable continuously fail children themselves.

Almost five years ago, the Virginia Department of Education refused to investigate 400+ cases of noncompliance in Fairfax County Public Schools. To date, that hasn’t changed. The article below was written in 2020, a month after the United States Department of Education released a Differentiated Monitoring Support letter on Virginia. VDOE had 90 days to come into compliances. Almost three years later, the noncompliance continues, as does USDOE’s failure to hold VDOE accountable and VDOE’s failure to hold FCPS and other counties state-wide accountable for their noncompliance. November 30, 2022, Office for Civil Rights found FCPS in massive noncompliance, yet even as it was investigated, even as it negotiated its resolution agreement with OCR, and even as its findings released, FCPS continued its noncompliance—and VDOE has remained silent.

This is part VII in a series about Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) ignoring Office for Civil Rights’ (OCR) November 30, 2022, letter of findings and resolution agreement with FCPS. The series discusses noncompliance that occurred before OCR’s findings, OCR’s findings, noncompliance that continues to occur, FCPS’s open defiance of OCR’s findings, FCPS modeling continued noncompliance to staff, and what FCPS is supposed to be doing pursuant to its own resolution agreement with OCR.

The focus of part VII is FCPS’s failure to ensure that placement decisions are made by a group of persons knowledgeable about the students and the meaning of the evaluation data.