There rightfully has been a lot of attention paid to radical Virginia Democrats’ day-one blitz as soon as they took back control of the state’s governorship this year. But those of us who live in the deep blue havens that control Virginia politics know that, for our part of the state at least, it didn’t matter whether our governor was a Democrat or a Republican anyway. Fairfax County, in particular, arguably has remained the same under its local one-party leftist rule.
For example, as the K-12 public school district’s leaders changed policies to reduce out-of-school suspensions for serious infractions, they suspended my three sons for 39 cumulative days for not wearing masks during the COVID-19 era. This occurred despite former Republican Gov. Youngkin’s Executive Order Two, which allowed parents to opt their children out of mask mandates. Since then, district leaders have refused to expunge those suspensions.
In 2014, leaders of Fairfax County Public Schools—Virginia’s largest district—changed the district’s code of conduct to reduce the number of out-of-school suspensions. At that time, the district’s leadership focused on the harms of out-of-school suspensions, including lost instructional time and the associated risks of grade retention or dropping out of school.
A few years later, following the 2019 election of 12 Democrat-endorsed school board members, equity took center stage on the issue of suspensions. The board’s priority shifted from reducing overall suspensions to eliminating systemic racial disparities in discipline. School board members seemed to embrace Ibram X. Kendi’s so-called “anti-racist” lens—following the taxpayer-funded $20,000, one-hour virtual presentation he gave to the county in 2020—under which any policy yielding inequitable outcomes is deemed inherently racist. District leaders subsequently implemented restorative justice practices, embedding the language in the code of conduct, in order to equalize disparities in disciplinary outcomes.
In addition to reducing racial disparities in the number of suspension days, district leaders continued to emphasize the importance of in-class instruction. And ironically, after locking students out of their classrooms for more than a year during COVID, administrators hung signs throughout the district’s 199 schools in English and Spanish that read, “Absences add up. To stay engaged, be successful, and on track to graduation, students should miss no more than nine days in a school year.”
In January 2022, however, the importance of suspending children for political infractions seemed to far outweigh the district’s acknowledged harms caused by missing school. Youngkin had alluded to ending mask mandates following his election victory in November 2021, and local liberal leaders objected. To that end, during the week prior to Youngkin’s inauguration, Fairfax County Public Schools’ board members added masks to the student dress code.
On Jan. 24, 2022, the day Executive Order Two took effect, my three sons — then in third, fifth, and seventh grades — elected to attend school maskless. The principals told them to put on masks, but when my sons refused and asserted their rights, they were suspended from school for dress code violations.
The suspensions continued daily until Feb. 7, 2022, when a judge issued a temporary injunction on Executive Order 2. At that point, in accordance with the law, my sons wore masks to school displaying their sentiments. My younger sons each wrote on theirs, “This mask is useless.” Meanwhile, my middle-schooler bravely walked the steps of his bus with a mask that read, “It’s not about safety, it’s about control.”
On Feb. 16, 2022, Youngkin signed SB739, which codified Executive Order Two. The legislation was supposed to take effect immediately following the governor’s signature, but that’s not how Fairfax County Public Schools’ leaders interpreted it. Instead, they again suspended my maskless sons for multiple days after Youngkin signed SB739.
Leading up to March 1, 2022, which is when the district agreed to abide by SB739, Fairfax County Public Schools had suspended my then-12-year-old for a total of nine days, and my 10-year-old and 8-year-old for 15 days each.
Despite national pleas from the left to move on and “declare a pandemic amnesty,” Fairfax County Public Schools’ leaders wanted nothing of the sort. On April 5, 2023, a few months after I received the principals’ denial letters for my appeals to amend my sons’ disciplinary records, I had a one-on-one meeting with Superintendent Michelle Reid during which she promised to look into my sons’ mask suspensions. At that time, she told me she did not believe it would be a problem to remove the suspensions.
On June 14, 2023, however, Reid sent an email informing me that, per division counsel’s advice, she was denying my request to remove the mask suspensions.
On Nov. 10, 2025, I submitted a Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) request to the district to amend my sons’ scholastic records — specifically, the sections relating to disciplinary actions and proceedings —given that those actions were inaccurate and misleading because they were imposed under a policy that was not properly authorized and inconsistently applied.
Under its own regulations, the district is required to provide a hearing before an impartial decision-maker. On Dec. 8, 2025, Pablo Resendiz, an assistant superintendent who reports to Reid and whom I had previously publicly criticized, sent an email indicating that he would be that so-called “impartial” decision-maker regarding my sons’ 39 days of suspensions.
In reality, there is no impartial decision-maker who reports to Reid, either directly or indirectly, because she has already denied my request in writing. No one would want to overturn his boss’s decision. District leadership suggests that it is committed to confronting “biases” and recognizing “power imbalances,” except when it pertains to themselves, apparently.
All of this means that as my honor-roll eldest son, now a junior in high school with no other disciplinary incidents, applies to colleges this upcoming fall, he will have nine days of suspensions on his scholastic record for not wearing a mask to school in seventh grade when it was fully within his right not to.
There seems to be an intersection of vindictiveness and “equity” among Virginia’s leftists. If the mask mandates were truly about safety in January and February 2022, those district officials would still be fighting for them today. Instead, public schools are filled with maskless children, and COVID continues to run its course. We now also share a collective understanding that masks did not work to stop the spread.
The suspensions themselves reflected local leftist leaders’ anger toward conservatives — even children — because Youngkin won the 2021 gubernatorial election. The refusal to expunge the suspensions or amend my sons’ scholastic records, however, arguably reflects a violation of my sons’ constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment.
And it’s worth asking: Given the explicit priority of alleviating racial disparities in disciplinary outcomes, would district leadership be so resolute on maintaining nonsensical, draconian disciplinary outcomes — 39 suspension days — if my sons were a race considered disadvantaged? If my sons were black, district leaders likely would have amended their academic records in the interest of meeting equity goals in the strategic plan. The flip side to that coin is that maintaining more days of suspensions for white and Asian students meets the same objective as deleting those for black students.
To be sure, our new Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, and her party’s problematic leftist policies undoubtedly will make waves across Virginia. But here in Fairfax County, we’ve been swimming through a hurricane for a while.
