Earlier this week, Loudoun County Public Schools’ leadership voted 6-3 to defy federal law by forcing girls and boys to share bathrooms and locker rooms. If Loudoun County and the four other Northern Virginia public school districts that are in noncompliance with the federal government do not meet today’s deadline to comply, they may lose federal funding, as U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has warned them. In other words, by opposing the federal government, these districts risk shortchanging their students of the education they deserve. Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, that seems to be an acceptable risk to ideologues running Northern Virginia’s public schools—including in my home of Fairfax County. 

Our superintendent, Michelle Reid, as well as our 12 Democrat-endorsed school board members, are likely to sprint alongside Loudoun County’s Race to the Bottom, robbing taxpayers and children in their quest to peddle an ideology the plurality of Americans rejected at the ballot box in November.

In 2023, when Reid and others decided to defy the Virginia Department of Education’s Model Policies—which are designed to protect parental rights and single-sex spaces—Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, who ran on the slogan of “parents matter,” didn’t stop them. But the Trump administration is different: Flying in the face of civil rights law is going to prove costly for school districts—and their taxpayers.

On July 25, the Department of Education stated that its investigation, launched in February, had found five Northern Virginia public school districts, including Fairfax County Public Schools, in violation of Title IX. The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights sent the district’s leaders a proposed Resolution Agreement notifying them of the steps they must take to be compliant:

Bathroom and locker room use must be based on sex, not so-called “gender identity.” District leadership must issue a memorandum to each school explaining that bathroom and locker room use are based on biological sex, and that Title IX also ensures women’s equal opportunity in educational and athletic programs. All schools must adopt biology-based definitions of the words “male” and “female” in all practices and policies relating to Title IX.

Basically, federal government officials notified Northern Virginia’s school districts that they must return to  common sense if they would like to continue receiving federal funding. We can summarize all of this by calling it the Kindergarten Cop policy approach. As put simply in the 1990 movie, “Boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.”

While the vast majority of parents across the political spectrum are nodding their heads in agreement with the federal government when it comes to protecting single-sex spaces, the tyrannical minority of activists who run these districts are trying to hold on to power they don’t have. 

For one thing, Fairfax County Public Schools literally can’t afford its leaders’ radical politics.

In fiscal year 2025, the federal government allocated about $168.1 million to Fairfax County Public Schools. This year, the county’s public schools have a budget shortfall of $121 million before any federal action is taken regarding Title IX non-compliance. Taxpayers—who already cover more than half of the bill to fund the district’s public schools—are left wondering if their property taxes will increase even more this year to financially support Reid’s anticipated adolescent defiance of both the public’s preferences and federal law.

Aside from losing about $168 million in federal funding, Fairfax County Public Schools likely also will take its losing battle to court—which wastes not only time and energy, but money. With each passing year, they prove to the county’s taxpayers how little they care about spending school funds on legal fees.

In fact, Fairfax County Public Schools is a faithful client of the exceedingly expensive law firms Blankingship & Keith and Hunton Andrews Kurth. Reid and school board members use these firms to push their political agendas, such as compelling students’ speech with mandated preferred pronouns, as well as to cover up the leadership’s alleged misdeeds.

In a Freedom of Information Act request, IWFeatures learned that Fairfax County Public Schools have spent about $44 million on legal fees since 2019.

*Obtained by IWFeatures in a FOIA request

To add insult to injury, Fairfax County Public Schools’ leadership eliminated 275 teacher positions for fiscal year 2026 to address its budgetary shortfall. The district’s students are already performing much worse on standardized tests than they did in the past, which raises the question: How many more teachers do Reid and other leaders think the district can afford to sacrifice for their extreme leftist political agendas? The beginning teacher salary in the district is $58,000, meaning that $44 million equates to about 758 annual teaching salaries. Divided over the six-year period detailed in the above table, Fairfax County Public Schools’ legal costs are taking away an average of 126 teachers per year.

And that number is likely to increase. Considering the district’s long history of lawfare tactics with its loyal lawyer soldiers from Blankingship & Keith and Hunton Andrews Kurth, it is highly likely that Reid and the school board members would pay any price—with our tax dollars—to fight the Trump administration and oppose the most straightforward interpretation of civil rights law. 

Thankfully, the U.S. Department of Justice is set to come to the table. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, has alluded to the possibility of taking action that involves individual criminal liability against government officials. “[G]overnment officials may think, because nobody ever bothers to enforce these statutes, that they’re immune and they can do whatever they want,” she said. “Not so.”

Leftist district administrators in both Fairfax County and Loudoun County have proven over and over again that they are happy to flagrantly spend taxpayers’ money on lawyer fees for political causes that are in violation of federal law. The Trump administration, fortunately, is taking a two-pronged approach to protect civil rights. First, it is slowly adjudicating the merits and intentions of Title IX. Second, it is likely to individually pursue these incredibly incompetent and irresponsible local leaders as the alleged criminals they are. 

Finally, American children have a government that stands up for them.