Many administrators and teachers in liberal public school districts across the country are presenting their leftist opinions as facts to indoctrinate our children. They do this through curricula, assignments, displays in hallways and classrooms, codes of conduct that mandate pronouns and replace sex with “gender identity,” equity grading and admissions, and restorative justice discipline. 

Recently, one district’s leadership went a step further in what seems to be an attempt at harassing, intimidating, and perhaps even reeducating students who push back. 

At the end of February, Fairfax County, Virginia’s high schools administered the Student Experience Survey. According to Fairfax County Public Schools’ (FCPS) website, the purpose of the survey is “to understand how students view and experience school. The ultimate goal of the survey is to elevate student voice in identifying strategic improvement opportunities for FCPS.”

The website further informs parents and students what the district does with the data, which it claims is collected confidentially. The district states, “FCPS will analyze the responses from the student survey to identify strategic improvement opportunities. Remember, survey responses will be collected confidentially. Only aggregate student responses will be included in reports.”

Adam* is a student at one of Fairfax County’s 27 public high schools who took the survey. He believed that the survey would be confidential and therefore answered the questions honestly. Under the “Health and Wellness” section, for example, he identified district leadership and policies as a source of stress. 

Adam informed IW Features that he was not provided a copy of his completed survey, but he wrote something like this: “Some of the decisions made by [Superintendent] Michelle Reid, such as the decision to keep the Hayfield Football team in the playoffs and the disobedience of [President Donald Trump’s] executive orders, have caused me stress and anxiety during the school year. I feel that these decisions made by Michelle Reid and FCPS are poorly made.” 

Adam added in his survey response that he was also concerned about the consequences of “FCPS’s illegal immigration policy,” referring to Fairfax County’s sanctuary policy that is sapping the district of critical resources and leading to increased crime in the area.

It’s worth providing some background on these poor decisions that Adam referenced. This past fall, the Hayfield football scandal dominated Fairfax County’s local news. A high school football coach worked with an athletic director and perhaps others to exploit a homeless student loophole to recruit the desired athletes to the public high school’s football team. 

The district’s leadership addressed it in a way that highlighted their biases and incompetence. First, Superintendent Michelle Reid tried to ignore it. Then she held town hall meetings so that residents would feel they were being heard, all the while dismissing legitimate concerns. In the end, when she could no longer deny reality, Reid was forced to apologize for her abhorrent handling of the situation.

With regard to Trump’s executive orders, Adam told IW Features that he was referring to Trump’s policies titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” and “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Fairfax County Public Schools are willfully violating the orders and stand to lose $168.1 million in federal funding as a result. 

About a week after Adam shared his concerns on the survey, around March 6, he said a school counselor pulled him from his history class. To his shock and embarrassment, and while they were standing in the hallway outside of his classroom, not even in her office, she held his “confidential” survey answers in her hand and wanted to discuss them. Adam told IW Features, “She asked about my response, including things such as why this was causing me stress, clarification about the Hayfield football scandal, and what I meant by executive orders.”

When Adam told his parents about the survey and his encounter with the school counselor, they were understandably upset by this clear breach of trust and confidentiality on the part of school and district leadership. His mother informed IW Features that when she called the school’s administrators to inquire how this happened, they said that survey answers are flagged based on district-level policies for any evidence suggesting that a student is a harm to himself or to others. 

Adam’s mother was even more confused by this explanation and inquired which one her son had been labeled. The administrator answered that they flagged him, based solely on his answers to the survey, as a potential harm to himself.

Adam told IW Features he thought that was strange because, even during his conversation in the hallway with the counselor, she noted that he seemed like an “easy-going, happy kid.”

Another question Adam’s mother posed to school and district administrators concerns parental notification. While Fairfax County Public Schools flagged her son as a potential harm to himself, they didn’t bother to tell Adam’s parents that they had labeled him as such until they pressed administrators for answers. Nor did the school inform Adam’s parents in advance that a counselor would be pulling him from class to discuss his survey answers.

On April 22, IW Features reached out to Fairfax County Public Schools with the following questions pertaining to the survey:

As of publication, district leaders have not responded for comment.

Adam’s experience with the survey and its aftermath sheds light on two important problems in many liberal K-12 public schools. First, administrators, teachers, and counselors clearly are leveraging institutions and murky policies in their efforts to penalize conservative students for wrongthink and manipulate their political perspectives. And second, public schools are invasively collecting a disconcerting amount of data on and from our children. 

Given that administrators and teachers can’t even meet their basic mission to teach children to read and do math proficiently, should they be trusted to extract and store private information regarding children’s attitudes and beliefs? I think not.

*Storyteller name has been changed to protect their identity