Sun Gazette editorial: Now it's the Fairfax school system to be under Miyares's microscope

Having bagged themselves a superintendent out in Loudoun County to end 2022, Gov. Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares appear ready to go hunting even bigger quarry.

Youngkin on Jan. 3 called for Miyares to investigate allegations that information about National Merit Awards, as determined by student PSAT scores, was withheld from students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology until after important deadlines for college scholarships had passed.

“We need to get to the bottom of what appears to be an egregious, deliberate attempt to disadvantage high-performing students at one of the best schools in the country,” Youngkin said in a press statement. “Parents and students deserve answers and Attorney General Miyares will initiate a full investigation.”

“I believe this failure may have caused material harm to those students and their parents, and that this failure may have violated the Virginia Human Rights Act,” the governor said.

That may be a stretch. But putting Thomas Jefferson and, by extension, Fairfax County Public Schools leadership under a microscope – and perhaps empaneling a grand jury as was the case in Loudoun – may prove enlightening to the voters/taxpayers of Fairfax County.

But wait, there’s more. On Jan. 9, Miyares announced he was expanding his civil-rights probe of the county school system to encompass its entirety, not just one school.

In a letter to Superintendent Michelle Reid, Miyares instructed her to preserve all relevant documents and take other steps to accommodate the investigation. “If you decline to cooperate, my office intends to issue a subpoena against you,” he warned.

(One wonders if Reid saw this coming when she applied for the FCPS job last year, and what her decision about taking the job might have been if she had?)

We’ll see where this leads, if anywhere. And yes, Fairfax school leaders (Democrats one and all) will scream that this is all political. Maybe so, maybe not.

But once rocks start getting kicked over in any investigation, things could get, well, interesting. Just ask the school leaders in Loudoun, who just a few months ago were smugness personified. Now they’ve run for cover.

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