To rebuild community trust after the explosive Hayfield Secondary School Football Scandal , Fairfax County Public Schools superintendent Michelle Reid has again demonstrated weak leadership through her Boundary Review Advisory Committee , which was meant to rubberstamp her predetermined decisions in the district’s boundary overhaul, detailed in Policy 8130 .

By blocking her advisory committee from Freedom of Information Act laws, forcing its members to sign expansive non-disclosure agreements , prohibiting public access , and selecting only leftist organizations to participate, Reid is demonstrating a pattern of surreptitious governance and biases. Despite her stated efforts to rebuild community trust following the Hayfield Scandal, her actions continue to deteriorate it.

After a 400-hour confidential internal investigation into the Hayfield football program, in which 31 athletes transferred from other schools to Hayfield for football season, Reid cleared the administrators of any wrongdoing. Following the regular football season, however, text messages surfaced proving that administrators were involved in abusing the homeless student loophole to stack a high school football team.

Given Reid’s access to internal documents in her so-called “investigation” and her continued failure to punish involved administrators, it seems to parents that the superintendent was involved in a massive cover-up. Without much choice, Reid eventually acknowledged the football scandal and apologized . She continues to conclude many of her written messages to the district’s parents with the phrase, “Together, all things are possible.”

Despite her sweet and arguably manipulative words, Reid’s actions suggest that she is willing to listen to and work with people with whom she agrees. That was made clear on Aug. 27, when she hosted a town hall at Hayfield’s auditorium about the football scandal. She abruptly ended the meeting 30 minutes early when it became clear that she had not sufficiently stacked the seats with supportive audience members.

In the same way, she continues to make the rookie leadership mistake of ignoring key stakeholders’ perspectives in her boundary advisory committee, whose participants were made public in mid-December. While 1,600 parents and community members applied for seats on the committee, there is much evidence to suggest that she handpicked some members to represent schools based on her pre-existing relationships with them, despite claiming that participants would be selected at random.

In addition to handpicking parents involved in the committee, she also personally selected the organizations that would have a seat at the table without explanation. In an email response, school board member Robyn Lady tried alleviating a community member’s concerns about excluding key groups. She wrote, “It is my understanding that all of the special interest groups are affiliated with FCPS.”

In reality, organizations such as NAACP Fairfax, Neurodivergent Liberation Coalition, and FCPS Pride, to name a few, are not any more “affiliated” with Fairfax County’s public schools than several of the organizations Reid likely intentionally excluded. If she were actually in search of other perspectives, the superintendent would have invited organizations including, but not limited to: FairFACTS Matters, Chinese American Parents Association of Northern Virginia, United Against Antisemitism, Black Student Fund, Hispanics for STEM, Fairfax County Parents Association, Virginia Education Opportunity Alliance, Special Education Action, Coalition for TJ, and the Independent Women’s Network’s Fairfax Chapter.

Fairfax County’s Board of Supervisors should also demand and expect a seat at the table since they allocate more than half of the county’s resources to the district’s public schools. Property taxes are rising, with vehicle taxes skyrocketing and a new meals tax under consideration, so our elected district representatives should be tuning in for oversight, if nothing else.

If the superintendent’s advisory committee is genuinely meant for transparency, inclusiveness, and rebuilding eroded trust, why would Reid block public access, make participants sign non-disclosure agreements, and try to exempt proceedings from Virginia’s FOIA laws? Perhaps Virginia’s Office of the Attorney General from the “ Parents Matter ” administration would like to weigh in on this.

Reid uses the same tactics in the boundary review process as in the Hayfield football scandal. She claims that she cares about community feedback and then does everything possible to silence dissent. The problem she has now is that community members have seen her playbook. What will our elected school board members do to hold her accountable for her poor leadership?

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner and the Federalist, a mother in Fairfax County, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.