Fairfax County Doubles Down on Keeping Secrets from Parents

Recent votes to continue secret gender “transitions” in schools and to remove public access to the Fairfax County, Virginia, sex education committee cap years of deceit by Fairfax elected officials. For a decade now they have inserted themselves between parents and children where they should most defer: in sensitive areas of mental health and sexuality. 

Sage’s Law amendment sabotaged 

On April 2, Virginia Democrats evaded a vote on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s “Sage’s Law” amendment requiring schools to notify parents before “transitioning” or counseling a child at school to “transition.” Youngkin added the amendment to SB 1048 and HB 1678 on parental notification of safe gun storage and prescription drugs, by Democrats Stella Pekarsky and Laura Jane Cohen.  

Both sponsors are former Fairfax school board members who voted in 2020 for Fairfax schools to “transition” kids in secret from their parents, with the help of a secret “transition” team. 

Sage’s Law, sponsored by Republican delegates Nick Freitas and Dave LaRock, is named for a young Appomattox girl whose secret transition at school set in motion a sex-trafficking nightmare. Cohen called the Sage’s Law amendment “garbage.”  

On April 2, Pekarsky asked the Virginia Senate to ignore (“pass by”) the amendment. She saved Democrats from going on record voting to deceive parents in an election year. 

Speaker Don Scott, a Democrat, got rid of the House vote by ruling, incredibly, that the parental notification amendment was not “germane” to the underlying parental notification bill. 

Why would Democrats avoid a vote on deceiving parents unless they plan to continue lying?  

Shutting out parents and the public 

Back in Fairfax, on March 13, the current school board voted to remove public access to its Family Life Education (sex education) Curriculum Advisory Committee meetings—but without telling the public that’s what it was doing.  

A meeting scheduled for the day before had already been abruptly postponed. Many community members had planned to attend the curriculum committee’s scheduled vote to recommend teaching gender ideology in elementary school.  

This recommendation flouts both Virginia state guidelines and overwhelming community opposition, as shared by a young Fairfax mother in a video viewed over 60 million times. 

Ironically, the move to limit public engagement came from the “Public Engagement Committee” of which School Board Vice-Chair Sandy Anderson is a member. At the March school board meeting, she explained that her motion to shift oversight of the advisory committee from the school board to the superintendent “aligned” it with other curriculum committees.  

Anderson omitted the reason she had given in the obscurity of Public Engagement Committee working sessions: avoiding “intense public scrutiny” and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 

There, she explained Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee members were “open” to FOIA requests “if it continues to be a school board advisory committee, in a different way than if it was an advisory committee to the superintendent.” The move would offer the committee “the space to have the conversations about what needs to be in their curriculum without the intense public scrutiny, particularly for this topic.”  

A committee that does not represent the community 

Ryan McElveen, who led the school board to adopt gender ideology in 2015, mused that some might be “unhappy, right, in the community they will think that we are trying to push this under the rug.” 

Indeed. 

Since the vote, even the composition of the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee has disappeared from its website.  

Members had included the transgender president of  Transgender Education Association, which supports “gender transition” in schools, and longtime LGBTQ activists. In 2022 three of twelve Board appointees were Transgender Education Association directors. 

Virginia Board of Education guidelines state that “[t]here must be evidence of broadbased community involvement” in the Family Life Education team and process. Virginia law further requires that “all such instruction shall be designed to promote parental involvement.”   

The committee, however, is woefully unrepresentative of parents in Fairfax County, with its rich diversity of immigrant and religious communities.  

Many parents have no idea that “Family Life Education” teaches kids they might be born in the wrong body and can change sex, and that sex is not a biological, binary reality but a spectrum. 

A look from the inside 

I served on the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee from 2015 to 2018, where I observed firsthand Fairfax schools’ quasi-savior complex to sexually “enlighten” our children. 

In 2018 I made a motion to use only the scientific term “sex” in Family Life Education lessons, rather than the ideological term “sex assigned at birth.” The Board promptly threw me off and replaced me with an activist who declared that “biological sex is meaningless.” He led the curriculum committee to vote to use only “sex assigned at birth.” 

Incredibly, out of over 30 committee members, only three of us filed a dissent to that recommendation to the Board. In reverse proportion, nearly 90% of community responses supported our dissent recommending lessons use “sex.”  

The Board ignored us and passed the changes.  

This contempt for community input is typical. So is deceit. 

Working behind the back of parents 

Preceding the March Board vote, Public Engagement Committee Chair Marcia St. John-Cunning had told her working group: “the way it’s [Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee] currently set up, their [students’] ability to be open and honest I think would be very difficult … and some of the consequences they may have to deal with if they’re very frank and forthright, so that was an overriding concern for me.”  

What, exactly, is so dangerous to students that adult activists must discuss it with them in secret?  

It must escape the board’s notice that there is NO mention in state law or guidelines of student committee members at all. Yet it has 14- and 15-year-olds voting on their own sex education. 

Board Chair Karl Frisch, an LGBTQ activist with neither children nor education credentials, who chose to be sworn in on a pile of pornographic books, promotes these upside-down priorities. 

In 2021 Frisch worked behind parents’ backs with Fairfax students to amend the disciplinary code to punish “misgendering” at the same level as arson and assault.  

The Board held the vote in the middle of summer, with activist speeches and a letter from hundreds of students in support. Not one speaker opposed the draconian punishments for wrong-speak. Why? 

The Board never circulated the new sanctions to the public. 

Open defiance of state guidelines 

Having voted in 2020 to secretly “transition” kids, the Board openly defied Youngkin’s 2022 state guidelines requiring parental notification. Fairfax activists invited students to run away from home to “queer-friendly” adults in Fairfax County, where they would not be “outed.” 

In 2024, against community opposition and state guidelines, it secretly green-lit 15 pilot programs combining boys and girls for Family Life Education instruction. 

In 2015 it elevated gender ideology as official school policy despite overwhelming community opposition. It promised transparency but secretly hired a radical gender consultant, refusing to disclose his work. 

And it lied outright that the new Virginia standards required sweeping changes to the Family Life Education curriculum on sexual topics and gender ideology. Again, despite tremendous community opposition, they voted in the new curriculum. 

A decade ago, as a mother new to Fairfax schools, I was shocked that my school board would lie to me. Now I know its devotion to radical ideology consistently leads to deceiving parents and harming children.  

It shouldn’t take a federal investigation to make Fairfax protect kids. Pekarsky and Cohen could have done it last week. 

Instead, in true Fairfax tradition, they doubled down on all the horrors that follow from keeping parents in the dark. 

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