Last month, Virginia’s Board of Education approved new accreditation standards for the state’s public schools. In addition to the existing school quality indicators — academic achievement, academic achievement gaps, chronic absenteeism, the Graduation and Completion Index, dropout rates, and the College, Career, and Readiness Index — the state wants to make sure local districts are bringing their English learners up to grade standards.
Under the previous accreditation system, the state granted students who are classified in Fairfax County as “multi-language learners,” or previously, “English language learners,” 11 semesters of exemption from certain accreditation standards, such as standardized tests in reading. Now, English learners will be included in each school’s accreditation analysis after only three semesters. Public schools that do not fully adopt and fail to implement the state’s required corrective actions to address level three school-quality indicators will be denied accreditation.
Whether one agrees with the change or not, this undoubtedly creates an added burden for schools with high populations of ESOL students. Justice High School in Fairfax County, for example, has been accredited with conditions for the past two years. It is now on the brink of imminently losing accreditation, and other schools are likely to follow.
Virginia’s public schools are graded on a three-level scale in each accreditation category, with level one being the best and level three being the worst. Prior to the regulatory changes, multiple high schools in Fairfax County, including Justice High School, were performing poorly, particularly in two of the state’s categories: chronic absenteeism and cohort dropout rates. These schools include Herndon High School, Falls Church High School, Mount Vernon High School, Annandale High School, and Lewis High School.
The tables below list each school’s dropout rate and chronic absenteeism rate with Virginia’s level grade from the most recent available state data .
Under the previous metrics, Lewis High School does not seem to be performing too poorly relative to the other at-risk schools. But a closer look at the numbers of multilanguage learners attending Lewis, in addition to its chronic absenteeism rate, highlights the district’s concern about its future performance. According to data from 2023, 521 English learner students took the Math Standards of Learning, but only 83 took the Reading SOL — a difference of 438 students (out of their total population of 1,700).
After three semesters, many students who are not proficient in English at Lewis High School and others in Fairfax County’s high schools will be added to the standardized testing pool next academic year, which will likely affect school performance in both academic achievement and the academic achievement gaps categories.
Why mention all of this? Because Fairfax County’s school district leadership has had many meetings about accreditation in the last year. They knew these challenges and more stringent accreditation changes were imminent under Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) administration.
Interestingly, they have not discussed this issue with the public during their justifications for redistricting our entire county. Instead, they hide behind claims of transportation inefficiencies and overcrowding in schools as they plot to move higher-performing students to lower-performing schools.
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During a school board meeting in July, for example, a school board member asked Michelle Reid, the district’s superintendent, if the massive overhaul of the district’s boundaries would reduce chronic absenteeism rates in at-risk schools. She affirmed that yes, it would indeed.
And while school board members have publicly denied that redistricting is mostly about equity, Reid is fighting for her professional reputation. She likely does not want Fairfax County’s schools to lose accreditation on her watch. So, I’m left with this question: Are our elected school board members gaslighting the public about the actual reasons for redistricting, or are they ignorant that the administrator whom they are supposed to be managing just played them for fools?
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.
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