WELCOME TO FAIRFAX COUNTY PARENTS ASSOCIATION

The Fairfax County Parents Association (“FCPA”) represents a wide cross-section of Fairfax County families who have a deep interest in the quality of education in Fairfax County Public Schools. As parents, we want to be actively engaged in improving FCPS’s commitment to providing all students from all backgrounds with a high-quality education focused on strong academics that prepares students for success later in life. As adults in the community, our job is to ensure that the best interests of children and students come first.

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We encourage parents to be advocates for their children.  To that end, parents will disagree on some issues as they pertain to their circumstances.  However, our bipartisan group can find common ground on many issues that are vital to our children’s education.  Among the key issues for FCPA are:

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• Open Schools: FCPA relies on the evidence that the majority of students learn best when they are in-person with peers, being taught by a teacher in the same room.

• School system spending should prioritize direct student academic supports.  School system resources, including ESSER funding, should be prioritized towards direct services (academic and counseling) to students by need with inefficient bureaucracy eliminated.

• The School Board should separate itself from politics. We believe that the best academic and social/emotional interests of students have absolutely nothing to do with the political party affiliations of the adults who control their education.

• FCPS: Too Big to Succeed? Throughout the pandemic, and even before, parents were repeatedly told that issues like reopening schools, managing buses, handling weather delays and closures are too challenging for the system because “the system is just so large.”

• Staggered terms for school board members. FCPA strongly supports changing the current school board election system to stagger the terms for school board members to ensure that some school board members always have an electoral incentive to be responsive, responsible, thoughtful leaders of the school system.

• Parents are indispensable stakeholders. FCPA strongly opposes the recent limiting of citizen participation at school board meetings.

• The FCPS community is more than the staff, unions, management associations, and PTA organizations.  FCPS is blessed to be located in an area of the United States where there are many active, engaged, educated, committed, and resourceful families.

• Supporting Military Families.  Fairfax County has over 15,000 military students.  They are an important part of our community and have unique needs.

• Ensure FOIA requests are responded to appropriately.  The VFOIA process is integral to providing transparency to families about how the $3.4 billion public school system operates.

• Literacy.  Accurate reading requires both word recognition, coming from the ability to decode phonemes and recognize familiar words, and language comprehension.

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