Virginia Schools Withheld National Merit Scholarships in the Name of Woke Equity

“Engage, Inspire, Thrive,” unless you’re thriving too much.

As he mulls a possible 2024 presidential run, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin couldn’t ask for a better gift from the woke establishment than the most recent shocking news out of the Fairfax County public school system. Fairfax County, if you’re unfamiliar, is a wealthy and liberal DC suburban enclave just outside the beltway a stone’s throw across the Potomac.

What started as a report of one student having their National Merit Scholarship award withheld as a “mistake” has turned into a full-blown scandal within the district. Many northern Virginia school systems, such as the infamous Loudoun County public schools, Fairfax’s wealthier neighbor to the north, have been making news in recent years for all the wrong reasons. For Loudoun, it was a cover-up of a sexual assault to avoid hurting a transgender bathroom policy. The blowback from the ongoing Loudoun scandal helped propel Glenn Youngkin to the Governor’s mansion in 2021.

For Fairfax, it’s been the documented insistence on equal outcomes in education and the lowering of standards to achieve it. There is no meritocracy in Fairfax County schools any longer, only a race-based system where everyone should be awarded an outcome based on equity to avoid letting any students gain advancement from hard work.

With multiple reports now indicating the practice of withholding National Merit Scholarship awards from students is widespread, the Attorney General’s office has now opened an investigation into possible human rights violations:

Multiple schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, are under investigation after allegedly failing to give students their National Merit Scholarship merit awards in a timely manner, before many students needed them for college applications.

State Attorney General Jason Miyares launched the investigation on January 4 against Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) for unlawful discrimination, according to a press release from his office.

Five days later, Miyares expanded the investigation to include the entire Fairfax County Public Schools system after receiving reports that other schools withheld awards as well, according to a separate release from the attorney general.

Fairfax County Public Schools is also investigating, via an independent third party, its superintendent said in a January 4 letter.

The harm, as indicated above, is that the awards were intentionally withheld to prevent other students from feeling bad. As a result, students applying for college were never notified that they had received the award which means it never made it into their college application. The district, with a woke policy of “equitable” distribution of grades, decided to inflict harm on its top-achieving students by tossing their merit scholarships in the trash. In many cases, simply winning the award can provide a fully-paid scholarship to some universities.

On a related note, Fairfax County has witnessed the largest drop in enrollment among all districts in Virginia over the past few years losing 5.4% of its students.

Speaking with a local reporter, Gov. Youngkin lamented a “maniacal focus on equal outcomes” and vowed to address the issue legislatively and investigate further:

“I think this is part of our investigation,” Youngkin answered. “They have a maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs. And at the heart of the American dream, is excelling, is advancing, is stretching and recognizing that we have students that have different capabilities. Some students have the ability to perform at one level, others need more help, and we have to allow students to run as fast as they can to dream the biggest dreams they can possibly dream and then go get them.”

The “equal outcomes” belief is rooted in Marxism but has been adopted and co-opted into bureaucracies from the federal government on down. In this case, Youngkin noted that Fairfax County spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years for an “equity coach” and various training materials to help the district work toward the “equal outcome” goal and avoid allowing kids to excel at various rates.

The woke mind virus is damaging and widespread. It will dig itself into aspects of life you wouldn’t even consider. Surely no self-respecting teacher or school administrator would decide, on their own, that withholding a highly-coveted prestigious award from a student would be in the student’s best interest as well as the communal interest of equity of outcomes.  It’s a sick and twisted religious-like dogma that has no place in the education system.

While Gov. Ron DeSantis proclaimed that Florida is “where woke goes to die,” Gov. Youngkin is proving that there’s plenty of woke-hunting for Republicans to do in other states as well.