Defending Education filed the complaint against Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) on May 20, 2025, to the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civils Rights.
"We found a federal civil rights complaint against FCPS for long-standing race discrimination," says Sarah Parshall Perry, Vice President and Legal Fellow at Defending Education. "This is fairly significant. In fact, we discovered that Fairfax County, which is the 9th largest school district in the country, paid Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) staff... a total of $5.7 million to implement radicalized policies that took federally funded benefits and distributed them on the basis of race."
That, says Perry, is unconscionable.
"It is unconstitutional. It is a violation of the equal protection clause as the Supreme Court has just reminded us and a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which guarantees that any federally-funded program will be neutral and will not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin."
FCPS’s “racial equity” policy is “One Fairfax,” and it encourages many policies that favors certain races and diminishes others. Perry says Fairfax County has been "sort of leading the charge in race-based programming" and requires the district to pursue policies, practices, and investments to eliminate racial disparities and guarantee equal outcomes.
"The use of that term "outcomes" is very significant because this isn't equal opportunity, this is not providing everyone the same set of materials, the same set of benefits," says Perry. "It's picking and choosing based on individual characteristics like race. That is prohibited under federal statute and the federal constitution."
Several policies that “One Fairfax” has implemented includes changing the racial composition of a school that has a higher population of one race, disciplining students through an “equitable lens” so that one race is not punished more than another, and skewing grading requirements by considering the race of the student. “One Fairfax” has led to other racially motivated policies, such as the “Education Equity Policy,” which is a policy that applies to all regarding FCPS and requires resources to be given to the “underserved” or, in other words, people of a particular race or ethnicity.
