Budgetary Considerations Must Take Student Outcomes Into Account

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora | May 1, 2025

(The Washington Times) — Many high schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, have surprisingly high dropout rates. The large majority of students dropping out are those labeled “multilingual learners,” formerly referred to as English language learners.

The number of multilingual learners and associated costs have grown precipitously in Fairfax County since 2019. The number of students who require language services increased with President Biden’s porous southern border policies, and even more so after January 2021, when the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors passed a sanctuary policy titled the Public Trust and Confidentiality Policy. As a result, by fall 2024, 26.8% of Fairfax County Public Schools students were multilingual learners.

With the concentration of multilingual learners in certain high schools, some school administrators are concerned that dropout rates, chronic absenteeism, and low standardized test scores among multilingual learners will affect their high school’s accreditation.

The table below shows that multilingual learners in Fairfax County’s most problematic high schools have much higher dropout rates than the class of 2024 student cohort and that 82% of the students who drop out are multilingual learners.

With a proposed fiscal 2026 expenditure of an extra $5,572 per English language learning student, the district’s price tag for English language instruction is now $210 million, up from $93.9 million in fiscal 2019.

Despite the substantial increase in spending on multilingual learners, their outcomes remain undeniably abysmal. As the class of 2025 graduation season approaches and county leaders discuss public school funding priorities, they clearly need to make changes.

Fairfax County residents, who are facing their largest tax increase in 10 years, can no longer afford the sanctuary policy, which is likely responsible for attracting many illegal immigrants who need English language services. Moreover, the Board of Supervisors, which likely would rather ignore its $300 million fiscal 2026 budget shortfall, must immediately repeal its Public Trust and Confidentiality Policy.

Fairfax County Public Schools leaders are also failing their most vulnerable students. Any budgetary considerations must take student outcomes into account. Rather than bloating district headquarters with even more egregiously paid and unnecessary, non-school-based administrative positions, Fairfax County’s leaders must ask what needs to be done to foster student learning and prevent students, particularly multilingual learners, from dropping out of school and then allocate funds accordingly.

Although Superintendent Michelle Reid and other district leaders are likely to claim that more money is the answer to all these problems, including the multilingual learner dropout rate, the real answer is that we need competent leaders and an intensive, external audit of the budget.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for The Federalist and the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network. Her articles have also appeared in Fox News Digital, National Review, Daily Signal, WMAL.com and Townhall.

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