Parents accuse Fairfax County school board of racism over admissions policy discriminating against Asian students

Parents in Fairfax County managed to get the school board to flee midway through a Thursday evening meeting. It comes amid an ongoing legal battle over the admissions process for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

Daily Wire's Luke Rosiak captured the moment. Lead protester Asra Q. Nomani is holding a copy of his anti-critical race theory book Race to the Bottom. In it, he talks about how school boards like Fairfax's have begun pushing far-left political ideologies into school curriculums in recent years. Parents still had to show up on Thursday night because the county requested a stay on a judge’s ruling, who agreed that the admissions process discriminated against Asian students.

Nomani is seen holding a stack of Rosiak's book, and confronting the Fairfax County School Board with claims of racism. It was at that point that the gaggle of protesting parents started chanting "racist" at the board.

A local outlet covering the protest got a quote from one of the parents impacted: "For my daughter, when she found out that she got accepted, she was very excited. But then she talked to her middle school friends and she found out a lot of Asian kids who should get in -- in her opinion -- didn't get in. So [then] she started to doubt herself. She thought 'is that because I'm good or because I'm lucky?’"

Per Nomani's social media, she says she brought enough copies of Rosiak's book for every member of the school board.

"You are all in this book... I hope you read them from cover to cover and see yourselves in the pages of history--as failures," Nomani told them.

After the members of the school board fled their own meeting, Nomani began reading Race to the Bottom aloud to the protester group.

An earlier portion of the meeting featured a mother of a former FCPS student giving a speech about how her son committed suicide because of the district's COVID-19 measures creating overbearing isolation in his life.

The protesters on Thursday gathered for a "Rally to #StopAsianHate," and by that they mean what they say was systemic racism against Asians by FCPS. It occurred on the same day that the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation barring racial discrimination in the admissions process at Governor's Schools in Virginia.

Governor Glenn Youngkin is expected to sign it as soon as it hits his desk.

The legislation was inspired by a change in 2020 that got rid of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology's standardized test. The school board did it in response to complaints that there weren't enough black and Hispanic students among the school's student body population.

Back at the end of last month, a federal judge ruled that Fairfax County Public Schools were discriminating against Asians given their policy shift for admissions to TJHSST. When school officials got rid of the standardized test, Asian American representation plummeted by nearly 20 percent.

TJHSST has been no stranger to controversy. Last October, the first black leader of the school's PTA, resigned amid the ideological push towards implementing critical race theory teachings at the school.

"They are looking to suppress speech and they are taking a very partisan, progressive, hard-left agenda on all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with education," Harry Jackson had previously said of the affair.