At Least 16 Virginia Schools Allegedly Withheld Merit Awards From Students
“the number has since jumped after Loudoun County added one additional school Tuesday and Prince William County added two schools”
Last week, three Virginia schools admitted to withholding merit awards from students in the name of equity.
Three days ago, the number of schools went up to seven.
Yesterday afternoon, the Daily Mail reported that as many as 13 schools had done this:
REVEALED: At least THIRTEEN Virginia high schools delayed merit awards until after college admissions as state AG says they are specifically targeting Asian American students
At least 13 Virginia high schools are under investigation after failing to deliver merit awards prior to college admissions, with the state attorney general alleging that the move specifically targeted Asian American students.
Following the case against 11 Fairfax and Loudoun County high schools, officials from Prince William County Public Schools revealed two of their schools did not tell 16 students they had earned a National Merit award.
Attorney General Jason Miyares condemned the schools’ actions as the state launched an investigation over alleged Anti-Asian bigotry.
The National Merit awards are only given to 50,000 of 1.5million high schoolers who score well on the PSATS – and can help students compete for scholarships, honors accolades, and college admissions.
The state’s investigation is looking into the administration’s decisions to withhold the National Merit Scholarship honors from students and if it violates the Virginia Human Rights Act.
Miyares said that one mom in the Fairfax School district lamented that her daughter had done everything right since the first grade to excel academically.
‘She studied so hard, and now she’s realizing she may not go to the school of her dreams because of who she is, a Korean American,’ Miyares said. ‘That goes against everything we believe in this country.’
On the same day, that number jumped to 16 schools.
WJLA News reported:
16 high schools in northern Virginia didn’t notify students of national merit recognition
As of Tuesday, 16 high schools in northern Virginia delayed notification to students of their national merit recognition. 7News reported Monday that there were 13 but the number has since jumped after Loudoun County added one additional school Tuesday and Prince William County added two schools.
On Monday, Two Prince William County high schools didn’t notify students of their national merit recognition in time for important college scholarship and admissions deadlines, the school district told 7News.
The school system blames “accidental administrative oversight” for not telling students last September.
Accidental oversight? Really? That might be acceptable if this had happened at one school, maybe two. But 16? What is going on here?
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is not pleased, and his attorney general is looking into this.
What we’ve found from news reports is that our schools have a maniacal focus on equal outcomes rather than rewarding high-performing students. This effort of withholding academic achievements is hurting the same students school officials claim they are trying to help. pic.twitter.com/4s4Kguw5gk
— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) January 17, 2023
The progressive concept of “equity” is a rejection of the equality of opportunity and a commitment to equality of outcome. Let’s be frank. This is communism, and it’s antithetical to everything the United States of America was founded upon.
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Comments
Voting for school boards is really important.
RUNNING for School Boards is really important.
Amen.
With emphasis on “men”.
I doubt this was policy at the board level.
This smacks of state level teachers union shadow policy.
There is zero possibility that all of the members of the boards of 16 schools would be on board for this so they would have marched right out and told everyone.
On the other hand 16 teachers/guidance counselors previously vetted to be very into CRT/DEI would absolutely be able to keep this secret for a few years.
You gotta judge school boards by what they allow the administrators to do.
Why do these admin still have their jobs? Because the board approves.
Exactly and to carry that logic another step, it’s the fault of voters who grew apathetic or complacent in allowing these board members to be elected and reelected. We have to be willing to do the pain in the ass hard work at the local level. Yes most people have jobs, families, hobbies to compete for time and attention. Tough cookies, no one is riding in to save us, nor should they if we are unwilling to help save ourselves.
This. Commo Chief is right: no one is coming to save us. WE are the Calvary.
Calvary? Or Cavalry?
Grizz,
Neither. The salvation offered by the events at Calvary is distant and apolitical, IMO, while the cavalry died out with the introduction of the creations of Mr Browning and Mr Maxim.
It actually could
have been all of them operating independently. Like any corporate organization, school employees have activities that bring them into contact with people from other districts. It very well could have been one school starting it, then people in that school showing off their “equity cred” to people from other schools. Over time, more and more schools adopt this lunacy because they are all cut from the same ideological cloth and “equity” is like catnip. My wife has been teaching for 16 years, and her principal did away with honor roll before my wife started teaching….so this ideology isn’t something new. This National Merit scandal is what happens when this ideology matures.
jaudio,
I don’t see how your argument is relevant to my point about lack of voter engagement. I agree with you in that the direction of this sort of ideology has crept in and spread over the decades. The voters had forewarning in a series of escalating steps until they found themselves here.
Yes, our BOE seems better than some, they’re not openly woke, but they don’t explicitly tell admins what to do either. The meetings are so deferential. Even when we elect the best, most conservative candidates, they turn into another flavor of that same thing when they’re sitting on the Board.
Sorry, Commo….the reply was directed at Dathurtz putting forth that there was some type of centralized collusion here. My point was only that what can sometimes look like collusion is instead people in power positions that are all cut from the same ideological cloth….when they all see or hear about a horrible idea, they all begin implementing it independent of each other because it suits their ideology, not because some higher up dictates it to them. Troops don’t need ordered to take charge and fight the enemy when they already desire to take charge and fight the enemy.
When a group of people coordinate certain outcomes, we call these things conspiracies. Here, the intent it to deprive some students of educational recognition, and therefore, access to higher education institutions. People doing this intentionally should not be permitted to hold positions of trust in education, and should be economically responsible for the damages caused. Personally.
No. Getting children out of the government schools is really much more important.
We might need to have a plan while we work on that one, though. It doesn’t seem likely to happen very soon.
Your plan is to begin homeschooling NOW. Education at a very local level, your house.
Hopefully, there are grounds for suing school administrators who withheld the info from students.
If they don’t want Asians to be admitted to higher ed or obtain scholarships, that’s fine. But to do this dishonestly….. no thanks.
We need to restore our freedoms of association and speech and thus rid our selves of the civil rights acts. Admit who you want, don’t admit who you don’t want. Freedom is so simple.
Following on on to your last paragraph: people at least see to eventually accept the nicer ones in “the other” group. No need for the government to push.
As for being locked out of something because of who I am: why do I want to force myself on people who – for whatever reason – don’t like me?
It’s not fine to do it when those Asian families are paying a large %age of the property taxes. It’s an agenda they are paying for and don’t want. It favors students whose families are likely to pay no property taxes. We get what we are willing to fund, and the system is highway robbery these days.
It isn’t “fine”— admittance should be based on merit only. Not based on skin tone of genitalia.
“If they don’t want Asians to be admitted to higher ed or obtain scholarships,” and they acted on that, they should be prosecuted and sent to prison for racial discrimination.
What are the damages of lost wages for not getting into your first choice university x hundreds of students?
What are the damages if some unqualified person became president of the United States and signed hundreds of bills that affected millions of people? How would you ever undo something like that?
Pepperidge Oswald Remembers.
Unless they have to pay as Conservatives do, it will not work.
In over words, jail.
Plus the theft of thousands of $ in scholarships.
I’ve lived in Fairfax County since 2002. I’ve watched it decay from a really nice place to live to a typical Demtard cesspit and that includes the schools. I’m glad my son graduated last year and is done with them as this sort of crap is only going to get worse.
Choosing to deliberately harm Students would seem to be a disqualification from future employment in any position of responsibility over the well-being of children.
Any care-giving, support, or advocacy position. They’re out of the vast-y helping apparatus.
Indeed. A college admission that doesn’t go to an Asian student probably doesn’t go to a black student from the same school, but someone from maybe thousands of miles away. So the schools are willing to hurt their students collectively to kneecap the whites and Asians. And we’re paying for that?
Just a little test of Affirmative Action in reverse. If you can withold merit awards, you can withold anything. The sky’s the limit.
It’s okay. It’s Equity.
In order to have equity, you must redistribute assets daily as some spend more while others save more and “poof” just like that, equity is out of whack.
Ah, but they’ve solved that.
You don’t have assets when you “own nothing and are happy.”
Equity and lack of reconciliation.
Men, women, and “our Posterity” are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus.
This is the war of the worlds all over again.
From Uranus? I see what you did there!
Affirmative discrimination under Diversity, Inequity, Exclusion.
It’s all about subsidizing laziness. Years ago school was hard and universities made it extremely difficult to graduate with a degree, but that resulted in people being honed into the best they could be. Now hard work, most expectations of quality work, responsibility, a strong work ethic, etc., are now considered racist because we don’t want to offend the lazy. Socialism is being pushed hard because many think they will get their “fair share” without having to work and who cares about anything else. All in all, it’s a push to the bottom where we will only be as good as the weakest, laziest, and least intelligent and when we get there everyone will complain about how it’s not their fault for the disaster. Welcome to America where nihilism abounds.
If you have a special card to play, you play it. It works every time you pull it, so you keep pulling it until, finally, the other people get tired of your shit
Diversity (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), Inequity, Exclusion (DIE)
A juicy scandal, to be sure. But still nothing like the big shillelagh we will have the moment it crosses state lines and goes national.
And, oh… by the way… “STOP ASIAN HATE!!”
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Gotta love them Dems. It’s so easy to know what depredations they’re committing at any given moment: just make a list of what they’re currently accusing YOU of!
Fake news! Stolen elections! Foreign interference! Talking with the enemy! Porking with the enemy!
And now… raaaaaaacism!
D Party -dividing and sorting by race since 1828.
I specifically asked the principal and board president of my local (southern Illinois) school district about this. They assure me that they don’t withhold notice of awards, and in fact have a ceremony every spring for all their academic award winners. Good to hear, but I’m going to keep an eye on them.
Schools usually brag about it when they have merit scholars.
Fire these people.
Out of a cannon.
Into the Sun.
Once is accident. Twice is happenstance. Sixteen times is a program, in a movement, with an agenda.
Similarly, one state is an aberration, but…
oh, that inspired…
“… or a directive, from a program, in a movement, with an agenda.”
You mean criminal.
I hope so. I hope they go to jail for at least a year, so that nobody tries this again. But I don’t know what criminal statute it violates. RICO?
Right now I believe they are looking at Civil Rights violations.
A secret conspiracy among administrators against certain students or a certain category of students. No less than that.
Uh, no: 16 times is what we call a conspiracy. No theory involved, just the definition.
Violation of student’s civil right is a crime. Will our DOJ pursue the perpetrators? OF course not ! They’re of the same Progressive stripe.
Maybe it would be quicker to list the high schools in VA that DIDN’T do this?
It shouldn’t be hard to find schools that did this. I am confused about this: a student can figure it out on their own. They presumably know their PSAT scores, which appear promptly on the National Merit website for them. Did the schools block this access?
Then there are private websites that post score cutoffs, like this: https://www.compassprep.com/national-merit-semifinalist-cutoffs-class-of-2023-archive/
If it’s for 2023 Commended Student, the national cutoff is 207 score index. If they made their state’s Semifinalist cutoff, which is the same or higher, they’re Semifinalists instead. Did this failure t0 notify affect only Commended and not Semifinalists? Did the schools fail to support enthusiastically their Semifinalists’ applications for Finalist?
Semifinalists were notified. Commended students were not. At least that’s my understanding.
Back in the day you got identified as semi-finalist with your score.
Other labels and awards required someone to do something more: you wouldn’t get notified by the National Merit people if you got the adtl thing, nor if the follow-up didn’t happen to get it.
“This is communism”
It’s more accurately Identity Politics.
Difficult read, but worth it.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Awakening-Identity-Politics-Afflictions-ebook/dp/B083ZHXQ85/
This shows a secret conspiracy among school administrators against some of their students. That’s shocking.
It’s time for legislation to make public schools more independent, and to prevent any communication between employees of different schools and districts except under open-meeting laws.
I see very little downside in this, and lots of upside. In particular, it cuts the power and arrogance of these school system employees, who need to feel that they work for us, full stop.
Recent publicized School Board kerfuffles show they’ve jumped off of being agents we use to govern ourselves, to our advantage (in our own terms.)
They have become part of government that wrangles us in aid of something else.
Remember the “college admissions scandal” of a few years ago, where students were cheating on the SAT but, more significantly in terms of admissions results, they were fudging athletic accomplishments? And a bunch of them got in, especially to USC? Parents went to jail and students were thrown out of college over that.
What about here? Schools kept their own students from obtaining what they were due from their test results, and it was a conspiracy. Shouldn’t these administrators go to jail, for a long time measured in years rather than months?
Can you say “Class Action”?
There definitely need to be consequences. This has gone on far too long. Students who graduated in 2021 weren’t notified. In addition to the harm inflicted on the affected students I find the brazen arrogance of these administrators to be particularly loathsome.
If you’ve been tracking Loudoun County for the past two years, you won’t be surprised by the arrogance. Hiding a rape, denying it on a technicality, sending the student to another school where he proceeded to rape someone else, having the victim’s dad arrested as a “terrorist” for demanding to speak at a board meeting about what happened to his daughter…
I live in Fairfax County, in the same congressional district as Loudoun County. What happened there — the rape, the coverup, sending the assailant to another school and the despicable mistreatment of Scott Smith, the dad — was an abomination and almost certainly led to the election of our Governor, Lt Governor and AG.
It was most gratifying to see that the LCPS superintendent was fired as a result of the AG’s investigation. Can only hope and pray for similar results in Fairfax County.
The withholding of this information was either intentional or was negligent. Virginia attorneys who practice bringing class action lawsuits should take notice if they haven’t already and bring class action lawsuits against those districts that withheld the information. The best way to get this type of discrimination stopped is to make the taxpayers of the offending districts have to make large payouts to send a message to other districts that this type of behavior has consequences.
Sorry, but bullshit. Stop screwing the taxpayers. The BEST way to get this stopped is by directly and personally punishing the PERPETRATORS. Tough fines and sentences, NOT suspended.